ContentChief

Posted by randfish

A very short tip, but one that has been proving incredibly valuable to all of our clients of late.

When you think about attracting links organically, the process goes something like this:

1. What content can I create that will naturally attract links?
2. What format should I put it in for maximum share-ability?
3. How can I promote it to reach the largest possible relevant audience?

For the very first part of that equation, a lot of link builders and viral marketers think about things like high quality resources or the "ultimate" guide to a particular topic group. However, in my recent experience, I’ve seen that link creation on the part of bloggers, journalists, site owners, and social media participants is less about linking to the "best" content, and more about linking to something because they get something in return. For example:

• Twitter users, forum posters and bloggers all like to link to things that will make their visitors/audience appreciate them and come back to them
• Social media users want to vote on things that excite them, inspire them or amuse them (the last one appears particularly strong). The ease of consumption plays a big role here, too - the faster something is to digest and enjoy, the more Stumble thumbs, Diggs and votes it earns. More complex pieces don’t earn that ability with the same ease.
• Site owners, particular those in the SMB or personal website arena are incented to link to stories and content that backs up their point of view or re-inforces a long-held or long-argued position.
• People everywhere want to link to things that show off how cool/impressive/important/interesting they are

Use this psychology of online participation to your advantage. If you’re a:

• Site catering to real estate professionals, rank the top real estate bloggers or top real estate agents
• Site that serves news stories, talk about the early adopters and discoverers of content and allow them to participate and get quoted - they’ll reward you in the future with loyalty and links
• Site involved in e-commerce, reward your customers who run websites with discounts, thank-you’s, and recognition
• Site that provides B2B services, incent your partners with badges or testimonials that make them look good

You can apply this logic to almost any business or content focus and benefit from the natural links that are created. You just have to remember the web isn’t "fair" and people don’t link to something because it’s the "best." They link because it benefits them to do so - play to linkers’ egos and their selfishness and you’ll often have more success than if you appeal to their sense of altruism and sharing ethos. Remember that, more and more, site owners, bloggers and social media participants think of themselves as competitors for online attention - while they will still share "great content," they also sometimes get that nagging feeling that the greater it is, the worse it makes them feel about what they’ve produced.

This may seem like a cynical viewpoint to take regarding online psychology, but it makes sense and it brings links, so I’d be remiss not to share. Get to work incentivizing your audience and you’ll see the links come pouring in.

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Posted by randfish

Linkscape has been out for just over 2 months, and recently had its first index update. Although it’s still in beta (and probably will be for another update or two), I’ve been using it enough for our client projects that I think it’s worthwhile (and high time) to share my personal applications for the tool and its data.

#1 - Comparative Reporting for Management

CEOs, CMOs and Director-level types tend to have a thirst for KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Yahoo! Site Explorer has historically been the pre-eminent source for link numbers, but it’s always had problems, not least of which is the massive fluctuations (hit F5 in your browser a few times and the numbers that come back are seemingly random). Linkscape’s index, although it’s less frequently updated, gives a reliable snapshot from representative sample of the web’s links. The only time that data changes is when the index updates.

Below is an example of what I’d prepare if we were working with Zappos.com and wanted to show my board of directors our stats against those of top competitors:

I’ve got some fast, easy takeaways from this data. First off, we’re winning not only the link numbers battle, but the importance battle as well. A raw count of external links actually shows Shoebuy.com ahead of Zappos, but when we look at the domain diversity (’# of External Links’ divided by ‘# of Linking Domains ), we can clearly see that Zappos is in the lead. Secondly, I know exactly how far a relatively new player like Endless.com has come - they’ve been here almost two years and clearly haven’t threatened even some of the smaller competitors in the field. Interestingly, DmR (Domain mozRank) matches up pretty nicely with rankings, too - Google results. I’d be more inclined to look at things like page-level mozRank, # of links to the URL and anchor text, but it’s still fun to see such high correlation.

Compare this to a classic report using search engine data:

Collection methodology for Yahoo! was to use the web search "linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com" and use "show inlinks except from this domain to entire site" in Yahoo Site Explorer.

The homepage PR has always been a crummy metric (and one that considers only that single page, rather than the entire domain), so having DmR is a big step up. Likewise, it’s hard to convince SEO outsiders (or insiders for that matter) that Yahoo!’s link reporting data is valid when it’s frequently extremely different from the numbers inside Google’s Webmaster Tools (which can’t be used for competitive comparisons since you can’t log in to other sites’ consoles) and even different from different types of Yahoo! requests. Honestly, Yahoo! isn’t even consistently inconsistent, so despite fresher data and a larger index, the numerical discrepancies make it nearly impossible to use for serious analysis.

#2 - Analysis of the SERPs (aka figuring out why a page ranks where it does in relation to others)

I’m always curious to understand how a site/page has achieved the rankings it has, and Linkscape is marvelous at taking a lot of the unknowns out of the equation. We can all look at keyword usage and targeting, but getting into the link analysis on competitive SERPs has always been incredibly difficult. Now (especially with the new Linkscape update showing more links per report - 3,000 for the URL at once), I feel really confident about the assessments I make as to why a site is succeeding or failing.

For example, if I wanted to analyze the top 5 ranking URLs for the phrase "Free Ringtones," I can do so with a lot of strong data points:

Naturally, I’d want to add in keyword usage and optimization information, but it’s normally sorely lacking that big anchor text component. With Linkscape, I can finally fill in that missing blank and have a real idea about the quantity/percent of links that contain optimized anchor text:

* - www.myxer.com appears to have several other pages that have earned links 301 redirecting to it.

Based on an analysis like this, I can put together an extremely good estimation of what will be required to achieve competitive rankings for the keyword phrase. If you’ve got high value keywords you’re pursuing and need to know what it will take to get there, this system is a remarkable roadmap.

#3 - Uncovering Competitor’s Link Acquisition Tactics

It can be frustrating to see a competitor shoot ahead in the rankings and have no idea how they’ve achieved their success. Linkscape makes it easy for us to reverse the tactics that have produced valuable links and good anchor text by letting us quickly sort through the links pointing to a given site/page.

For example, if I was curious about how Evosales.com (a site selling scooters and mopeds) had earned their links, I could peek inside an advanced Linkscape report and see 852 links to the domain from 277 domains. Linkscape will show only the top 10 from any given domain, so even though it has 1,315 links, it’s limiting some of those that come from domains with tons and tons of links.

Looking at the data, I can see a lot of links that appear to come from partnerships they’ve got with other scooter dealers on the web like mopeds.com, neoscooters.com and iscooterparts.com. There’s some nice natural links coming from Scooter forums like ScooterBBS.com, Digg.com, Kaboodle.com and AdLandPro.com. They also have a small directory link building campaign earning some juice from sites like About-Cars.com, rkom.com, motorcycleonlinestore.com and more. All in all, for a small number of links, the profile is pretty balanced and relatively organic.

For many cases, knowledge like this will help establish an understanding inside your organization of what the competition is up to. If there’s lots of spammy, low quality links, you can potentially report these to the engines. If the competition has great viral content, you can attempt to mimic or outdo their efforts. And if they’ve simply got a small, organic footprint, you can be more aggressive with directories, content strategies and direct link requests or purchases to overcome their lead. It’s always an excellent idea to be prepared and the ability to sort, filter out nofollows and internal links and see where good anchor text and link juice flows from makes this process much more accessible than with other, less granular or expansive tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer or Exalead.

#4 - Identifying the Most Important / Most Linked-to Pages on a Site

In the near future, we’ll be building out a specific tool to help with this process, but in the meantime, the data is still relatively accessible through Advanced Link Intelligence reports. Just choose "links to domain," then select "same PLD" (Pay Level Domain: Entire website including all subdomains) and "show only." This will give you an ordered list of the top ten highest mozRank (or highest mozRank-passing) pages on your site. For example, I’ve done just this with SEOmoz’s homepage below:

What’s amazing about this kind of information is that it’s so easily actionable. Looking at this, it’s obvious we need to start using the link juice on the SEOmoz PRO Landing Page better (or potentially redirecting non-cookie accepting users back to the homepage, since you’ll need to log in to complete the next step anyway). Likewise, I can see that the old page strength tool is redirecting link juice to the Trifecta report, which probably needs some attention as well (since that page isn’t trying to rank for anything competitive, either).

Running this on your own sites and pages can reveal internal architecture and link structuring mistakes that could spell huge opportunity for redirecting link juice to places where it’s needed. And similarly, you can use the comparison report feature to custom-check any number of combination of pages on a site:

Comparing the URL mozRank with the link counts reveals great information - it can help to illustrate the relative success of a piece of viral content (like our Web 2.0 Awards against our Search Engine Ranking Factors) from both a number of links and importance of links perspective. I can also use it to identify strong vs. weak pages and make decisions about whether to redirect, where to point links to and from and what difficulty level of keywords to target.

#5 - Finding Sources of Split Link Juice

Many sites have multiple versions of the same page for one reason or another. Oftentimes, it’s tough to convince developers or management that it’s a priority that needs addressing, but SEOs know from experience that it can have a big impact, particularly when the engines themselves are doing a poor job of canonicalizing for you (or haven’t passed along the link juice when they scrub the duplicates). Linkscape is great at illustrating the potential problems, using the comparison report.

For example, on NYTimes.com, there are four different URLs that send you to the technology home page. In fact, you can see them all in Google’s index:

Wow. That’s pretty telling - and even if Google is doing an OK job of getting those pages canonicalized, it’s a terror to imagine trying to do analytics work on that page. You’ve got four different URLs you’d need to track (in Omniture or whatever analytics NYTimes is running), making for a huge headache. Let’s see if Linkscape can help convince us that it’s time for a move:

Basic Comparison Report

You can see we’re looking at 4 unique URLs, all with the same content, and each earning hundreds or thousands of individual links. Put the link juice together, and the potential is remarkable. Apply this same logic to pages on your own sites (or those of your clients) for easy wins on low-hanging fruit.

#6 - Identifying Possible Spam

There are two big reasons an SEO wants to be able to see spam. First, so they can potentially identify and report their competitors for violating the search engines’ guidelines and second, to help keep their own noses clean as they conduct link building and acquisition campaigns. My favorite way to do this is to use the difference in mozRank & mozTrust to help quickly spot possibly problematic URLs and domains. If you’ve got lots of link juice but very little trust, it usually means you’ve gotten links from places that aren’t particularly reputable. Since mozTrust is still a rough metric, it’s best found on sites/pages where the disparity is quite large.

Let’s say, for example, I’d like to rank well for "discount mortgage brokers" - which probably wouldn’t be as appealing today as it was 6 months ago, but probably still gets some pretty decent search traffic. Here’s some folks ranking in the top few results:

In classic SEO, I’d go look at the links pointing to these pages (and sites) and try to find some potential sources where I can also get links - directories, lists, resource hubs, etc. But, if I’m smart, I’ll only spend time chasing the ones that are really worthwhile, and that’s where mozRank can have a big impact. For example, if I go to the links pointing to www.wes-state.com, I’ll see some good links, but I might also find some like these:

Obviously, the Yahoo! directory link is a pretty good one - high mozRank and mozTrust on both the domain and the page level. But the others, especially on a URL mozTrust level (and judging by the feel - title, URL, content, etc) might not be prime candidates. While I love Yahoo! Site Explorer, there’s no fast and easy way to weed out the good from the bad as you’re sorting through it, so these metrics can be a huge time saver, as well as helping to avoid money spent on links that may not provide much value (either now, or in the future).

#7 - Judging the Quality of a Potential Link

In a related way, Linkscape has also been good to help me judge the potential value of a link. Since most of our clients are larger enterprises and organizations, I’m not usually doing this on a link-by-link level. Instead, I’m applying the logic of metrics like inbound link quality and diversity (along with the specific mozRank and mozTrust scores) on a domain-wide basis.

For example, if we were working with Apple (we’re not, currently), they might want to examine the SEO value of buying up some smaller MP3 stores or fan websites and hosting those themselves, embedding their links or entirely redirecting the sites. Without numerical evaluation metrics, it would be much harder to visualize the different values of particular sites. This applies equally well to individual pages and smaller sites. Thinking about paying for a link, buying a site, putting up some advertising or engaging in a joint venture? Trustworthy metrics are an invaluable asset. 

#8 - Finding Specific Link Acquisition Targets

There are a few particular queries inside a linkscape report that I’ve found incredibly valuable for individual link sourcing:

• Search for "resources" in the URL
• Search for "links" in the URL
• Search for "directory" in the URL or title
• Search for "list" in the URL or title

Results may vary, but just a few quick searches can source hundreds of new link opportunities. For example, check out a search for "directory" in the title of pages linking to www.directlendingsolutions.com:

Or see the links that point to popular online comic book store, tfaw.com that have "links" in the URL:

If you’re hankering for an easier way to find link acquisition targets, this is a pretty spiffy system.

#9 - Judging the Relative Success of Viral Content

What worked better? My mortgage calculator, or my blog post on how zombie overlords are eating the brains of Wall St.’s elite? From a traffic perspective, it’s not hard to see using your site’s analytics, but on the SEO side, it can be very tough to judge which content is earning more links (and higher quality links). Luckily, the comparison report simplifies the process.

Since we’re on the topic of the undead, let’s look at how some specific pieces of linkbait have fared in the world of vampires, zombies and their ilk:

Looking at the numbers, we can see that the Zombie Survival Wiki (ZombieSurvivalWiki.com) and the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency (FVZA.org) lead the way, although since the Mingle2.com Zombie Harmony site once existed at its own domain - www.zombieharmony.com - we should really count the 1,380 links from 412 domains that site earned as well, putting it clearly in second place.

This isn’t just for fun - you can use analyses like this to see what’s been successful for your competitors as well as your own site and leverage that knowledge to make informed decisions about how to best target and construct your next viral campaign.

#10 - Finding Specific Kinds of Links, such as .edu and .gov

Just as you can use Linkscape’s search function to identify directories and resource lists, you can also leverage it to locate high quality .gov and .edu websites links.

If you’re trying to identify links from particular domains, whether those are educational or government or from specific country-code TLDs, Linkscape’s search function via the URL is a great resource.

5 General Notes on the Links in Linkscape

1. Linkscape’s current index is between 1/3-1/2 the major indices at Yahoo! & Google, and it’s biased towards domain diversity over depth, so while you’ll see tons of different domains and their homepages and important inner pages, you often won’t find deep pages on those sites
2. Linkscape data is between 1-2 months old at any given time, so the links aren’t always completely fresh
3. Linkscape now shows, by default, the top 3,000 links to a page and domain for every advanced report. The anchor text metrics and the juice passed numbers are based on these 3,000 shown.
4. For that 3,000 number, we’ve elected to show up to 10 links from each domain, again favoring displaying domain diversity. We had lots of folks request this feature before the update last week, but it does mean that many links from a single domain aren’t shown.
5. The metrics we’re happiest with are URL mozRank, URL mozTrust and Domain mozRank. Domain Juice, mozRank passed, and Domain mozTrust are still a little behind, so if you’re wondering what metrics to use, go with the former. Link counts and domain counts are also very good.

Whew! That’s a lot of material, but I think (nearly) all of it is incredibly valuable for many SEO campaigns. If there’s any applications you’ve employed (or would like to learn more about), please do share!

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Posted by great scott!

Straight from a conversation at a recent seminar, we bring you a new model for looking at the fundamentals of an SEO campaign: The SEO Pyramid!

This is a great way to visualize what you need to consider when analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your organic search campaigns; including prioritizing your efforts and shoring up weak spots.

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EDIT BY RAND: I’ve included an image below:

A larger, printable version is also available here.

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Posted by rebecca

I’ve been hearing a lot of grumbling lately about the steady degradation of the quality of content online, especially as it relates to social media and social news sites. I don’t necessarily agree with the gripes–was content that magical in 1999? As far as I can recall, there were hamster dances, dancing babies and Geocities pages long before LOLcats, Rickrolls and MySpace. Sure, there are millions and millions more people online now than there were 10 years ago and there are buttloads more pages of content, but to me, the type and quality of content hasn’t changed all that much. You still have news articles and research papers and useful information in one corner, and porn, memes, photoshopped images, and general nonsense in another corner.

Why then are so many folks turning their nose up at the seemingly lackluster content that plagues the Internet nowadays and are pining for the days of yesteryear? Well, for one, it’s always great to reminisce. Everyone always seems to think that the current era sucks and that the previous decade was fantastic. A child of the 90s will say "Today’s cartoons suck! Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs were the best," while a child of the 80s will disagree and insist that Smurfs and He-Man were the greatest. Some people will cling to Motown while others will swear by disco, yet both will agree that "music nowadays ain’t what it used to be."

Another reason is that it’s easy to point fingers at the seemingly obvious culprit: social media sites. Everyone seems more than willing to kick that mangy dog. After all, if you pull up a site like Digg or reddit and glimpse at the home page, you’ll often see silly pictures and inane top 10 lists mixed in with actual "newsworthy" submissions. It’s easy for Internet snobs to point at this type of content regularly making popular, sneer and say, "This is why Internet content sucks now."

However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that social media sites are simply the People’s Choice Awards of the Internet. If you’re unfamiliar with the People’s Choice Awards, good. They suck (see, this is why I can relate to folks hating on Internet content quality). The awards are decided not by movie critics, movie industry union members, or by an academy of voters, they’re cast by millions of regular Americans who vote on what they like and don’t like. And despite the trove of quality films and shows that come out each year, oftentimes the People’s Choice Award winners are mainstream, crowd-pleasing fare.

Here’s an example: in 2007 some notable dramas were released:

• The Lives of Others
• Away From Her
• Atonement
• Michael Clayton
• There Will Be Blood
• No Country for Old Men

The above films were critically acclaimed and won several nominations and awards. Meanwhile, what did the People’s Choice Awards crown as the top drama of 2007? Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. That’s right, a whole year’s worth of great dramas were released and the people crowned a boy wizard sequel as the best of the year.

Okay, maybe you love Harry Potter and disagree with my example. No problem, I’ll provide you with another one. The masses voted Robin Williams as their "favorite funny male star" of 2007. Robin Williams. In 2007. Not 1987 or even 1997–apparently America thinks he’s the funniest person of TWO THOUSAND SEVEN.

You see where I’m going with this? As a somewhat snobbish moviegoer, I think the People’s Choice Awards is the absolute worst, most "you’ve got to be kidding me" awards show. Don’t get me wrong, the Oscars and other prestigious shows have their fair share of bullshit wins and snubs, but as a whole they tend to recognize quality films and truly talented actors. Nonetheless, the People’s Choice Awards exists and it lets the average Joe vote on his favorites for the year. And wouldn’t you know it, not everyone in America is a film snob, a movie critic, or has seen 80+ movies in the theater that year (don’t judge me and my disposable income). They vote on what they have seen and what they’re familiar with, and they vote on what they like; thus, oftentimes mainstream, crowd-pleasing, familiar, or even downright silly (c’mon, Robin Williams?!) choices are made.

Which brings me back to social media sites. When you’re giving the masses the ability to submit, vote on and promote any sort of content from across the entire web, what do you think they’ll do? Sure, some people will want to know about the latest news in the Middle East while others are interested in Obama, and lots of people are are paying attention to recent medical advancements, literary thesis papers, search engine patents, the economy, and other "high quality," valuable information. And yeah, niche social media and social news sites will have a focus (Digg leans towards technology, BallHype is sports-oriented). But when you boil it down to a fairly general social media site that allows anyone to participate, you’re gonna see a lot of mainstream, general crowd pleasing stuff. Pictures you can easily glance at and laugh about. Bulleted lists that are easy to skim and consist of X Funny Nostalgic Things That You Loved When You Were a Kid. Stupid rants that have no discernible point and won’t make any sort of positive impact other than the fact that they made you smile or laugh for five minutes out of your busy, hectic day.

Am I a movie snob? Sure. Do I look at the People’s Choice Awards and think that the quality of movies and television have gone down the crapper because "America has voted, so surely this must be an accurate representation of what’s being made nowadays"? No, absolutely not. Great films and TV exist, and it’s easy for folks like me to find and appreciate them. Similarly, great content still exists on the web just as it’s always existed, and it’s easy to find it if you know where to look. Don’t take a cursory look at social media and reduce a vast, entire Internet’s worth of content to the stuff you see being featured on Digg, reddit, Facebook and MySpace profiles, etc.

Just because the "crappy" stuff now has a magnifying glass being held over it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist before or that the "good" stuff is drastically declining. That’s the beauty of the Internet–it’s a comprehensive resource created by the people, for the people. For every and all kinds of people–elitists, snobs, dummies, juveniles, women, men, geniuses, liberals, conservatives. And that’s the way it should be.

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Posted by bookworm seo

With every tweak and change that Google brings to its search result pages, the "potential-ROI" balance on search tips ever more towards PPC and away from SEO. I realized this when I read Aaron Wall’s Marketing Lessons from Google.

Search marketing leaders demand results, so it’s irrelevant that the means of practicing SEO remain the same. What is relevant is that Google is decreasing the ability of SEO to provide stable, measurable results. As Aaron points out in his post, Google seeks to undermine competing business models.

Aaron’s written before about how Google has been promoting informational results to encourage marketers to buy AdWords, but I always dismissed that as standard SEO-Wikipedia-jealousy. Of course, Aaron’s discrete about the industries he works in (though his frequent mortgage-oriented posts are probably a good hint), so I couldn’t compare notes, making it harder to appraise the accuracy of his argument. 

But as Rand’s bullet list indicated, it’s not just about demoting e-commerce sites. Consider the effect of the following:

• Multiple images listed at the top of the search results
• Side-by-side video blocks (from YouTube, naturally), often in the top three positions
• Greater Google Books distribution through Google’s search results lately, which has (affiliate?) links to Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and certain other book stores
• News articles and other Onebox items
• Personalized results making sites that aren’t even in the top 100 otherwise show up top 10
• Further personalization of the search results as users manipulate their own listings
• Geo-targeting making results change even within cities and certainly across regions and countries - this is huge, imho
• Maps featuring all your competition, including those that aren’t even online with a website

The effect is that a number 1 ranking is no longer a #1 ranking. It’s a #1 ranking on your computer while you’re in that city…until tomorrow when some jerk uploads pictures to his authority site, while you’re logged in, as your keywords stay out of the news, and until the next algo tweak decides your link profile sucks …

Risk scares people sh*tless. PPC already has most of the corporate search marketing budget cornered because you’re guaranteed X clicks so long as you bid roughly the same amount. Plus Google keeps producing ‘lite’ versions of industry tools that help people optimize their spend (unknowingly helping Google skim part of that back through AdWords, perhaps…)  .

All these changes introduce more risk and more uncertainty into the SEO equation. Not to mention that as people get used to generally relevant results, they stop scrolling and places 6-10 decrease in value to where a 5-result SERP wouldn’t bother folks. Thus, SEOs have to compete harder as the zero-sum game divides the spoils even more sharply.

It’s why I couldn’t cut a deal with Action Coach, a business coaching company that approached me for SEO services to help them rank in Google.ca.

Their site is already ranking #1 in Google.com. (Uh, at least when you turn off personalized search and check the American - not Canadian - Google.com.) So I should have been ecstatic to gather the low-hanging fruit and rank them in Canada, right?

Well, my philosophy towards SEO is that I want a win-win for the client and myself. So if I don’t think the ROI potential looks good, I’ll tell them. My Toronto SEO friend Dev Basu and I were just discussing this last night, discovering that we both decline leads where the search volume is too low to justify the SEO spend. And I’m proud to say that I’ve always included testing with paid search before running SEO in my proposals. Which is where things stuck, I believe, with Action Coach.

The search volume for their keywords is dramatically less here in Canada than it is in the US or elsewhere. And while I might be ignorant, I’ve yet to see research indicating that ROI on a set keyword is equivalent across regions or countries. If anything, AdWords’ geotargeting capabilities suggest the opposite. 

So when I wrote in the proposal that I wasn’t prepared to take on the contract unless we tested via AdWords first (which, in not responding, it seems they declined to do)… That’s not to say there isn’t some value in measuring ROI based on rankings, but that’s diminishing every day as they fluctuate constantly. It’s already hell to project how your SEO ROI is going to look, and the trend towards it is only getting worse. 

The next time a panel moderator asks that generic "Where will search be in 5 years?" question, the answer should be obvious: organic will be even more fractured, so therefore you had better be a PPC Rockstar by then.

p.s. @ Rand - Please don’t take this personally. I wouldn’t be fortunate enough to do SEO at all if SEOmoz hadn’t taught me so much when I was a newb. And I’m fully aware that you’re still light years ahead of me in this game, as this eye-opener demonstrated :). 

@YOUmoz readers: Please, make it worthwhile for myself and others to keep writing for you guys. Take a minute to thumb, comment, Sphinn, get YOUmoz’s RSS feed or <shameless plug> swing by my blog (go search for it ) for more</shamelessness>.

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Posted by rebecca

Before SES San Jose I interviewed Chris Winfield about the panel he was speaking on, social media, and other fun stuff. With SES Chicago just around the corner (December 8-12), I had the opportunity to interview another SES speaker, Jessica Bowman. Not only is Jessica a great colleague and friend of SEOmoz, she’s also very knowledgeable about SEO and has been a recognized name (and smile) in the industry for quite some time. She’s presenting on in-house SEO next week, so I peppered her with various questions about agencies, conferences, and, of course, her desert island essentials. Enjoy!

Jessica Bowman (pictured left) along with (l-r) Laura Lippay, Dafina Curtis, Lauren Vaccarello, Kim Krause Berg, your favorite blogger, and Danielle Winfield

1. Tell us a little about yourself: what sort of work you do, where you blog, all that good stuff.

Until this year I have always been an in-house SEO, building in-house SEO programs at Yahoo!, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Business.com.  In mid-2008 I started SEOinhouse.com, a company dedicated to helping in-house SEOs get further faster, by not reinventing the wheel.

I help companies implement SEO quickly and smoothly, through SEO consulting for in-house SEOs and building in-house SEO programs. I find there is a right approach to in-house SEO, and there’s a long approach to in-house SEO because you are trying things out and aren’t aware of what lies on the road ahead. Eventually you’ll get to the same spot, but we can get there faster with a higher ROI and less frustration.

I blog at SEMinhouse.com.

2. How did you get involved in the SEO/SEM industry? 

Like many search marketers, I fell into it. I was working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and my position as a project manager was dissolved. I was interviewing for other positions in the company and during my free time went around looking for work. Someone said, "We want to get into search engines, I think it’s called search engine marketing."  With that, I went away for 2 weeks and emerged with a 20 page document (my first SEO audit) that explained SEO, identified what we were doing right, what we were doing wrong and what we needed to fix.  They asked if it was enough for a full-time position — it was because it was enough work to keep us busy for 2 years.  The rest, as they say, is history.

3. What’s something you love and hate about the SEO industry?

I love that there is always something new, which means there are constantly new opportunities to explore and maximize. I hate that it takes so much time to keep up with it all!  It’s a struggle to balance the workload and find the new innovative things in the media amidst all of the SEO content being written these days.

4. Do you run into any barriers being a woman in a typically male-centric industry?

Surprisingly, no.  There are a few male-only conversations or "guys’ nights," but the ladies have the same so it all balances out. As an in-house SEO I saw no more than you see at any large corporation. When I started out in search marketing my biggest barrier was youth, rather than the fact that I was female.

5. You’re speaking at SES Chicago about "In-House: Lessons Learned & Victories Won." What sort of struggles does an in-house marketer face that’s unique or different than an agency?

Where to begin!  This is a novel unto itself.  When you’re at an agency you’re expected to provide innovative ideas and a thorough list of what needs changed. When you’re in-house you’re the one who has to create that AND figure out how to pull it off amidst the opposition, politics and higher priorities.

Some in-house SEOs are better than many of the consultants I’ve seen, yet they struggle to gain support and buy-in from people in the company. Many in-house SEOs recognize that they need to bring in a consultant to help sell ideas.  In fact, a lot of my training and speaking engagements start off with a "What do you need them to do and what is the opposition?" discussion that guides the direction of everything that follows.

6. Are there specific pros and cons to working in-house vs. at an agency level?

Most definitely there are pros and cons.  When you’re at an agency you’re expected to really think outside the box and get credit for doing it. When you’re in-house you have to reign yourself in or risk gaining the perception of always having wild ideas that can’t be implemented in your organization. 

I find working at an agency a lot less stressful because you tell the client what they need to do and they have to figure out how to pull it off. I equip clients with many ideas and recommendations for doing that, but at the end of the day there is only so much the agency can do to help make that happen, unless we’re coming in on-site and building rapport with the key players.

On the flip-side, being in-house is very rewarding because the rankings and traffic growth are the result of your hard work and people in the company see that. If you play your cards right, SEO can be an extraordinarily visible position within the company - I’ve worked on projects for and presented to the COO, in-house corporate attorneys, CIO, etc. An agency can try to get this visibility, but when you’re in-house you can definitely make it happen.

7. How do you think search will evolve in the next couple years in terms of awareness and in-house adoption by various companies?

Especially in the rough economy, I anticipate more awareness for SEO and interest in investing SEO initiatives. We’re going to see executives looking more at the analytics in the way they do for PPC and expect it for SEO. I was on the phone with a recruiter the other day who was looking for an analytics driven SEO, indicating it’s already starting.  (BTW…it’s currently still available: a Director level in-house SEO position in San Francisco. Let me know if you’re interested!)

We’re going to see more companies bring search marketing in-house, especially SEO, and particularly at big brands.  Unfortunately, many of these companies will unknowingly hire the wrong talent, because what makes a successful in-house SEO is extremely different than what makes a successful agency SEO. 

8. What search tip or tactic do you think will become obsolete in the next year or so?

I hope the paid links in a list making up a "sponsored sites" section become obsolete. We know they can create issues, but so many people don’t and get themselves into trouble.  I’m hoping these become a thing of the past quickly.  Truthfully, I think most of the SEO tactics will still be important, depending on the site.  Just when I think a tactic is becoming a thing of the past, I run into a scenario where it’s a solution that works really well and this tiny change can generate millions of dollars.

9. What do you think is the most overrated piece of SEO advice, and why?

Similar to above, just when I think a tactic may be overrated, I find a company or scenario where it makes complete sense.  I believe PageRank is overrated.  It’s important in some scenarios but people get hung up on their current PageRank, despite it being several months old - it can be insightful, but I think companies waste a lot of time and money dwelling on it. Now a replacement for that might be mozRank, which reflects more up to date data.  You guys did a great job with that tool [Linkscape]- we as an industry needed it.

10. What have been your favorite and least favorite panels you’ve spoken on, and why?

My favorite panel was at SES Chicago a few years ago, I can’t even remember what it was called, but I do remember it was about in-house SEO and building the expertise within your organization. Jeffrey Rohrs moderated and it was the first and only time I have ever seen the entire room productively involved in a single conversation - the audience contributed great ideas along with the panelists, and it wasn’t your typical Question-and-Answer.

My least favorite panels are about reputation management. For me the topic is tough because executing reputation management campaigns and digging up the material for a presentation is draining because it’s all extremely negative. Years ago I was doing reputation management in-house and remember talking to the attorney about how draining we found it. But, it’s got to be done because there are a lot of good companies in need of great advice on the topic.

11. In your opinion, what is the formula for a perfect search conference?

Plenty of opportunities to meet new people, a great place at the hotel for people to congregate (part of why SES Chicago is my favorite SES conference), parties with standing room only so you’re forced to talk to everyone you pass, sessions that start at 10 am and, most importantly, never-seen-before content.

12. What is one piece of advice you can give someone who has just started out in the SEO world?

Get facilitated SEO training, whether it be an in-house SEO training that someone creates for your company, a training class that walks you through SEO 101 in a logical fashion, or SEO certification programs such as those offered by SEMPO and Market Motive. There is so much information out there right now that it’s a challenge to get the big-picture understanding and list of action items in the same fashion as a structured training class. Once you have the basics down, you’ll get even more value out of the conference sessions and articles that look at one single aspect of search marketing from many different angles.

13. What are some of your non-SEO hobbies?

There’s life beyond SEO???   I love to travel internationally and see how people live - the culture, customs and history. I once went to rural Russia and saw life in a way that I have never imagined - the heat and hot water shut off one day each week, even in the winter - that was in 2005 and I had a couple of unexpectedly cold days. I also dig museums — French Impressionism is my favorite and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris is on my bucket list.

14. If you were stuck on an island with one DVD, one meal, one CD, and one website, what would they be? 

What a question - almost a trick question.  For the website, my initial thought was Google, but then I couldn’t access the information on the websites.  Instead I’m thinking Google Books or Amazon, because I could access an entire library of anything I could ever need to know!

For a DVD, it would have to be a custom made DVD with as many episodes of Are You Being Served? as possible (It’s a BBC comedy from the 70’s).  One meal, wow, only one - it better be filling!  One CD - again, it would have to be a custom CD, with the best-of-the-best, including 2 of my favs: That’s Amore and Circle of Life from the Lion King - who can’t smile with these two songs?

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Posted by rebecca

After having worked with a number of clients as well as listened to my colleages talk about companies and folks they’ve worked with, I thought I’d draft up a handy list identifying the various types of clients you may run into. I’ve found that this list is extremely official and scientific, so you should be able to refer to it and instantly identify a potential client. Enjoy!

1. The Gabbo Client

The name for this client stems from the episode of The Simpsons titled "Krusty Gets Kancelled." In the episode everyone in Springfield sees commercials and billboards saying "Gabbo! Gabbo! Gab-bo!", but nobody knew what the heck Gabbo was. A Gabbo Client is someone who hires you to help out with their site, and when you take a look at the site you have no idea what the hell they’re selling, what the site’s purpose is, what it’s focusing on, or why it even exists.

You: "What…is this?"
Client: "We’ve got videos!"
You: "Yeah…I’m still not getting it though. What’s the site’s purpose?"
Client: "Check out this funny article about marshmallows! We’ve got another one about Jay-Z!"
You: "Uh, so…you’re selling…rap s’mores?"

You’re gonna like me! You’re gonna LOVE me!

2. The Lumbergh Client

You’ve all seen Office Space, so I’m sure you’re familiar with the boss, Bill Lumbergh. A Lumbergh Client is someone who is unfazed by your efforts and instead needs you to "go ahead" and make a bunch of ridiculous changes to their site, even if you’re only providing consulting work.

Client: "Yeeeeah, I’m gonna need you to go ahead and manage our paid search account."
You: "I don’t do paid search."
Client: "Greeeeat. I’m also gonna need you to redo our landing pages and increase clickthrough rates by 110%."
You: "I’m only providing consulting. Don’t you have a team or a staff to handle these–"
Client: "Greeeeeat. We’ll touch base at the end of the week." [hangs up]

Yeeeeahhhh…

3. The Flatterbut Client

Flatterbuts are people who flatter you, then follow it up with a "…but…"

Client: "This site design is really incredible."
You: "Why thank you! I’m glad you like it!"
Client: "Really, this is just great work."
You: Aw, well thanks."
Client: "I just love it…buuuuuuut…I really want the whole thing to be in Flash."
You: "Again, I really appreciate your–wait, what?"

4. The Jessie Spano Client

For all you Saved By the Bell fans out there, I’m sure you remember the infamous episode where goody goody Jessie Spano gets addicted to caffeine pills and freaks out:

A Jessie Spano Client is someone who initially is "so excited" to work with you but ultimately gets overwhelmed by all the changes that you recommend and has a massive freakout from the stress of having to do a complete site overhaul. Most Jessie Spano Clients don’t end up implementing any of your recommendations because they’re afraid of a) losing rankings (even though you repeatedly tell them it’s temporary at worst), b) confusing customers with the new "confusing" design, c) making the site more complicated, or d) all of the above.

5. The BTJ Client

The BTJ Client (or Bigger Than Jesus) is someone who is obsessed with getting a PR9 or PR10 site, no matter what you tell them or how hard you try to convince them that Page Rank isn’t something they should obsess over. 

Client: "I really want us to get a PR10 ranking."
You: "Um, for your wool socks site?"
Client: "Yes. It can’t be that hard, right? Lots of sites have PR10s, yeah?"
You: "Well, there’s Google.com…"
Client: "Okay, maybe a PR10 is a bit of a lofty goal. How about a PR9? I think we’re PR9 material. Which sites have a PR9?"
You: "Uh, Yahoo.com…" 

6. The DEFCON 1 Client

We’ve all had a DEFCON 1 Client. They somehow manage to freak out over everything.

Client: "Did you get my 24 emails?!"
You: "I saw them in my inbox and thought I’d call. Is something wrong?"
Client: "YES! It’s terrible! I don’t know what to do! How do we fix this?!"
You: "What’s wrong?"
Client: "When I check my site’s rankings from home it says we’re at #5, but then when I’m at the office it says we’re at #6!"
You: "Uh…"
Client: "Also, Yahoo! Site Explorer said we had 312,947 links last week, but this week it’s only reporting 312,522 links! How’d we lose 400 links in a week?!"
You: "Oh dear…"

7. The H8tr Client (aka The Haterade Client, aka The Negative Nelly Client)

You know how it goes with these guys:

You: "What did you think of my recommendations?"
Client: "Hated them. Can’t execute any."
You: "Uh…well, what about our design mockups?"
Client: "Not one is remotely feasible."
You: "Well, did you at least get my holiday gift basket?"
Client: "I’m allergic to nuts. Also, I hate Christmas."

8. The T-800 Client

This quote from The Terminator sums up T-800 Clients quite nicely:

It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Well, maybe not dead. More like "it will not stop until you’ve gotten it top rankings."

Client: "I want #1 rankings."
You: "Well actually it looks like you’re getting great clickthrough and conversion rates from the position you’re currently at, so I don’t know how much moving up a couple spots will help you out…"
Client: "I want #1 rankings."
You: "I mean, if anything, you could focus on usability and worry more about the customer experience on your site…"
Client: "I want #1 rankings."
You: "Sigh. Okay, I’ll see what I can do."
Client: "I’ll be back."

Either looking for Sarah Conner or top rankings…

9. The Brainy Smurf Client

This type of client fancies himself an expert on Internet marketing despite actually knowing very little. He usually latches onto a buzz word he’s just heard and spouts nonsensical information in a smug, know-it-all fashion:

Client: "We’re really angling for a holistic social media approach, because, you know, content is king and we need that link juice!"
You: "What do you mean exactly?"
Client: "Well, you’re supposed to be the expert, but I’ll tell you what I think. Basically, we really think that canonical long tail latent semantic indexing is what’s going to put our site over the top…blogosphere."
You: "Is that even English?"
Client: "Linkerati!"

Jerk.

10. The Holy Grail Client

Finding a Holy Grail Client is like finding a $20 bill in a six-month old Christmas card that you were going to throw away. It’s like stepping on the scale and discovering you’ve lost 10 lbs. It’s like trying something for the first time and discovering that you’re a natural. While the perfect client isn’t quite as elusive as unicorns, leprechauns, or unicorn-riding leprechauns, they’re nonetheless tough to come by. Nonetheless, once you do work with a Holy Grail Client, you remember how satisfying client work can be. These are the folks who are excited to work with you, trust your recommendations, appreciate your hard work and efforts, understand your reasoning and are able to grasp various concepts, and genuinely love everything you’ve done for them. Holy Grail Clients make me happy.

I wish they were all like you…

What types of clients have I failed to mention? Got any good ones to share? Post your suggestion in the comments and I’ll award the best one (don’t thumb spam because I’m just going to pick the one that I like the best) a free month of SEOmoz PRO. Or, if you don’t want PRO access, I can send you a can of Redbull or a lock of Rand’s hair or something. We’ll figure it out…

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Posted by Tom_C

I like talking about link building - it is, after all, one of the most important rankings factors (hey Rand, when’s that going to be updated?) and also one of the things people struggle with the most in the SEO industry. So here are some more tips and tricks you can use to get links. This week I’m talking about how to actually get links from your linkbait.

For anyone that’s launched linkbait you’ll know that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Of course, by ‘works’ I’m talking about a digg homepage, a reddit homepage or huge amounts of traffic from stumble. But actually even for the pieces which don’t go hot on one of the social news sites there’s still massive potential - after all the content is no less appealing right? This is still highly linkable content, you just need to go about putting some elbow grease in to get the links. This image is supposed to represent elbow grease, or that women are much better linkers than men, or something equally random:

1. Submit to niche social media sites

Ok, ok - I know I said this post was about how to get links AFTER submitting to social media sites but actually this is a very important step in launching linkbait and getting links. Don’t just stop with Digg, Reddit and Su - look at niche social media sites as well. By submitting to these sites not only do you increase the chances that it will go hot on one of these sites (and hence spread and hence get links) but also a lot of these sites provide nonofo links (nonofo being our internal term for clean non-no-followed links) so they’re valuable in their own right too.

Don’t know where to start? Here are a few ideas:

• Jane’s list of 30 quality social media sites to submit to
• 120 social media sites with PR
• A categorised list of niche social media sites

It’s worth bearing in mind here that while these niche sites won’t send as much traffic as Digg or Reddit the quality of traffic is MUCH better - the visitors will almost certainly stick around longer, be more likely to comment and probably more likely to link too (though this is un-tested). Incidentally, does anyone know of any studies into this?

As an aside, don’t forget foreign language social media sites, especially if your linkbait is visual. Both Wykop.pl and Szanalmas.hu have sent us considerable traffic in the past.

2. Ask for links. Seriously.

This point is actually the real reason I wanted to write the post, the other ideas are just fleshing the post out so it’s not really short (shhh - don’t tell anyone!) and is something we’ve been doing which is proving very effective at the moment. The concept is simple - once you’ve created and launched your linkbait use it to manually build links by contacting people who might be interested in your content and ask if they’d like to link to you.

This works especially well when you craft your linkbait correctly - we had success a while back when we launched a video explaining bittorrent for a client, the video was cutsie and fun but it neatly explained the concept of what a bittorrent was. Then we did a search for bittorrent faq and voila - we have a list of relevant people who are actually interested in our video and could easily embed and/or link to it.

Another example - we recently launched a quiz about beds and dust mites. It didn’t do terribly well on digg or reddit but it transpires that there’s a really big dust mite community online (who would have thought!?) and since we have real content to offer bloggers we’re having success simply asking relevant bloggers if they’ll take the quiz and link to us. We’ve only just started manually building links off the back of the quiz but we’re seeing good results already - for example this very nice gentleman has linked to us!

While there was no money changed hands for this link you could equally be more aggressive about getting links and pay for people to link to your linkbait as well, but I won’t delve into that whole can of worms here as it’s been discussed elsewhere a lot and it’s not really the focus of this post.

3. Email chains

Back when I used to work in a large corporate office (a far cry from the 14 of us at Distilled!) there were constantly emails flying back and forth among staff with headlines like "Oh My God FUNNY. PLEASE READ" or "SEND THIS TO FIVE FRIENDS OR YOUR KIDNEYS WILL SUFFER DEATH". I used to hate those people. I really did. Thankfully, it’s several years later and I’ve just about managed to weed out all those kinds of people from my social circle and I very rarely get sent these kind of chain emails. Still, the market for them hasn’t decreased. They can be a very valuable way of helping your content spread - sure these people aren’t always going to link to you but the number of visits it can drive is sickening. So next time you’re launching linkbait, why not get back in touch with THAT person in your life and send them an "OMG FUNNY, TAKE THIS QUIZ" email.

As an added bonus for this post, I’ve also uploaded my SMX London presentation on Blow Your Mind link building techniques which you can view online. It’s light on content but there’s hopefully some useful tips in there:

Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques

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Posted by randfish

Site after site that I visit lately has been showing a tendency for using footer links to run their internal SEO link structure and anchor text optimization. While this practice, in years past, held value, today I rarely ever recommend it (and yes, SEOmoz itself will be moving away from using our footer for category links soon). Here’s why:

1. Footer links may be devalued by search engines automatically
   Check out the evidence - Yahoo! says they may devalue footer links, Bill Slawski uncovers patents suggesting the same and anecdotal evidence suggests Google might do this (or go further) as well. Needless to say, if you want to make sure your links are passing maximum value, it’s wise to avoid the footer (particularly the footer class itself).
2. Footer links are often not the first link on the page to a URL
   Since we know that the first link on a page is the one whose anchor text counts, and footer links, while anchor text optimized, are often a second link to an already-linked-to target, they are likely not to have the desired impact.
3. Footer links get very low CTR
   Naturally, since they’re some of the least visible links on a webpage, they receive very little traffic. Thus, if algorithms like BrowseRank or other traffic metrics start to play a role in search rankings, footers are unlikely to have a positive impact.
4. Footer links often take a page beyond a healthy link total
   Many pages that already have 80-100 links on the page are going to lose out when they add a footer with another 30-50 links embedded. The link juice passed per link will go down and the value of each individual link is lowered.
5. Footer links can be a time suck
   The time you spend crafting the perfect link structure in the footers could be put towards more optimal link structures throughout the site’s navigation and cross-linking from content, serving both users and engines better.

That’s not to say I don’t suggest doing a good job with your footers. Many sites, large and small, will continue to use the footer as a resource for link placement and, just as with all other SEO tactics that fade, it does carry some residual value. Let’s walk through a few examples of both good and bad to get a sense for what works:

Thumbs Up: Shopper.Cnet.com

I like the organization, the clear layout, the visibility and the fact that they’ve distinguished (through straight HTML links vs. drop downs) which links deserve to pass link juice and ranking value. I’m also impressed that I actually see a "Paris Hilton" link in the footer yet am not completely unaccepting of the idea that it could be there entirely naturally, simply as a result of what’s popular on CBS.

Thumbs Down: Hawaii-Aloha.com

These are my least favorite kinds of footers. The links are just squashed together, the focus is obviously on anchor text, not relevance, the links are hard to see and read and there’s little thought given to users. The links don’t even look necessarily clickable until you hover.

Thumbs Up: VIPRealtyInfo.com

When I searched for "Dallas Condos", I was sure I’d find some examples for thumbs down, which is why I was so thrilled to find VIPRealtyInfo, a clearly competitive site in a tough SEO market doing a lot of things right. Yeah, there’s some reasonable optimization in the anchor text, but it’s definitely not overboard and the links are useful to people and search engines. The visual layout and design quality gives it an extra boost, too - something that can’t be overstated in importance when it comes to potential manual reviews by the engines.

Thumbs Down: ABoardCertifiedPlasticSurgeonResource.com

The site’s done a great job with design - it’s really quite an attractive layout and color scheme. The links in the "most popular regions" aren’t that bad; it’s really the number of them that makes me worried. If they’d stuck to one column, I think they’d easily pass a manual review and pass good link juice (rather than spreading it out with so many links in addition to everything else on the page). The part that really sent me over the edge though was the two sentences in the green box, laden with links I didn’t even realize were there until I hovered. Technically, there’s nothing violating the search guidelines, but I wouldn’t put it past the engines to come up with smart ways to devalue links like these, particularly when their focus is so clearly on anchor text, not user value.

Thumbs Up: Food.Yahoo.com

Again - great organization, good crosslinking (remaining relatively relevant then branching out to other network properties) and solid design. Even the most aggressive of the links, on the right hand side, appear natural and valuable to users, making it hard for an engine to argue they shouldn’t pass full value.

Thumbs Sideways: DeviantArt.com

 It’s huge - seriously big. And while it’s valuable for users and even contains some interesting content, it’s not really accomplishing the job of a footer - it’s more like a giant permanent content block on the site. The arrow that lets you close it is a good feature, and the design is soild, too. However, the link value really isn’t there and the potential for big blocks of duplicate content across the site makes me a bit nervous, too.

So what can we take away from these analyses? A few general footer-for-SEO rules of thumb:

• Don’t overstuff keywords in anchor text
• Make the links relevant and useful
• Organize links intelligently - don’t just throw them into a big list
• Cross-linking is OK, just do it naturally (and in a way that a manual review could believe it’s not solely for SEO purposes)
• Be smart about nofollows - nearly every footer on the web has a few links that don’t need to be followed so think about whether your terms of service and legal pages really require the link juice you’re sending
• Make your footers look good and function well for users to avoid being labeled "manipulative" during a quality rater’s review

What’s your take on footers for SEO, and how do you use them or avoid them?

p.s. If you’re thinking about footers from a layout and design perspective, check out Matt’s older (but still good) post on 19 Gorgeous Website Footers.

p.p.s. Happy Thanksgiving! This year, I’m thankful for (among many other things) Danny’s awesome post calling out spam and manipulation in the engines (and Google’s responses, too).

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Posted by randfish

I’ve been getting into Twitter (under my usual moniker - randfish) more and more over time (despite only following a few friends and family), and lately, its been weighing on me that the service, despite its brilliance, rapid adoption and passionate fanbase, isn’t yet pursuing revenue. That’s OK - I think they probably have lots of very smart, talented, experience people thinking about the problem and taking action to prepare for it. However, I thought it might be fun to brainstorm some concepts publicly and recruit the smart SEO crowd to pitch in.

First off, here are the ideas I’d toss - I don’t think they make good sense. Thumbs down to:

1. Third-Party Contextual Advertising - Google AdSense or YPN just don’t excite me, and I think they’d undermonetize and be limited to only those folks who use Twitter on the web (and not through third party apps or mobile).
2. Broadcast Tweet Ads - Sending users a random ad tweet every 5, 10 or even 50 tweets isn’t exciting and it’s not targeted the way Twitter should be. Twitter knows something about everyone; leverage that if you’re going to message your users.
3. Display Ads - For the same reasons as contextual advertising
4. Third Party Aps & APIs - I love that it’s free now, and I think Twitter will be far more valuable by remaining completely free to users and open to developers.
5. Pay for Corporate Accounts - Can’t prove you’re a real person? Twitter charges for your corporate/brand account. It’s an easy one (even if people set up lots of sock puppets to get around it, Twitter’s sales/spam team can go find the valuable accounts), but it doesn’t have the targeting value or the potential that some of the others do.
6. Pay for Followers - Twitter fans are going to get angry quickly if you auto-sign them up to follow a brand or person they don’t know. I’d stay far away from this one.
7. Pay for Followed Links - Something tells me Google would be pretty quick to penalize Twitter and they probably don’t want to make enemies with the search giant just yet.

And here’s some ideas I really like:

1. Keyword Purchases - Everytime someone Tweets the word "SEOmoz," I, as an advertiser, want two things. First, I want those users recorded so I can message to them in the future and second, I want the word to automatically become a link pointing to the page of my choosing (probably a Twitter-specific landing page for PRO in our case).
2. Search Ads on Twitter Search - As Twitter search becomes more popular (and it will, not just for obsessed Twitterers but brand managers and reputation analyst but for regular users and marketers and researchers, too), placing relevant ads in those searches becomes valuable. Better yet, you can combine Twitter searches with tweet history, so I could, for example, only show my ad to Twitter users who search for "SEO" and have previously twittered (or received twitters from those they follow) with my brand name.
3. Charging for Power Accounts - Your first 1,000 followers are free. After that, no one can follow you until you pay $50 a year (or some nominal, but affordable number). When you get to 5,000 or 10,000, the price goes up.
4. Subscribe Invitations from Advertisers - When I log into Twitter or reach my account page on the site, an overlay could indicate that some users have invited me to follow them. Those "invitations" could have 140 characters to say something clever and enticing enough to attract me and Twitter could target them based on my followers, followees and tweet history. There’s a lot of targeting options for a brand manager seeking new followers.
5. Targeted Tweet Ads Based on Tweet History - Unlike the broadcast ad concept I didn’t like above, these would rely on user history and profile to make them effective. If I’ve tweeted a combination of words a number of times or follow people who have, I’m an ideal candidate to receive a sponsored tweet every 20 or 50.
6. Opt-In Geo-Tweet Ads - You Tweet a location and advertisers can Tweet back (and appear in your mobile updates) with messaging. It’s a pretty solid concept, although I worry that opt-in adoption rates would be low unless the advertiser quality controls were extremely high.
7. Pay to Opt Out of Ads - Don’t want to receive Tweet ads or sponsored tweets (and maybe get some extra member features like a more robust timeline and maybe greater visibility or listing in some sort of Twitter user directory)? Pay $3 or $6 or $9 a month. It’s a great extra revenue stream for those who’d (inevitably) complain about the ads.

Your turn - any good ideas for how Twitter should monetize? Any guesses as to which they’ll adopt and when?

p.s. I recognize that many folks around the web have probably already voiced these ideas, and I’ve glanced at a few headlines on the topic, but thought I’d come at it independently without reading anything else first. If this were my job, I’d approach it much more systematically.

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