Search Engine Optimization SPONSOR MESSAGE: US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009-2014 Predictions for SEM, Social, Mobile, Video and More!

SPONSOR MESSAGE: US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009-2014 Predictions for SEM, Social, Mobile, Video and More!: "In this independent report, Shar VanBoskirk, Vice President at Forrester Research, explains the factors behind the decline in traditional marketing and shows the reasons why current marketing professionals are investing in interactive marketing efforts. It is predicted that by 2014 interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend.
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Usman Farooq SEO/SEM/SMM Expert Pakistan
Usman@technotera.com

SEM pakistan/SEO Pakistan: One Giant Leap for Link Data: Announcing Open Site Explorer + Page/Domain Authority Metrics

One Giant Leap for Link Data: Announcing Open Site Explorer + Page/Domain Authority Metrics: "

Posted by randfish

For the past 15 months, we've been working hard to improve Linkscape, our index of the WWW. Today, we're releasing an entirely new platform for Linkscape's index with more accessible data than ever before. And, for the next 48 hours, full functionality is available entirely for free:

The new tool, Open Site Explorer, makes gathering, sorting and exporting link data easier than ever. It's built with speed and accessibilty at the forefront and provides a tremendous amount of information about the links to any page or site. Since there's a lot to cover, let's dive right into some of the features and functionality.

#1 - Fast Access to Top Level Metrics

At the top of every results page, you'll find the key metrics we have on your page - the importance/ranking ability of that URL (Page Authority) and root domain (Domain Authority), the number of linking root domains and the total number of links.

#2 - See Up to 10,000 Links Alongside Anchor Text & Key Metrics

You can browse through up to 10,000 links (this is restricted to 1,000 for non-PRO members normally, but will be completely free to everyone for the first 48 hours). We also offer CSV export functionality, but it won't be available until the weekend (and then, only to PRO members - CSV takes up a LOT of bandwidth for 10K rows :-)).

#3 - Filtering for the Links You Want to See

As you drill down in the list of links, you can exclude nofollowed links or see only the 301s that point to a page. You also have the ability to sort by the location from which you want to see links - internal vs. external - and links that point to a given page, all pages on a subdomain or an entire root domain.

#4 - Display Root Domains that Contain Links

The second tab in Open Site Explorer (OSE for short) is the linking root domains. We realized that a lot of people want to get a quick glance of the types of sites that are sending links to a given page or domain, and thus created this unique view. In the future (probably a couple months away), you'll also be able to click an individual domain and see a list of pages from that site that link to the target of your choice.

#5 - Review Anchor Text Term & Phrase Distribution

Anchor text is often the missing link in a "why does that guy rank there?" puzzle. We're opening up the anchor text distribution so you can learn more about your own sites and pages and those of the competition. You can also sort by both the number of root domains that contain a link with a particular anchor text term (single word) or phrase and the raw number of links containing that anchor text.

#6 - Pie Chart Displays of Link Data

Many SEOs worry that, particularly on small sites, they may be seeing lots of numbers of links, but the sources aren't ideal. In this view, we try to illustrate through pie charts the percentage of links that come from internal vs. external pages and are followed vs. nofollowed. This view is at the top of the "full metrics" tab.

#7 - Rejoice in Data Junkie Heaven

Additionally in the "full metrics" tab, you'll find a list of all the Linkscape data we've got including mozRank (an algorithm similar to Google's PageRank), mozTrust (akin to TrustRank) and many more. You can also see the more refined link counts and data for an individual URL, the subdomain it's on and the hosting root domain.

#8 - Compare Pages/Sites Link Metrics to One Another

A frequently requested feature is the ability to compare one site/page against another. OSE makes this quick and easy with a comparison view drop-down. If you click the "-" symbol again, you can return to the individual report view.

#9 - Graphical Views of Metric Comparisons

In the comparison view, we show nice visual charts that you can embed in a client report or send to your boss to help illustrate just how challenging it might be to take on a particular competitor. For example, you can see above that Fred Wilson has a long way to go to reach Guy Kawasaki's stats on his blog (granted, Guy's posts are designed for a much broader audience and he's been blogging for longer).

#10 - Compare Links Side by Side

At the bottom of this comparative view you'll see links side-by-side. We noticed a lot of SEOs open two browser windows with lists of links to compare them against one another and thought "why not make that easier?!" With this feature, you can scroll through the links for two pages to get a fast sense for the quality and variety of sources that point to each.

New Metrics - Domain Authority & Page Authority

We've got much more information coming soon about these two metrics, but basically, we're using our ranking models to build predictions about how well an individual page might perform in the search engines (Page Authority) or how well content on a root domain would do (Domain Authority). These aren't like PageRank or mozRank at all - they're much broader.

Authority scores take into account all the metrics we have about a page and hundreds of derivatives of those metrics. We've put the scores on a classic 0-100 scale that's logarithmic (so moving from a 50 to a 60 is much harder than moving from a 10 to a 20). Over time, these metrics will change and evolve as we get better and better with our machine learning systems (and as the engines and the web itself changes). Watch for this week's Whiteboard Friday with much more detail on this subject. For now Open Site Explorer is the only place to get Domain/Page Authority data, but we'll be rolling it into the SEOmoz toolbar and other tools over the next few months.

Linkscape's Index Update

Linkscape itself has also updated - growing to a whopping 65 billion URLs with 45 day minimum freshness. As Nick's previous post on the Trillion+ URLs Linkscape has seen shows, freshness is one of the most critical metrics for those who care about accurate link data, and we're working hard to keep our index as up-to-date as possible. Linkscape recrawls every page in the index each month, so no "old data" is stored or served. Our current metrics for this index are:

• Pages: 64,180,990,434 (65 billion)
  
  
  
  • 301s: 293 million
  
  
  
  • 302s: 672 million (Marshall Simmonds calls this "job security")
  
  
  
  • 404s: 360 million (but we do try to exclude known 404s in crawls, so this may be low percentage wise)
  
  
  
  
  
  



• Subdomains: 259,977,972 (260 million)



• Root Domains: 63,264,651 (63 million)
  
  
  
  • .com - 49.4%
  
  
  
  • .net - 6.4%
  
  
  
  • .de - 5.8%
  
  
  
  • .org - 5.2%
  
  
  
  • .ru - 2.5%
  
  
  
  • .cn - 2.5%
  
  
  
  
  
  



• Links: 701,881,850,733 (701 billion)
  
  
  
  • Nofollows: 13 billion (1.85%)
  
  
  
  • Internal Nofollows: 9.06 billion vs. External Nofollows: 4.11 billion
  
  
  
  • Meta Refreshes: 40.9 million
  
  
  
  • Internal Links: 638 billion vs. External Links: 63 billion (people link to their own stuff a lot more than they do to others)
  
  
  
  • Feed Autodiscovery (i.e. RSS/Atom feeds): 2.261 billion
  
  
  
  • Rel=canonical: 100 million
  
  
  
  • Links passed through 301s: 8.61 billion (just over 1% of all links go through a 301)
  
  
  
  
  
  



• mozRank Correlations to Google Toolbar PageRank
  
  
  
  • Individual page mR: 0.42 (avg. error +/- 0.56 from PR)
  
  
  
  • Subdomain mR: 0.45 (avg. error +/- 0.35 from PR)
  
  
  
  • Root domain mR: 0.45 (avg error +/- 0.37 from PR
  
  
  
  
  
  



• File Extensions
  
  
  
  • 
    
    
    html: 26.5%
    
    
    
  
  
  
  • 
    
    
    php: 21.7%
    
    
    
  
  
  
  • 
    
    
    htm: 10.6%
    
    
    
  
  
  
  • 
    
    
    asp: 5.7%
    
    
    
  
  
  
  • 
    
    
    aspx: 2.9%
    
    
    
  
  
  
  • 
    
    
    cgi: 0.89%
    
    
    
  
  
  
  
  
  

API Update

Finally, we've also updated the SEOmoz API - you can now get lists of links for any URL for FREE along with tons of other link data and metrics. Sarah & Nick have a blog post coming soon with more, but for now, check out the API page to get a developer key and the API Wiki for more details.

Answers to Common Questions About OSE

What's the difference between OSE and Linkscape?

Open Site Explorer provides a fast, free, more basic view of link data while Linkscape provides power users the ability to refine by dozens of filters, search within link anchor text, URLs and domains. Linkscape will let you dig into significantly more metrics and details on a per link basis on things like mozRank passed, Domain mozTrust, juice per anchor text, links from particular TLDs, etc.

OSE is substantively faster than Linkscape, and not as metrics heavy. It's designed to give the "500 foot view" vs. the deep, in-the-weeds look you can get in Linkscape. Certainly feel free to try both and use the one that suits you best.

Why is OSE on a separate domain?

Three big reasons, actually:

1. We've haven't tried the microsite strategy in a long time (since the first launch of the Web 2.0 Awards), and want to test and see lots of SEO and strategic/branding (we'll have some cool data to report in the next few weeks/months)



2. OSE is built entirely on the SEOmoz API platform - we wanted to show off just how much you can build using that service :-)



3. SEOmoz engineers are very busy working on another exciting launch (scheduled for June) so we wanted to split resources without putting a load on folks focused on our site (PRO members may see some previews of that even earlier)

What will OSE continue to offer for free?

For the first 48 hours, registered members (anyone with a free SEOmoz account) will get the full PRO features (unlimited metrics, up to 10K links per report, full anchor text data, etc). After that, anyone can still get up to 1,000 links per search and a sampling of metrics. You can see a full breakdown in the bottom right-hand corner of the homepage.

Why Call it "Open" Site Explorer?

We're aiming to give out more link data than anyone else on the web for free. Open Site Explorer not only gives out lots and lots of links (up to 1,000), but also metrics and link numbers for free (permanently). We also provide a free API that lets you use any of the data (including lists of links) in your applications, public or private. Our goal is to be transparent with this data - to show exactly how many pages/domains are in our index, show accuracy with freshness and canonicalize and re-crawl like a search engine. We're trying to take the web's link graph and make it as available as possible and use the revenue component of PRO membership to accelerate growth on index freshness, quality and size.

Please Give Us Feedback!

We'd love to hear from you. If you have suggestions, bug reports (this is a first launch, after all) or ideas for future iterations, please leave them in the comments or send them via the Open Site Explorer feedback form. We're of course very excited for the launch of OSE and would certainly appreciate you sharing and helping us spread it around. The free period ends at 8am Pacific on Friday, January 22nd, but PRO members will continue to be able to access all the features and unlimited reports (and free reports will still provide up to 1,000 links).

p.s. Two great posts with more information on this topic appeared in the last 24 hours and are worth sharing:

• Open Site Explorer Bookmarklets from MediaWorks UK



• Six Highly Actionable Tips for Open Site Explorer from SEOGadget

If you have more to share, feel free to link in the comments.

Do you like this post? Yes No

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Usman Farooq SEO/SEM/SMM Expert Pakistan
Usman@technotera.com

SEM Expert Pakistan: Whiteboard Friday - Keyword Strategies: Kill the Head or Chase the Tail

Whiteboard Friday - Keyword Strategies: Kill the Head or Chase the Tail: "

Posted by great scott!

Welcome, dear readers, to the first Whiteboard Friday of 2010!! As you may notice, there's a bit of a new look. This comes in large part from our move to a different video hosting solution. We hope these changes will provide a higher-quality WBF experience, and better accessibility for our viewers around the world. On with the show...



There's always debate: should you focus on your big head terms, or those wide-ranging tail terms? We've invited one of our best mozMates, Will Critchlow of Distilled, to join us for a look at how to balance your keyword strategy.



A major factor in designing your strategy needs to be analytics data. As Will discusses, many people find that analytics show most of their conversions coming from branded keyphrases, but this doesn't adequately reflect the search path people are following before they make a latent conversion.  In the video Rand and Will discuss how to take this into account and make sure you're targeting the best phrases for your business and your audience.

Will is currently stuck at the airport trying to get home to the snowed-in United Kingdom, so the post he references in the video isn't available yet. In the mean time, you can view his slide deck from the "Analytics Every SEO Should Know" presentation he gave at the SEOmoz London Seminar this winter. Slides 23 and 24 show a little bit about first-touch and multi-touch search analytics. Keep an eye here, or on the Distilled blog for his post about doing first-touch analysis in Google Analytics.



Will's post is up! Check it out: How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics

Do you like this post? Yes No

"


Usman Farooq SEO/SEM/SMM Expert Pakistan
Usman@technotera.com

SEM Services Pakistan: SPONSOR MESSAGE: Optimize PPC, Natural Search and Landing Pages via a Single Web-based System

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Optimize PPC, Natural Search and Landing Pages via a Single Web-based System: "The Yield Web Marketing Suite is a complete, easy and profitable way to optimize your total search marketing program. Fully automated, the system relies on complex algorithms that work daily to manage bids, keywords, multivariate tests and more so you don’t have to. And the Natural Search Optimizer helps to improve page rank [...]



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Usman Farooq SEO/SEM/SMM Expert Pakistan
Usman@technotera.com

SEM Service Pakistan: Q & A About Using Q & A Sites to Build Your Business & Reputation

Q & A About Using Q & A Sites to Build Your Business & Reputation: "

Posted by Gil Reich

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.

Q&A sites are a great way to get your message across and to build your brand and reputation.

How many people use Q&A sites?

• In a recent Business.com study, 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites. Only 29% said they use Twitter to find business-related information. The 49% doesn't even include the many who get info from Q&A sites by Googling or Binging.


• Answers.com (where I work) is now ranked (by comScore) as the 17th most visited site in the US. The vast majority of Answers.com's traffic is to user generated Q&A pages. Yahoo! Answers gets even more traffic. Much of your potential market is already getting their answers from these sites.

Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com, December 14, 2009, http://www.business.com/info/social-media-best-practices-q-and-a

What's in it for me?

Providing quality answers and links to relevant pages can help you in the following ways:

• Direct your customers (and potential customers) to accurate information about your product.


• Connect with people in your market, build your reputation, and generate leads.


• Provide links back to your site. Some of these links are Follow links, and thus also provide SEO value.

How do I use these sites?

The general rules of social media apply here too:

1. Help others


2. Build relationships


3. Push your products and services when they answer somebody's question or request.

Q&A sites work great for this, because people are already asking the questions. When I blog I hope my posts address questions that my readers want answered, but they may not. In Q&A sites, your starting point is that somebody asked the queston that you're answering.

Specifically:

• Search the Q&A sites for questions about your subject, and browse the relevant categories.


• Answer questions fairly and accurately. If appropriate, mention your product or service, and / or link to a relevant page on your site.


• Follow up & interact where appropriate. Use these sites' message boards to see if you can be of further help, or to congratulate another contributor for a great answer.


• Fill in your User Profile, showing why people should like and trust you. You can also usually link to your site from your User Profile.

In the example below, notice how the user provided a quality answer (much of which follows a template he uses in other answers as well) and adds a relevant link to his site.

 

What are the leading sites and how do they differ?

• Yahoo! Answers: The biggest site in the industry, with 47 million US visits in November according to comScore (and that's probably a very conservative estimate). It's a broad horizontal site. Questions are open for 4 days. Users answer the question, and vote on the best answer. The best answer is selected by either the asker or by the community.


• Answers.com / WikiAnswers: Answers.com has 41 million monthly US visitors according to comScore, making it second to Yahoo! but far larger than the other Q&A sites. It's also a broad horizontal site. It's key differentiators are:
  
  
  
  • It's connectd to a reference site, so if you ask "What is the abstention doctrine?" your answer will come from West's Law and the Oxford University Press.
  
  
  • It's a wiki, so instead of multiple users providing multiple answers, users collaborate on one answer.
  
  
  • In most cases Answers don't get closed, so you can find questions asked more than 4 days ago and still contribute to the answer.
  
  
  
  


• LinkedIn Answers & Business.com Answers: These sites are great for more targeted communication, lead generation, and reputation building. Think of Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com as more B2C, and these sites as more B2B. This is Q&A in the context of advanced professional networking sites.


• Stack Overflow and its siblings: Stack Overflow is a great Q&A site for programmers. If you're a software developer and you want to establish yourself as an expert and to network with your peers, this site's perfect. The same technology is now powering other niche sites, most notably serverfault.com (for system administrators) and Answers on Startups, which Rand Fishkin just named one of the 10 Sources I've Come to Love.


• Aardvark: Aardvark is more of a closed system where you ask questions to people in your network. This is great for well connected journalists and bloggers to get answers from their network, but may not be ideal for spreading your message beyond your social circle.

How is using them like doing a guest post on SEOmoz?

Answering questions on Q&A sites is exactly like doing a guest post on SEOmoz:

• Find the sites where the people you need are getting their information.


• Give them quality information that will benefit them.


• Get your own message across, with full disclosure of who you are. You can be self-serving, but not too self-serving.


• Build relationships, and establish your expertise.

Ultimately you need a win-win here. You need to serve the needs of the community with whom you're interacting, in a way that also builds your business and reputation.

Where can I get more information on Q&A sites?

See the following excellent articles:

• Jason Falls: How to drive business leads with Q&A forums


• Using Yahoo! Answers to generate leads. Does it work?


• Lisa Barone: Finding Answers on Business.com


• Business.com's Study: Social Media best practices: Q&A forums

Or contact me (Answers.com user: Gilr)

Do you like this post? Yes No

"

2009: A Look Back

2009: A Look Back: "

2009 was a fun year for us, and we hope, for you too. Here's a month by month breakdown of new features and significant launches from 2009, with links to the blog posts announcing or explaining them. And if you haven't yet, take a look at the Google Analytics YouTube channel, where you can see tons of tutorial videos on the new features.

A big thank you to our Google Analytics Authorized Consultants, who have helped advise us on our product roadmap and told us what you need to see in the product.

Get ready! 2010 should be even more exciting.

January

• Track Google Sites with Google Analytics

April

• The integration of AdSense and Google Analytics
• The public launch of the Google Analytics API
• Google Analytics IQ - an online course in web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools
  
  

May

• Integration with Google Ad Planner so that you can replace traffic estimates with directly measured Google Analytics data
• Pivoting and Secondary dimensions become available in your reports
• Share custom reports and advanced segments
• Track YouTube brand channels with Google Analytics

June

• Import your Google Analytics goals into AdWords
  
• New homepage and website for Google Analytics
• Google Analytics Desktop Wallpapers!
  
  


• International blogs in German, UK & Ireland, Spanish, French and Japanese

July

• Advanced Segments for Event Tracking

August

• Getting started guides for the API
• Number and reach of Authorized Consultants breaks 100 global partners, with a presence on every continent except Antarctica

September

• Event Tracking available via the API

October

• More goals and new goal types
  
  
• Expanded mobile reporting
• Advanced Table Filtering
  
  
• Unique Visitor metric added to Advanced Segmentation and Custom Reports
• Multiple Custom Variables
• Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report templates
• Analytics Intelligence reports and Custom Alerts

December

• New asynchronous tracking code
• Annotations allows you to easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out 'what happened'.
  
• Custom variables available in Advanced Segments and Custom Reports
• New tracking code setup wizard
  
  
• API new features, including support for Advanced Segments, more goals and goal types, and custom variables
• Urchin Software version 6.602 available in more languages

And, of course, we added the ability to post comments on our blog posts.

From our entire team, we hope that, wherever you are, you and yours had a safe New Year's Eve and are looking forward to a happy, healthy, productive and data-driven 2010!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

"

Web Analytics TV with Avinash and Nick

Web Analytics TV with Avinash and Nick: "This is the fourth video in our recent Rapid Fire series which we are now calling Web Analytics TV. In this series you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

Here's the list of last week's questions. We enjoy hearing from you, so please keep the questions coming. Like the hosts Click and Clack from a long-standing radio show called CarTalk, who will answer any car question that exists, we'd love to do the same for web analytics. Call us Data and Point? Hm. Click and Clack is catchier. If you can think of a name let us know. But please, ask any question related to web analytics. Tools. HiPPO's. Reporting tips. Challenges. All are fair game, so ask away.

In this episode we discuss:

• Tracking social media referrals in Google Analytics
• Why do I see clicks with 0 visits in Google Analytics keyword reports
• Does sharing data with Google Analytics have an impact on Organic Search rankings?
• How to track Google custom site search engines in Google Analytics
• In keyword reports how to change '+' characters into whitespaces
  
• How advanced profile filters work
• Best practices for reporting user 'engagement'
• What insights can you gain from the content drilldown report
• How can one change the cookie duration of visits
• How does one become excellent at web analytics
  

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

• Tracking Custom Search Engine with Google Analytics help center article
  
• An article discussing tracking custom search engine by Robbin Steif
  
• Custom Advanced Filters explained by Robbin Steif
  
• How regular expressions work in Google Analytics by Robin Steif
  
• Why engagement is an 'excuse' by Avinash Kaushik
  
• Example Engagement API report using the Google Analytics API (check out the Solving Business Problems section)
  
• Tracking methods to change the duration of the visitor, session and campaign cookies in ga.js
  

We'd love to hear your comments or questions in the comments section below, and let us know if you find this helpful.

Also, if you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video. Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

"