SEO de sombrero blanco: Que obras de F@$#ing

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I hate webspam. I hate what it's done to the reputation of hardworking, honest, smart web marketers who help websites earn search traffic. I hate how it's poisoned the acronym SEO; a title I'm proud to wear. I hate that it makes legitimate marketing tactics less fruitful. And I hate, perhaps most of all, when it works.

Here's a search for "buy propecia," which is a drug I actually take to help prevent hair loss (My wife doesn't think I'd look very good sans hair):

Like most search results in the pharma sphere, it's polluted by pages that have artificially inflated their rankings. This is obvious to virtually everyone who's even partially tech-savvy and it does three terrible things:

Marketers and technologists who observe results like this equate SEO with spamming. If you've read a Hacker News or StackOverflow thread on the topic, you've undoubtedly seen this perspective.SEOs new to the profession see this and think that whatever these sites are doing is an effective way to earn rankings, and try repeating their tactics (often harming their sites or those of employers/clients in the process).Consumers learn not to trust the search results from Google, killing business value for everyone in the web world, e.g. this post on Why You Should Never Search for Free Wordpress Themes in Google

Spam removes economic and brand value from the search/social/web marketing ecosystem. If you create this kind of junk, at least be honest with yourself - you're directly harming your fellow marketers, online businesses, searchers and future generations of web users.

Last week, Kris Roadruck wrote a post called "Whitehat SEO is a Joke." He was upfront about the fact that it was intentionally provocative, not entirely truthful and more sensational than authentic. Despite these caveats, I think a response and some clarification about my thoughts on black hat in general are in order. I'm responding less because I think Kris believes it and more because of the surprisingly supportive response his post received in parts of the search community.

Kris begins his article with a personal realization:

"... I started realizing there were only really 2 kinds of white-hats. The ones complaining about how they were doing everything by the book and getting their asses handed to them by “unethical tactics”, and the ones that were claiming success that didn’t belong to them... because they... happened to be in a niche that bloggers find interesting or entertaining..."

"It’s easy to preach great content when you have a great subject. But no one gives a shit about non-clog toilets or pulse oximeters or single phase diode bridge rectifiers. Sure you might be able to piece together 1 or 2 bits of link-bait but you can be sure that you aren’t going to get the anchor text that you want."

Kris' premise seems compelling and even has elements of truth (great content does work better in fields where there's more interest from web-savvy site owners), but on the whole, it's a lie. That lie - that "great content" doesn't work in boring niches - is one told out of laziness, jealousy and contempt. It's told by spammers to other spammers because it glosses over the fact that white-hat, legitimate marketing can work well in ANY field, for any site.

How about some examples, you ask? Happy to:

Here's Ready for Zero. It's a Y-Combinator backed startup tackling the horrificly spammy and, worse-than-boring, field of credit card debt relief. They don't rank yet (as they've just launched), but if they invest in SEO, they will. They have content - in this case a great team, great story, great investors and the right product - to earn all the links they'll need. If I were an SEO consultant for a company seeking rankings for debt relief type searches, that's exactly the "great content" I'd recommend.Here's one that does rank - Oyster Hotel Reviews. Today, they're on the first page for nearly every hotel they've covered, and in position 5 for the massively competitive phrase "hotel reviews" (and they're the best result in the SERPs).Another that ranks - Pods Moving Company. It's not the most exciting site in the world, but it's a good idea with good marketing and it's on the first page for "moving company," another incredibly competitive result. And guess what? No links from bloggers, either (nor any black/gray hat links I could find).Speaking of not exciting but white hat and "great content," here's Ron Hazelton's DIY Home Improvement. A mini-celebrity thanks to a home repair-focused TV show, his site isn't exactly drawing in the Linkerati, but he markets it well and his stuff is good, so when you do searches like 'toilet replacement' Ron's site is #1.Slightly less boring, but more competitive and equally un-blogger friendly is the world of business invoicing and bill paying. Yet, the gang at Freshbooks is kicking butt and taking page 1 rankings all over the place.Sound effects are another unlikely arena for building a big SEO success story, but despite avoiding every black hat tactic leveraged by the typical ringtone spammers, Seattle-based Hark.com has kicked serious butt here. They generate millions of visits from more than 750K keyword phrases each month, and they've built a serious brand in an industry rife with manipulation.Kris specifically called out bridge rectifiers as being an impossibly boring industry, yet here's AllAboutCircuits, who shows up on page one for virtually every diode-related search. There's nothing fancy there, either - it's just great content, like this one on rectifier circuits. The illustrations are detailed, the content is awesome and they follow an almost-Wikipedia-like model to get contributors, many of whom link back.

I try hard, in my writing, my presentations and my professional contributions to this industry to be warm, generous and understanding. But, black hats telling the world that they turned their back on white hat because it's impossible is a load of crap, and I'm not feeling very empathetic toward that viewpoint.

Yes, white hat SEO, particularly in boring industries for non-established sites is a tremendous challenge. It requires immense creativity, huge quantities of elbow grease and a lot of patience, too. Black hat takes some creativity sometimes, but often it's about finding or learning the tactic Google + Bing haven't caught up to and applying it over and over until it burns down your site and you have to find another. Black hat is fundamentally interesting and often amazingly entertaining, much in the same vein as movies and TV shows featuring clever bank robbers. But a statment like this has no legs to stand on:

"... the longer I practiced and studied greyhat, the more annoyed I got with the piss poor advice and absolute falsehoods I saw being doled out by so called SEO experts to newbie’s who had no way of knowing that the advice they were soaking up was going to keep them at the back of the search engine results pages (serps) for the foreseeable future. Whitehat isn’t just a bit slower. It’s wishful thinking. It’s fucking irresponsible."

Thankfully, it's easy to refute Kris' points with hard, substantive examples (something his post doesn't do at all).

Job searches are among the most challenging, competitive results in the SERPs. Back in 2008 (when we still had a consulting practice), we worked with the crew at Simply Hired to set up a long term strategy to win. It involved a syndication strategy with smart linking and anchor text, embeddable widgets, a search-friendly, crawlable site, a data-rich blog and a massive online brand building campaign, too. After 6 months, Simply Hired had improved rankings and traffic, but they certainly weren't #1 across the board. Today, however, I'm incredibly proud of their progress and I continue to stay in touch with their team and help out informally when/where I can. They're on page 1 for "job search," they rank for hundreds of thousands of job title + geo combinations and thanks to SEO (and dozens of other successful marketing + sales programs) they're poised to be industry leaders in a massive market.

These strategies that worked for Simply Hired (and worked for other former SEOmoz clients like Yelp, Etsy and Zillow) aren't some dark secret, either. I wrote a lengthy blog post explaining the process in depth in a post called Ranking for Keyword + Cityname in Multiple Geographies. And I'm not alone, blogs like those from SearchEngineLand, SEOBook, Distilled and all of these others give tremendously valuable advice day after day.

I think Kris owes us some examples of "piss poor advice and absolute falsehoods" being "doled out by so called SEO experts." I'll agree that there's some bad advice floating around the SEO world, and I'll even admit to giving some myself (remeber when I thought XML Sitemaps were a bad idea?), but that's a bold statement to make without any evidence.

Unfortunately, this next statement can't be written off so easily:

"If you are charging your clients for service and not being competitive then you are ripping off your clients. It’s as simple as that. I know you whitehats are squirming in your seat right now shaking your little fists and saying, “It’s not sustainable. Our strategy is based around long term results!”. No, it’s not. Your strategy is based around wishful thinking and hoping that someday Google will do your job for you so you don’t have to. Until Google starts enforcing the rules, there aren’t any. And as long as that is true anyone who is not waiting around for them to be enforced is going to rank. Anyone who does wait around won’t. You have an obligation to your clients to do everything in your power to rank their sites using the most effective methods currently available to you."

He's dead wrong on the false choice between either being black hat or "not using the most effective methods." A tax advisor that recommends quasi-legal, high-risk shelters might be using "the most effective methods," to protect wealth, but that doesn't make his more responsible peers obligation-dodging sissies. Search marketers, whether in-house or consultant DO have an obligation, in my opinion, to know and understand the full spectrum of tactics, white hat or black, but we also carry the same responsibility as any other professional with specialized knowledge: to recommend the right strategy for the situation.

Unless your manager/company/client is wholly comfortable with the high, variable risk that comes with black hat SEO, you'd better stay clear. I'm also of the mind that there's almost nothing black hat can accomplish that white hat can't do better over the long run, while building far more value. Unless it's "I want to rank in the top 5 for 'buy viagra' in the next 7 days," you'd better explain that you're recommending black hat primarily because you're not smart, talented and creative enough to find a white hat strategy to do it. 

But, Kris makes a fair point with regards to Google (and Bing as well). The engines are not doing enough to stop spam + manipulation from black hat tactics. And, for as long as they fail on this front, there will be those seduced by Kris' viewpoint (Kris himself used to be quite white hat). To be fair, they've done a good job on several fronts recently - pushing down low quality content farms in the Panda/Farmer update, making original content rank better, and putting more high quality brands in the SERPs (even if they're not doing perfect SEO).

The biggest problem currently (IMO) are manipulative, black hat links through paid sources, automated link drops, reciprocal spam, article "spinning" (possibly my least favorite tactic on the rise), low quality directories, link "rings," etc. There's not a lot of truly new types of black hat link manipulation, but the old ones are, tragically, working again in a lot of niches. I hope that's next on Google's + Bing's radars. If it is, a lot of black hats are going to have some painful times, but I think that's the only way to solve the problems webspam creates. One of my favorite parts of being a white hat is chearing for the search quality teams rather than against them, and getting that little bump in traffic every time they improve the quality of their algorithms.

The last point of Kris' I'll tackle revolves around the jobs an SEO performs:

"If your main offering is quality content – YOU ARE NOT AN SEO, You are a writer. If you are billing your client SEO prices for writing services you are ripping them off. If you didn’t go to college for or otherwise study writing and literature and you are offering writing services to your client rather than advising them to hire someone who actually specializes and is trained in writing, you are ripping them off.

With the exception of very large sites, most onsite optimization opportunities can be identified and charted in an audit in a matter of a few days. Implementation in most cases won’t take very long either and doesn’t even really need to be conducted by an SEO if the audit is written up properly. What does that leave; content strategy and off-site SEO. The content strategy is just that… a STRATEGY, which can be handed off to a competent writer. If you are still charging your client after this point and you aren’t competing with all the tools available and you aren’t advising them of someone else who could or would, then you are doing your client a disservice."

These are ludicrous statements, but I think Kris realizes it and is simply using them to generate controversy. Anyone who honestly believes that the extent of an SEO's job is to develop content strategies, audit for on-page SEO and build links has never done the job professionally.

I wrote a blog post back in 2007 highlighting why SEO is so hard. In it, I talked about the massive quantity of things that affect SEO and that number has only grown. Today, a responsible SEO needs to be thinking about:

The business' overall product, marketing and sales strategy and where SEO makes the most sense.Keyword research + targeting (a process that requires tools, patience, intuition, testing and experience)Funnel optimization (CRO has both direct and indirect SEO impacts these days)Testing + optimizing content for users (time on site, bounce rate, engagement, etc. all matter directly + indirectly, too)Content strategy (which ties into overall business strategy at the highest levels)On-page optimization (black hats were actually some of the earliest to notice that Google's gotten so much smarter about on-page analysis than just keyword use and repetition, so I'm sure Kris knows how in-depth this process can be)Making the site search-engine friendly (a complex project even on many simple sites as features like faceted navigation, AJAX crawling, different treatment of Javascript/Flash and many, many more now exist)XML Sitemaps (we recently gave a 90 minute webinar on this topic that generated dozens of questions; it's no fire-and-forget tactic)Analytics - visitor monitoring is just the start, there's webmaster tools, link monitoring, brand/mention alerts, social media tracking and more Alternative search listings (local/maps/places, video, images, news, blogs, shopping, etc. Just one of these can be a full-time job.)Usability + user experience issues (since these can have a huge indirect and possibly direct impact on rankings)Reputation tracking + managementCompetitive researchSocial media marketing (FB shares are the most highly correlated metric we found to Google's rankings. No SEO can afford to ignore social today, and that's a massive strategic and tactical undertaking)Syndication, scraping, copyright and duplicate content issues

And hundreds of others.

If Kris thinks pounding links at a page until it ranks is the majority of his SEO responsibilities, I'm worried (Note: I don't actually believe that; I've met Kris and he's a very smart guy. Instead, I suspect significant hyperbole went into his writing). If anyone out there tells you this is how they're going to do SEO, you'd better make sure they're either a highly specialized contractor or find another provider who can help think holistically about all of the above.

Last week, I was in Munich keynoting SMX and spent some time with a retiring black hat, Bob Rains (who's moving to the White Hat world and joining TandlerDoerje in Germany). Bob and I were on a panel discussing some black hat social media tactics. In particular, Bob mentioned a tactic wherein he'd build Twitter + Facebook profiles for racehorses that would garner thousands of followers by making the profiles seem "more real than real" and even pretending to be "official" Twitter accounts for the horses. On gameday, he could then tweet/share a link to his gambling site to place bets on the horses, netting him big affiliate payouts.

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Marcus Tandler, Mikkel deMib, Johannes Beus, Bob Rains and Rand at SMX Munich
(Note: You can listen to the full panel, a mix of German + English, here)
 

To do this manipulative work, though, Bob had to work incredibly hard to have real conversations on these social sites, upload photos from events, tweet interesting stats and experiences that could be verified. In other words... He's building great content!

My recommendation was simple - just call the account a "fan page" and suddenly, you're 100% white hat. You're building a great social profile; why not make it something Twitter/Facebook won't shut down if they get word of it from the real owners? Why not go one extra step, remove the "official" title and BE white hat! Yes, you might have a slightly harder time building up the profiles, but they'll last forever! You can sleep at night!

I highlight this story because it perfectly illustrates how close black and white hat marketing often are. It also shows why I love talking to black hats and learning from them. There's almost always a way to take the knowledge and experiences from black hats (the best of whom, like Bob, are often massively creative) and apply it in white hat ways.

Three weeks prior, in London and then New Orleans, Distilled hosted a one-day intensive seminar on link building. One of the talks at each event was called "Lessons from the Dark Side: What White Hats can Learn from Black Hat SEO." Two presenters, Martin Macdonald (in London) and Kris Roadruck (in NOLA), gave talks about their experiences with webspam's effectiveness, limitations and takeaways. I thought both presentations were excellent - they clearly indicated the danger of black hat SEO (Kris' deck started with almost a dozen slides about how + why not to do what he showed), but didn't pull any punches in showing the ups and downs of a spammer's life.

SEOs have a responsibility to understand and appreciate how and why black hat SEO operates. It's certainly not the first or most important step in an SEO education, but it's part of being a true professional. No one who does IT consulting would neglect to understand hacking + malicious attacks. No one who does public relations avoids studying the manipulative parts of their field. Even in industries like construction and contracting, it pays to understand how, why and when shoddy work and cut corners happen. So too must professional, white hat SEOs know the range of tactics at play in our field.

A few months back, I answered a related question on Quora:

Knowing more about each of those practices listed can make you a better SEO. I'm not someone who pretends to have great expertise in this field, but every time I hear a black hat share a successful tactic (that isn't illegal or just drive-by spam), I learn something and am often able to come up with a way to leverage the same effect in a white hat way.

There's very few things in the world that I perceive as wholly black + white. Spamming the search engines vs. authentic, organic marketing, however, is one of them.

It's my opinion that for real brands and real businesses, the choice of going 100% white hat will pay massive dividends every time. Here's why:

There's always a better way to spend that time + money. Spam isn't free or easy, despite the image some black hats portray. When I hear about the actual costs and time commitments black hats invest, I'm blown away. For not much more time, and often less money, those same businesses and sites could invest in long-term, high value white hat tactics. Many just lack the creativity and willingness to do the hard work, others are seduced by the quick win or ignorant of the options available to them.White hat builds exciting companies, spam doesn't. With a very small number of execptions, spam doesn't build exciting, scalable, long-term companies. It creates relatively small amounts of temporary wealth. If you're unwilling to trade short term gains for long term success, you're probably hurting the online ecosystem - none of us should endorse that behavior.White hat rankings can be shared. That means never having to sweat hiding dirty secrets, protecting your tactics or link sources, jumping through hoops to keep your footprint anonymous or refraining from showing off your site. The benefits of transparency improve your ability to do PR, branding, networking and all of those, in turn, help SEO.Spam always carries risk. Whether it's tomorrow, next month or 3 years from now before you're knocked out of the search engines, it will happen. You can invest in multiple sites and tactics, shore up defenses and build anonymity to hide your online profile, but honestly, if you applied that creativity and effort to white hat.... Just saying.You're renting rankings rather than buying them. Devaluation of spam tactics means you have to stay one step ahead of the engines, and can never spend a week free from sweating what will and won't be found. White hat may take longer, but, if done right, it can build an unassailable position of strength long term.Reliability in the spam world sucks. The people who sell spammy links or offer spam services are nearly always fly-by-night operations, moving from one business model to the next. Spammers are almost never long-term operators.Any victory is a hollow one. I don't just mean in a touchy-feely way, I mean that no matter how many times you rank well with spam or how much you make, it's just money (and often far too little to sustain you, meaning you've got to go do more tomorrow). You're not building something real, long-lasting and sustainable and you're rarely fulfilling any of the other requirements for job satisfaction or happiness.The money's not that good. Ask yourself who the most prolific, talented, high profile spammers are in the world. I can name a good dozen or so and none of them are retired, only a few are millionaires and not a one, to my knowledge, has done 8 figures (excluding a few truly dark hatted individuals who've earned their money from porn empires or illegal activities). There is legal danger. I hesitate to bring this up because some folks in the search sphere have over-emphasized this danger. However, the FTC, the British government and the EU all have regulations about disclosure of interests, and a lot of link buying and link spamming behavior violates these guidelines. We've yet to see serious enforcement, but personally, I have no tolerance for risk of this kind, and I suspect many others don't either.Spam never builds value in multiple channels. What I love about the inbound/organic marketing philosophy is how it builds a site that attracts authentic traffic from hundreds of sources, often without any additional work. Spamming your way to a #1 ranking might send search traffic, but if the web shifts to Facebook/Twitter or if email marketing becomes the biggest tactic in your niche, or if a competitor wins purely on branding and branded search, you're up a creek. You've built nothing of real value - nothing to make people come back and share and like, +1, tweet, link, email, stumble, vote for, shout to the heavens about. Spam builds a shell of a marketing strategy; one crack and it's all over.

The graphics below were in a slide presentation I made, but they're worth repeating here:

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Who ranks #1 for "online dating?" It's not a black hat, but a site that found a genius way to become a content and media hub, OKCupid. How about  "buy shoes online," one of the top converting terms in the apparel industry. It's Zappos, a brand that's put customer service, great product and a unique business model part of their SEO (big props to Adam Audette, who's made them a shining star in the SEO e-commerce world). Or "real estate values," an incredibly competitive term that's only risen in popularity with the market crisis? It's Zillow. Or "travel blog site," where some brilliant viral marketing earned Travelpod the top position. Or "art prints," where Benchmark-backed Art.com outranks even the exact match domain.

I could go on and on and on. The sites that people WANT to click on in the results. The ones that make searchers, technologists, marketers and search quality engineers happy are sites that deserve to rank. When you build a brand that does that and optimize in a way that no webspam engineer would ever want to discount, you've built a true competitive advantage in SEO. Black hat is, much of the time, a sad excuse for a lack of creativity, discipline and willingness to invest in the long term.

Here's to hoping the SEO industry continues to grow, flourish and attract brilliant, creative minds. Over the past 9 years of my career in the field, I've seen great progress, but not enough. I can promise that I, SEOmoz and our partners are going to do everything in our power to bring greater legitimacy, value and econmic opportunity to the field of search + inbound marketing. It's a fight I look forward to every day.

I'd love to hear from you in the comments about why you're a white hat, and if you do it, what success you've had (and feel free to link to your site).

p.s. I put out a call on Twitter for great white hat sites ranking for competitive phrases and received some terrific responses:

Online budget app, Budget Simple has a well-designed site and top 3 rankings for "online budget" and "free online budget," competing against the likes of Mint and Intuit.Mini Mave in Denmark has legendary SEO Mikkel deMib as a partner and top rankings for competitive terms like "Gravid" (Danish for "pregnant"). Last year, they recorded over a million keywords sending many millions of visits to the site.TPMS maker, Orange Electronic has only been around for a few months, but is already ranking for electronic tire pressume monitoring systems and the common acronym TPMS off some great, authentic links from press, media and government sources.Science equipment supplier Edmunds has a great site with links that rock and a brand that's trusted throughout the community. Their rankings for hyper-competitive searches like "science equipment" and "scientific supplies" along with a massive long-tail presence show the power of white hat in e-commerce niches.Online appliance retailer 8Appliances just started their online marketing, but they've already had success, earning more than 50,000 search visits monthly from top 10 rankings for queries like "miele kitchen appliances" (in Google Australia).Mexican-focused travel site JourneyMexico has been having a lots of success in niche search results like "cultural travel mexico" and with their awesome blog.

White hat can be done, even in boring industries or for competitive queries. Anyone who says otherwise isn't telling the truth.

p.p.s This week I'm speaking at SMX Sydney. My first talk (originally Bing vs. Google ranking factors) has changed from the program's listing and will now be on Black Hat / White Hat SEO. If you're in Australia (or nearby), you should definitely attend.

Actualizaciones para el programa de afiliados de SEOmoz

Aviso: Este post no contiene cualquier impresionantes Consejos SEO, tácticas, revelaciones de motor de búsqueda ni nada de esa naturaleza. ¿En su lugar esta entrada contiene información sobre cómo hacer dinero rápido... no me odian, k?

¿Puede usted cree que ha sido casi 5 meses desde que pusimos en marcha el programa de afiliados aquí en SEOmoz? Loco yo sé. Supongo que las moscas de tiempo no sólo cuando usted divierten, sino también cuando están haciendo dinero! Ahora tenemos afiliados sólo alrededor de 1.000 ayudarnos a difundir la buena que es PRO SEOmoz, y no podríamos estar más agradecidos. Ha sido una experiencia de aprendizaje única empresa amplia tanto a nivel personal, creó el programa, establézcalo en vivos, con filiales y colaboraron para ayudar a educar a un círculo de comercialización más acerca de nuestras herramientas de PRO.

Ahora que tenemos casi medio año bajo nuestro cinturón (y gran cantidad de datos para ayudar a guiarnos) hemos decidido hacer algunos bastante audaces en el frente de programa de afiliados, y que quería tomar un poco de tiempo hoy a contar todo sobre ellos.

# 1 Pagan $25.00 por cada líder de prueba gratis
Estamos cambiando el pago de "pago por alta PRO" para "pagar por plomo prueba libre" {Insertar jadeo multitud aquí}! Sí, usted leer ese derecho. Anteriormente lo estábamos pagando sólo si usted nos envió una visita que firmado Pro inmediatamente, a un precio de 99 dólares al mes. Obviamente sabíamos que esto pone una carga enorme de nuestros afiliados. Ese precio era una alta barrera de entrada para muchos visitantes que realmente desea que podrían probar nuestros servicios de administración de SEO primero.

En febrero lanzamos nuestra primera prueba gratuita de 30 días de SEOmoz PRO. Desde entonces hemos renovando el sitio con la esperanza de mostrar la versión de prueba gratuita para los nuevos visitantes. Ya hemos cambiado el sitio para vender realmente este proceso de suscripción, pensamos que es justo pagar afiliados para cada principal prueba libre. Estamos súper emocionados acerca de este cambio, y optimista contribuirá a nuestros afiliados a través de la Junta.

# 2 Afiliados pagan más rápidamente con menos problemas
Hemos pasado a la plataforma de pago en línea de PayQuicker a pagar a nuestros afiliados más eficientemente. Las plataformas de PayQuicker permite a los afiliados a elegir lo que quieren ser desembolsado. Esta plataforma con también guardar SEOmoz bastantes horas validar afiliados, emisión de pagos y mucho más. Todo nos están emocionado para ver esto facilitar nos pago de comisiones más y más en un mucho menos tiempo, más la manera ideal para nuestros afiliados.

* Me gustaría tomar una segunda rápida para enviar un enorme gracias a Mick, nuestro representante de PayQuicker. Realmente apreciamos su gran servicio en ayudarnos a conseguir configurar y ranuras en la plataforma de pago de PayQuicker.
# 3 Obtener todos los activos nuevos afiliados a trabajar con
Dado que ahora estamos pagando a $25.00 por alta prueba libre, nos aseguramos a actualizar páginas, actualizar pancartas y hacer todo lo posible en nuestro fin para establecer éxito. Actualmente estamos reclutando para que otro distribuidor en línea que me ayude a administrar este programa (así como otros canales de adquisición) por lo que puede esperar un servicio de su equipo afiliado de la administración.

¿Phewww, bien que está excitado? Sé que soy. La verdad es que el equipo aquí en SEOmoz siempre ha sido tan agradecido por todo su apoyo. Sabemos que, incluso sin ser pagado por ello, muchos de ustedes están dispuestos a enviar alrededor de nuestro nombre y SEOmoz PRO como el software SEO de elección. Nuestro éxito hasta la fecha es en gran parte debido a su generosa evangelización. Estos cambios son nuestra manera de decir "gracias".

Como cada vez más los publicistas, periodistas, empresarios y propietarios de sitios saltan en el bus de ventilador de optimización de motor de búsqueda, que esperamos SEOmoz PRO dan una oportunidad de ser su plataforma de administración de SEO de elección. Si conoce a alguien que podría beneficiarse de nuestras herramientas, no dude en alta para nuestro programa de afiliados, agarra su ID único afiliado y enviarlo a su manera. Si registra para nuestra prueba gratuita, le pagan 25 dólares pop. Es fácil amigos.

Está bien he tomado suficiente de su tiempo hoy. Si alguien tiene alguna pregunta sobre el sentir de programa de afiliados libre para enviarles mi forma, me puede enviar en joanna@seomoz.org. Siempre puede leer más sobre el programa de afiliados detalles aquí y si desea omitir todo eso y sólo comenzar, puede inscribirse para el programa aquí.

Acerca de JoannaLord , Director de contratación & de adquisición del cliente en SEOmoz.

Anatomía de enlace - comprender el valor de un vínculo

Ahora muchos de nosotros en la industria SEO tienden a pensar en términos absolutos. Sombrero blanco o sombrero negro, esto funciona o no, este vínculo es increíble o es inútil... obtendrá el punto.

Esto es peligroso pensar porque si algo no es absolutamente perfecto o dorado, tendemos a evaluarla como inútil. En nada es más obvio que en el edificio de enlace.

Constructores de enlace provienen de dos escuelas de pensamiento. Bien, perseguir y tomar cualquier enlace desde cualquier lugar o (b), investigación y examinar cada oportunidad potencial de enlace.

Si piensa como el primer grupo, entonces este post no es para usted. Pero si usted está en el segundo grupo, esta entrada debe ayudarle a evaluar el valor de un vínculo.

La anatomía de un vínculo puede pensarse en cinco partes: anclaje de texto, la confianza, la pertinencia, la colocación y enlaces salientes. Cada uno es un trozo de la tarta de enlace.

Ya sé lo que estás pensando: ¿qué autoridad? Las cinco piezas del pastel antes mencionados son los que hacen el pastel, pero la autoridad es lo que determina el tamaño del pastel.

Esto significa que si el vínculo es de alta calidad, sitio Web de la autoridad, los motores de búsqueda pagará mucho más atención a las métricas de ese vínculo que uno en algún sitio Web de spam.

Analicemos cada métrica individual, a continuación y ver el significan de todos ellos.

1. La autoridad

Como acaba de mencionar, la autoridad es lo que determina el tamaño del pastel. La autoridad más un dominio tiene, los motores de búsqueda más peso que las métricas de sus enlaces salientes.

Sugerencia: cualquier búsqueda en Google traerá sitios Web con autoridad de dominio al menos en los años treinta. Si el sitio Web que está considerando una oportunidad de vínculo no tiene al menos un 30 por autoridad de dominio, no obtener mucho valor de ella.

2. El anclaje texto

Durante la mayor parte del último decenio anclaje texto ha sido la métrica más importante de un vínculo. Los comercializadores entendieron esto y es precisamente a causa de esta forma que vio el surgimiento de la bomba de Google.

Blog comentarios spam es otra enfermedad que está directamente relacionada con la importancia del texto del delimitador. Es sólo por esta métrica que tengo para eliminar comentarios en mi blog de lectores como "avance efectivo en línea barata durante la noche."

Texto del delimitador de coincidencia exacta no es la única manera de tener éxito aquí. Un sitio Web que vende bicicletas de montaña y objetivos clave no debe bajar un vínculo con el texto del delimitador "bicicletas".

Sugerencia: Pruebe y conseguir enlaces con las palabras clave en el texto del delimitador. Asegúrese de mantener cierta variedad aunque; motores de búsqueda pueden detectar cantidades antinaturales de texto del delimitador idénticos.

3. Confianza

Mucha gente se esfuerzan por comprender la diferencia entre la autoridad y confianza. SEOmoz tiene sus propias mediciones llamado autoridad, mozRank y mozTrust. Recomiendo leer en ellas para tener una mejor idea de la diferencia.

Fomento de la confianza con los motores de búsqueda es clave para lograr la clasificación gran. Hay sólo una forma de construir que confianza y es conseguir enlaces a sitios Web que tienen mucha confianza creado ya.

Sugerencia: Escribir un comunicado de prensa es una excelente manera de obtener algunos vínculos de confianza. Lotes de noticias y medios de comunicación tienen confianza con los motores de búsqueda.

4. La pertinencia

Relevancia es una medida de cómo conectado es su contenido a la página que está vinculando a usted. Tiene mucho más sentido para un blog de ejercicio vincular a un sitio Web que vende cintas y no uno que vende telescopios.

Es difícil determinar cómo otro sitio Web es relevante para usted sin embargo. Una forma útil es utilizar la herramienta LDA de SEOmoz. Simplemente conecte su palabra clave y la dirección URL de la página que está viendo y ver cómo pertinentes a ese término.

Sugerencia: Intente obtener vínculos de sitios Web que tienen un contenido similar a la suya.

5. Colocación de

La fórmula original de PageRank de Google trata todos los vínculos de una página web de la misma. Cada uno podría pasar una cantidad igual de PageRank. Esto fue llamado el modelo Surfer aleatorio.

Google y otros motores de búsqueda son un poco más avanzadas ahora. Bill Slawski explica cómo Google podría utilizar un modelo de Surfer razonable en su algoritmo actual.

Esto significa que con su enlace en el pie de página de una página web no va a ayudarle mucho. Un enlace contextual en la parte superior de la página de contenido es más probable que se ha hecho clic y por lo tanto, les transmita más PageRank.

Lo mismo es cierto de listas. Las personas son mucho más probables que haga clic en vínculos en la parte superior de la lista, por lo que esos vínculos podrían pasar el enlace más jugo.

Tip: Conseguir enlaces que tienen una mayor probabilidad de que realmente se ha hecho clic.

6. Enlaces salientes

Si todos los vínculos de una página pasan una cantidad igual de PageRank, vínculos más salientes de una página significa menos PageRank por enlace. Cada vínculo saliente de una página devalúa su vínculo muy ligeramente.

Esto es por qué algunos directorios parecen bastante inútiles en estos días. ¿Con cientos de enlaces de una página, qué valor existe en añadir uno más?

Tip: No publique vínculos en granjas de enlaces o otras páginas con muchos y muchos enlaces ya en ellos.

Conclusión

Volver a mi punto original: en la industria SEO tendemos a pensar que todo o nada. No es raro ver a gente rechazar una oportunidad de vínculo con texto de gran ancla y gran colocación en una página pertinente porque no tiene mucha confianza o autoridad.

Esto parece viciado para mí. ¿Sólo porque no se puede obtener cada pedazo del pastel no desea que parte de ella? ¿Por qué rechazar un poco justo porque no puede haber mucho?

Lo mismo ocurre con piezas parciales. Una coincidencia de texto ancla parcial no es tan buena como una coincidencia de texto ancla exacta, pero es mejor que nada.

No estoy diciendo tiene que conformarse con cualquier enlace desde cualquier lugar, pero si puede obtener incluso dos piezas del pastel, quisiera aprovechar, incluso si no obtiene los otros tres.

Utilizando la API y herramientas para realizar un seguimiento de su estrategia de medios de Comunicación Social

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The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Social media is becoming increasingly important for SEO. Just in the last week we've seen the launch of Google +1 and early correlation data showing Facebook shares are highly correlated with rankings.

In this post I'm going to walk through a bunch of different ways of tracking your social media strategy. We'll start with the basic/easy stuff and move up to more complicated things (Google Docs! APIs! Mmmmm)

There are a million and one social media monitoring/tracking/reporting tools. Here's just a quick sample of ones that I like personally:

PostRank

PostRank is a neat service that tracks your pages (either through inputting manual pages or via an RSS feed) and gives you engagmenet metrics for your content. It even hooks up to Google Analytics giving you real stats for visit counts which is nice. Here's a screenshot of SEOmoz content on PostRank:

There is a free plan or a paid plan that is only $15 / month so it's very easy to get started with PostRank. It's a great tool for tracking your own content - but not as powerful for tracking competitor sites.

Topsy

Topsy is an awesome twitter tracking service - I personally love their search functionality because it's easy to use and gives nice data. For example - a search for our recent #linklove conference gives a really good summary of tweets and links shared:

But Topsy doesn't stop there - you can also run an awesome site: query in their search to show the top tweeted content from a domain. For example a site:distilled.co.uk query from the last 30 days:

Ok, Topsy is cool - we're getting close to analysing our competitors. What about a bulk URL lookup?

Sharedcount

Sharedcount is a very lightweight app I found in a Hacker News comment which gives you a very quick and simple lookup for a given URL. For example the startup Zapd's footprint on social media:

The great thing about this is that they have an API - the same data above is avaiable by just visiting this URL. Wait - what's an API? Let me get on to that.

Ok cool, now we've covered off some 3rd party tools and services I like let's move on to some DIY solutions. In this section I'm going to walk through some fairly advanced things so you might want to read carefully. To give you a tease here's a few things I'm going to show you how to generate:

A graph of social media activity for your site:

Mouse over an individual data point to see which blog post the data point refers to. Of course, I'm not just about the pretty charts - I'm also going to show you how to generate a bunch of data like this:

I should stop here and mention that a lot of this section is going to build on knowledge of Google Docs. Most people only consider Google Docs as an online basic version of Excel. But it's so much more than that - using Google Docs you can actually build spreadsheets that make web calls and interface with live data.

Disclaimer: There are lots of things in this section you can just copy and paste and start using straight away so even for the beginner there should be lots of value. I link to a bunch of Google Spreadsheets at the bottom of the page that you can just make a copy of and get going. However, along the way I'm going to go into some fairly advanced bits and pieces. If you're completely new to using Google Docs to make web calls you should start out with this guide I wrote on Distilled about using the importxml function and Google Scripts:

Using Google Docs To Build Agile SEO Tools

The foundation for this post is that we're going to look at calling some APIs to gather some data. Most normal people I know either don't know what an API is or freak out when they hear the term mentioned. Let me reassure you. An API is just a method for fetching some data from a remote resource in an efficient manner. For example, take the Facebook Graph API. You can make a call to this API by just visting a URL like this in your browser:

http://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://www.seomoz.org

You'll see something like this:

Yes there are curly brackets everywhere but hopefully even the most technically-averse among you can figure out what the data says. This is actually JSON and the good news is machines love reading JSON.

Thanks to a Hacker News thread I found a whole bunch of free APIs like this that let you get information about a site's social presence:

Facebook - http://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://www.seomoz.orgTwitter - http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.seomoz.orgLinkedin - http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share-count?url=http://www.seomoz.orgStumbleupon - http://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url=http://www.seomoz.orgDelicious - http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/urlinfo/data?url=http://www.seomoz.orgGoogle Buzz - https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/count?alt=json&url=http://www.seomoz.orgReddit - http://www.reddit.com/api/info.json?url=http://www.seomoz.org

Using these APIs is a much better thing to do than scraping data from their HTML pages - this way our request only causes minimal load on their servers whereas a full request would load all of the JavaScript and images and so on.

Google scripts are pretty easy to get your head around - anyone who's ever used a macro in Excel will feel right at home. For those who aren't so sure here's a very short (~1min) intro showing how to use Google Scripts:

if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'] || navigator.userAgent.match(/Android/i)!==null)Wistia.VideoEmbed('wistia_329982',620,349,{videoUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/7341ac94eeb2747270fcda898733161b20bf90bc.bin',stillUrl:'http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/9a357f842501b42b1d3afc3671f70674aefc7f08.bin',distilleryUrl:'http://distillery.wistia.com/x',accountKey:'wistia-production_3161',mediaId:'wistia-production_329982',mediaDuration:63})

Of course, what I haven't shown you is how to actually write your own Google Scripts. Let's deconstruct the script I use in the video:

What this piece of code is saying is broadly translated as:

"Define a new function for me to use called FBshares that takes one input argument. When the function is called, fetch the contents of the Facebook graph API for the given URL, interpret the data we get back as JSON and then from the JSON give me in my spreadsheet cell the shares data from the JSON"

Once we have this setup we can just put =FBshares("http://www.seomoz.org") into a cell and our newly defined function will give us the number of FB shares for the URL. The key thing to realise here is that once we've told the computer that the data is JSON we can read the data using the dot notation very easily. Let's try a slightly more convoluted script to demonstrate what's going on.

Here's the respone for the Reddit API for a recent Oatmeal comic:

Basically what this is showing us is the different submissions for a particular URL and the data for each submission. I've collapsed the view to make it easier to read (aside: this online json parser is awesome for making JSON look pretty). Within each "data" section we have the following:

Cool - so what we want to do is a build a script that will go through each of the data fields in the JSON and sum the score from each. Hey presto! Here's the script that does just that:

Don't be put off by this - it's really very simple. If you don't understand the for loop at the moment just ignore it and focus on the fact that we can drill down the JSON using the dot notation. object.data.children is looking at the children element within the data element within the overall object. The reason we need to use the [forloop] code is because the data within the children is an array of items and we can select which one we want by saying object.data.children[0] for the first one, object.data.children[1] for the second etc.

Hopefully you can get a feel for writing your own scripts but if you're lazy you can just copy and paste my scripts I wrote here:

Or, if you're really lazy you can just click the image below to be taken to a pre-loaded Google Doc with all these scripts :) (make sure you're signed in to Google and click file -> make a copy and you'll have a personal version of the sheet to use and play with)

Note that I'm actually dynamically pulling in the most recent SEOmoz blog posts (kind of like a DIY PostRank) but you could just run this across a static list of URLs you copy and pasted in.

Hopefully by now you have a taste of the power of Google Docs and you're able to fetch your own social media data quickly and easily (and in spreadsheet form!). For bonus points though you should consider building something like this:

It's a google docs that lets you input a keyword - it fetches the top 10 ranking URLs and then fetches the Twitter and Facebook shares for each URL so you can quickly analyse the social footprint of the sites that are ranking for a particular keyword (I even built in a little geolocation switcher for my UK friends!).

That's all for now folks - leave some links in the comments to some cool things you've built using Google Docs! Remember if you set the access to "anyone with the link can edit, not view" then people can make a copy - this is a good way of sharing Google Docs without letting other people graffiti it or break it.

Citas de lugares de Google: 5 más tácticas para ganar enlaces para su negocio Local

Los anuncios locales en Google + Bing son cada vez más competitivos sector por sector y para algunas empresas locales en la web, incluso tácticas como análisis competitivo de citación y herramientas como buscador de impresionante cita local de Whitespark no son suficientes. Aquí, entonces, son cinco más formas únicas y útiles para aumentar la visibilidad de su sitio en la web local, ganar más citas de lugares + revisiones y potencialmente aparecen en incluso las más competitivas SERPs locales.

Función de "búsqueda de discusión" de Google está infrautilizado en general, pero me sorprendió al examinar las recomendaciones de otros subprocesos centrada en la cita para ver que nunca no había sido mencionado! Vea lo fácil que es:

Los debates no sólo te llevan a sitios donde anuncios a menudo son posibles, pero también dan una gran apertura a mencionar o promover su negocio (sólo debe asegurarse de hacerlo auténticamente + transparente). Es una enorme fuente de inteligencia competitiva y va más allá de las críticas habituales de investigar lo que quieren los clientes y posibles clientes y por qué podrían elegir otros negocios.

Otro gran vertical para encontrar oportunidades es los resultados de búsqueda de la imagen. Una variedad de consulta tipos de función aquí, pero algunas de las que me gusta incluyen:

Nombres de los competidores businessesCityname + negocio tipo/categoryProducts/servicios que ofrece citynameBoth de la anterior con barrio nombres (en lugar de citynames)

Aquí es un ejemplo del valor potencial:

Tenga en cuenta que al pasar el ratón sobre una imagen muestra su ubicación, que puede ayudarle a determinar rápidamente si el origen es uno que ya tienes, o algo nuevo y dignas de investigación. Fuentes que muestran imágenes locales tienen un sorprendente buen cruce con posible listado oportunidades.

Lista de los lugares Google de fuentes (y los mapas de Bing demasiado) están tirando de páginas más oscuro y sitios que tienen poco que ver con simplemente listado de empresas locales. Parece como si todos los sitios que regularmente mencionan o vinculan a empresas locales e incluir dirección/teléfono información y descripciones se convierten en fuentes de descubrimiento y posiblemente las clasificaciones, demasiado. No tienen la confianza de la alimentación o el mismo directo efecto, pero parece que en algunos competiive SERPs, están haciendo la diferencia (Nota: si sabe mucho más sobre clasificación de lugares que yo y han probado esto, por favor deje un comentario).

Un ejemplo:

Para encontrar estas oportunidades es, afortunadamente, no que dura. Aquí hay algunas búsquedas para comenzar (sólo reemplazar el tipo de nombre o negocio con su propio):

Desde allí, puede ampliar, ser creativo y probablemente construir algún poder cita graves.

Dada la expansión de fuentes y tipos de datos de perfiles de uso, sociales de Google, donde a menudo puede agregar información sobre su negocio incluyendo nombre/dirección/teléfono/sitio/etc. hacen mucho sentido. Aquí está un ejemplo:

Sitios como Formspring, About.me, Quora, Twitter, Facebook, corazonada, OpenForum, Slideshare, etc. todo oferta potencial y probablemente pueden encontrar muchos más.

Estas son las búsquedas simples para realizar, pero otra vez, pero no veo que mencionado en mi revisión de muchos puestos de estilo recomendaciones. Un ejemplo:

Mediante esta consulta de ejemplo

La idea es simplemente encontrar lugares que usted podría no han descubierto a través de análisis de la competencia, o porque sus competidores no están allí porque Google no los de la muestra en el "más sobre este lugar" o "revisiones de alrededor de la web" conjuntos. En el primer caso, están definitivamente vale la pena los numerosos, en este último caso, es un ROI menos seguro, pero potencialmente vale la pena el esfuerzo, especialmente si ya ha agotado las otras oportunidades.

Si tiene grandes recomendaciones para ganar lugares de Google / mapas / locales citas, por favor agregar en los comentarios! Voy a estar entre los entregando los pulgares arriba:-)

8 Posiciones abiertas en SEOmoz, sólo el nombre # 6 mejor lugar de Seattle para trabajar

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Out of the many recent accomplishments that we've had, perhaps none is more exciting than the recent publicity we received from being named in Seattle's Top 10 Places to Work by Seattle Met Magazine:

What do rubber band balls, coffee, cupcakes & a workspace w/ no computer have in common? The cover of this month's Seattle Met magazine!

But, magazine articles aren't the only things that should entice you to join our ragtag bunch...

When you step foot inside SEOmoz, you'll be forced to breakdance... Well, OK, that's only if you mindlessly obey floor diagrams. You will, however, find a space that's fun, productive, light-filled and only a block away from the Pike Place Market. We have pretty cool meeting rooms, too.

Lots of windows help keep the gloomy Seattle weather from damaging our sun-starved bodies

Xbox Kinect on Friday Nights

The 34 people who work at the MozPlex are absolutely amazing. I noted in the Seattle Met piece that we bias toward folks who are not only smart and capable, but fit our culture of TAGFEE. That's resulted in a group that I'm proud to call co-workers and friends.

 

Cyrus + Jen from Marketing, Chas from Engineering + Miranda from Product 

If you've met Moz team members at events or interacted with us over the web or phone, you've probably already been impressed. If you haven't... you should apply for an interview at one of the positions below just to come to say Hi! :-) (OK, probably not really, but you should at least come to our NYC meetup May 12, the Distilled Boston conference or MozCon this summer).

We're privileged to tackle a huge, meaningful problem in a massive market. It's our goal to take what is today a massive, complex set of tasks + challenges and make them accessible to non-experts, trackable via solid data and provide recommendations + automation to make improvement easy.

This stuff is really hard. We're building software to make it less so. If that's something you're passionate about, we think there's no better place to be.

In March, SEOmoz + OSE had its first ever combined 1million+ visit month:

 

As if you needed another reason not to trust Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, etc. :-)

Over the years, millions of people have used our tools + resources to learn more about search/web marketing and improve their sites. Our market position is an exciting one, filled with opportunity, but we know that great responsibility comes with that privilege. One of the best things we can offer to prospective employees is the chance to have a big impact on an emerging field - it's the same thing that makes me excited to come to the office (or hop on a plane) every morning.

In addition to our ongoing search for world-class software engineers, I’m thrilled to announce eight new positions on the Moz team:

SEOmoz wants people who believe in our mission and in TAGFEE. We’re unique in focusing not only on great talent, but great fit with our team. If you read the blog regularly or have stumbled across a few posts from us and feel a kindred spirit, we'd really love to talk. If you're new to SEOmoz but curious to learn more, we are too and we hope you'll take that first step by clicking and applying to one of the positions below:

Awesome Job #1: Marketing Oracle (aka Quality Content Honcho)

Producing exceptional content has been the foundation of our strategy since the beginning. We're looking for someone to produce extraordinary content for us and manage our entire content production process (the blog, news, guides, videos, and lots more). Whether it's original research, data analysis, or thought leadership in the inbound marketing space, we're looking for someone who can become our best blogger and produce our most linked-to content. You should have a proven track record of producing quality, engaging content for social media audiences, experience and knowledge of all forms of inbound marketing, and the ability to see where things are headed (i.e. be a marketing oracle).

Quality content is of the utmost importance to us, and you must share this obsession. You should be able to distill complex ideas into simple ones, create visualizations and infographics of data sets, and have a deep-rooted desire to teach and communicate ideas online. You’re abreast of the latest industry news and able to quickly respond and communicate the implications to our community. This position is unlike any you'll find at other companies -- there are few formal requirements. If you're passionate about producing phenomenal content, then this job is for you!

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #2: Online Marketer

We’re looking for an amazing online marketer. You know how to dominate paid marketing channels and are obsessed with managing them every day—making adjustments for daily performance gains, performing detailed analysis in Excel, and creating key performance indicators in Google Analytics. You’re obsessed with managing data to a positive ROI. You know how to take charge of new channels that aren’t even popular yet (Twitter Advertising, for example) or can learn how to very quickly. You make use of acronyms like PPC, CRO, CPA, CPM, CPC in daily conversation. You don’t just know these acronyms, you have years of practical experience working with them.

When it comes to performance marketing, you believe in a data-driven culture and the power of ongoing testing. If you like getting creative on a daily basis, testing new marketing waters, and collaborating with other passionate marketers, then this position is all you. But most of all, you really want to work for the awesome and talented Joanna Lord.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

To be a Mozzer System Administrator, you should be a Mac ninja and Google Apps whiz, have a good sense of humor, and have The Office Tivo’d. You have a desire to work with a bunch of technology rockstars who are passionate about developing stellar Internet marketing software. You often find yourself daydreaming about networking, development support, and production support. People often catch you using words like Cisco, MySql, and Samba constantly. You’ll provide desktop support for over thirty MozStaff and those to come in our rapidly growing office. We would love for you to work with and support the development team from prototype to staging to production; providing systems resources, setup, and monitoring.

You should know administration of Macs and some Windows and Linux systems, network administration including Cisco ASA with VPN, wireless networking, and Google Apps for your domain. Joining SEOmoz would a great opportunity to learn new technology and show your skills by enhancing what is already in place. We run part of our systems in the cloud, part hosted, and development is virtualized—so, you’ll spend part of your day on the ground (managing our office’s computers), and part of your day managing our cloud systems—we won’t be upset if your head is up in the clouds.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #4: Graphic Designer (Web UX/UI)

We’re looking for a web designer with the ability to create mind-lasers with his/her design talents and destroy web zombies with his/her Photoshop cannon abilities. Swoosh. Explosion. If you have the ability to liquefy rainbows and concentrate their pantones into web-safe colors, we want you! You’ll participate in site discussions, information gathering, team brainstorms, critiques, and presentations with the product team and marketing team. Daily tasks center on a comprehensive understanding of the design vision of SEOmoz, leading to the creation of new visual assets, concepts and the production of a full suite of site material and interface components. This role will also be involved with periodic maintenance of current site design material.

You should be a solid communicator (iambic pentameter optional), actively seeking and spreading inspiration, regularly challenging the status quo of our current designs, and curiously seeking out and learning about new tools and design trends. Did we mention you should have mad Photoshop and Illustrator skills, like pie, and wear Threadless t-shirts? Those who do not love tightly-kerned Helvetica Bold need not apply, or have a good reason not to. ;-)

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #5: Customer Service Expert

Do you <3 the Internet, love helping people, and laugh easily and often? Do your friends call you when their computers barf up strange error messages? Does Search Engine Optimization fascinate you? Are you unafraid of the early morning—or love making copious amounts of coffee? If this sounds like you, then we should chat. As a Customer Service Expert on our morning shift (6:30am to 3:30pm), you will contribute to the team by assisting our customers with all of their SEOmoz site and billing problems.

This includes the technical problems they encounter using our site and tools, and the billing questions they have about their accounts. You'll diagnose problems and provide helpful advice across several different platforms: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE, Windows and Macs. By understanding our customers’ needs and working closely with the product and marketing teams, you will help us build high quality, delightful products.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #6: Community Attaché

Our community is one of the most vibrant on the net. The Community Attaché, along with Jen Lopez, our Chief Community Wrangler, will connect, develop and nurture that community. Seriously, you want to have our community over for a sleep over. One of your primary responsibilities will be managing the day-to-day operations of our PRO Q&A Forum—you should be excited about increasing participation, quality and functionality. You’ll ensure questions are answered quickly, and that great answers are rewarded and recognized. You don’t mind rolling up your sleeves and reviewing dozens of questions daily. You’ll connect weekly with lots of community members and develop and manage a team of associates and moderators who will help you keep things running smoothly.

You’re passionate about user-generated content and will encouraging participation in YOUmoz (our user-generated blog), walk new authors through the process, help edit submitted posts, and publish and promote finished content. You love SEO and social media and should have experience with both. Most importantly, you aren’t afraid working with a wonderfully diverse set of people (including some very occasionally grumpy ones) who are passionate about online marketing and SEO. You must also enjoy giving and receiving hugs. ;-)

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #7: Business Development (Chief Friendmaker, API Guru)

You like to create things, whether that’s partnerships, creative new uses for our API, or lasting friendships with SEOmoz customers. Maybe you’ve worn a suit in the past and want to work somewhere where shorts and a t-shirt are typical attire. You’ve got technical chops and are able to devise creative ways for others to use our data. You want to create new distribution partnerships that develop new marketing channels for SEOmoz PRO. You should have experience and knowledge with the SEO industry—you’ll be helping large agency and enterprise customers adopt our software. You’ll also be the primary point of contact for our API customers and always be on the lookout for new opportunities. You’ll feed new technology ideas to our product team who will make those ideas a reality. You’ll foster a community of API developers and host developer hack days.

You should have business development experience but not be afraid of a company that encourages honesty and informality in business dealings—we prefer friendships to partnerships. You should also be a super-friendly person that people love to spend time with—big plus if you can do a cartwheel, know how to make friendship bracelets, or love talking partnerships over Happy Hour.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #8: Software Engineers!

We’re still hiring Software Engineers and offering a $12,000 bounty both to the engineers who are hired and those who referred them. To get the full scoop, see this earlier blog post.

So, if all this seems interesting, we'd love to chat with you, and if you know one someone who'd be a good fit for any of these positions, please send them our way; there's a nifty "Send JobVite" link on each jobs page that lets you share a position via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  We'll always keep our careers page updated with the latest positions at www.seomoz.org/about/jobs. Oh, and we’re definitely an equal opportunity employer.

p.s. We do offer re-location packages and assistance, but we can only accept folks who can legally live/work in the US (much as we'd love to make more international hires, navigating the US visa system is, as yet, beyond our means).

La historia de SEOmoz

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Several weeks back, I gave a very unique talk at LUISS University in Rome, Italy at the bequest of the US State Department and the Business Association Italy America (BAIA). The audience was small, but the energy was fantastic. Italy has traditionally been a challenging place to do a tech startup, but a consortium of folks are aiming to change that. My talk was an early part of that effort, and I'm really proud to be involved.

Luckily, the presentation can now reach a much wider group, thanks to the efforts of Robin Good, creator of Master New Media and one of Rome's most well-known bloggers. Below, you'll find all the sections of my talk, broken down by topic, in both video and text format. My deep thanks to Robin for this remarkable work transcribing, filming, editing and even researching all the links I mentioned. Enjoy!

 This is the story of SEOmoz, as I have heard it by sitting in the first row of a small but very attentive audience at the LUISS University in Rome, Italy. The storyteller is Rand Fishkin himself, the father and founder of an SEO company which has become synonym of high value tools and services, competence, and a natural inclination to share valuable information before asking something in return.

Photo credit: Rand Fishkin

As Rand himself announced at the beginning of his presentation, this is the first time that the full story of SEOmoz is being told publicly, in front of an audience and the first time that he his sharing some of lesser known stories, anecdotes as well as the data and numbers that have characterized his unique online adventure.

And being this a story full of valuable lessons, I am truly grateful to him for having given me and MasterNewMedia permission to record and publish this story in full without any editing or censorship.

I must also say, that while watching Rand recount the story of how his company became what it is now, I was humbled by Rand's own honesty and transparency in sharing his own failures and mistakes, as much as I did admire him for the perseverance and determination which he has painted all along his value-creation path.

Having recorded Rand's full SEOmoz story presentation from start to end, I have split the material in twelve relatively short video clips (which I have also transcribed in full), which cover everything from the early times before SEOmoz existed to the financing times, and up to today success. In these videos you can also see Rand Fishkin sharing some of the key lessons learned as well as the strategy and tactics he has utilized to drive his company to his fast increasing value.

Duration: 1' 15''

Text Transcription

This is the first time that I am giving this specific presentation.

This is a story that I told many times in bars, restaurants, enotecas, but never on stage in a formal presentation - you are going to be the first to see it, and hopefully it will be valuable.

What I want to do is tell the story about how we started SEOmoz, how it went from being nearly a disaster to a surprising success this year, in fact the last few months have been incredibly exciting for us.

Some of the things we learned along the way, both from an entrepreneurship perspective - starting a company, scaling a startup - as well as in marketing capacity.

I know there are a few of you here that are very interested in search, in SEO, in web marketing... I am going to represent some of the lessons that we have learned from that as well.

I put the presentation up on SlideShare, so if you like it you can download and share it.

Duration: 5' 20"

Text Transcription

In 1981 - I know, this is a long time ago to start a startup - my mom Gillian founded a local service that helped people make business cards, print identities, pre-internet marketing services.

In 1997 when her clients started needing websites, then I followed the typical path "I want to make some extra money while I am in high school, I am in college. I will make some websites for her clients, learn HTML, learn  CSS" - and I also learned Flash, which is how I still build a lot of my graphics and stuff.

In 2001 - know I am speaking at a university so I should not recommend this - I dropped out of college.

I did not finish, I only had two classes away from graduating, so I paid them almost all the money, but I just did not get a degree.

Two classes away from graduating, I decided that I could not go to school anymore. I just needed to do this startup thing, and of course following the first steps of other great Seattle’s entrepreneurs like Bill Gates who did the same thing.

In 2002, Gillian and I started essentially a small agency that did consulting around website building and built a lot of Flash websites.

It was in 2003 that we had contracted some other consultants locally to help us do SEO, to try get our rankings higher on Google for all our clients.

We were struggling. You got to remember that in 2001 the Internet was an incredibly exciting place and then I dropped out of school and it became a much less exciting place very quickly, because in 2001 the market falls apart around technology and I have already dropped out of school. I dropped out of school in June and it was around September that the market took a crash.

It was looking like maybe it was not the greatest decision but, of course, being obstinate - which I truly am - I stuck with it.

We had these third party services that were failing to do good SEO work for our clients, so I started learning it myself, which is how I picked up web design and all anyway.

We had gone pretty deeply to debt - I will talk about that in more detail a little bit later - but hiring those contractors, buying expensive offices, spending a lot of money on equipment, paying salaries that we could not really afford to pay... unfortunately not for me.

There is a very beautiful woman in a black dress in the third row - that is my wife Geraldine - during this time that I was deeply in debt and I could not pay myself a paycheck, she paid our rent, she worked... I do not know why she stuck with me, but it worked out well, it was a good investment eventually.
In 2004 things are kind of going terribly and I started the SEOmoz blog, because not only was I struggling financially, but I was struggling with SEO.

I realized that I was not great at it, I could not figure it out, it was very challenging.

Google makes it really hard to know and understand how to do SEO well. And that was one of the reasons why I built SEOmoz, as I thought that this practice of search engine optimization, should be easier. It should not be this black pox, it should not be so hard to understand and so, SEOmoz was founded around this idea of transparency and sharing and information.

If you go back and read the blog posts from 2004, you are not going to be impressed. They are not particularly insightful. A lot of them were just silly day-to-day stuff.

Things like: "I found this article here, it says to do this thing. I tried it and it did not work", but eventually it gets more popular, it starts growing, I get better at blogging, I get better at writing and building these resources and in 2005, after we produced some viral content, Newsweek Magazine, which used to be a very popular magazine in the United States - they had subscription of around eight / nine million subscribers weekly who pick up this magazine - they featured us in a big four / five page spread around SEO and that was a sort of a big coming out party.

We suddenly had a lot more media attention, a lot more clients contacting us instead of wanting us doing web design development services, they wanted us to do SEO. That kind of kicked us off and in fact the Newsweek article was the impetuous for me writing something called The Beginner’s Guide to SEO which is still a relatively famous and well-regarded resource.

The weird part is The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, brought us more clients, more traffic, more value than the Newsweek article did. I thought: "Oh, Newsweek wrote an article, I would better write a guide to SEO for all the people who are going to come to the website from reading the magazine and want to learn more."

It turned out the other way around. The guide itself is more popular.

Duration: 4' 39"

Text Transcription

In 2006, after doing a little bit better, we finally have our first profitable year.

You might think to yourself: "Boy, it seems from 2001 to 2006 - five years without making one profitable year - that you would have given up. In fact you probably should have given up." This is one of the lessons on entrepreneurship: If you stick with these things and you keep finding a way to live, you will make it - and I think that story is definitely more true for us than many others.

In 2007 we transitioned to software.

What we realized was we had a good consulting business - it was growing and we finally had a profitable year and we suddenly change business model.

We had a consulting business, but it is incredibly hard to scale consulting.

You take clients in, they pay you money, but you need people, well payed human resources to do a good job, to scale up the practice of consulting, and that is really hard particularly in a field like SEO where there are not a lot of talented people and many of the most talented people run their own firms or in-house set successful agencies.

Training people up takes a lot of time away from clients, so you already need a revenue base before you can do that.

We found it tremendously challenging and we built up a really popular community. The SEOmoz blog now is getting between 8000 and 10000 unique visitors a day.

We thought: "Consulting is a terrible way of monetizing, because maybe we take three or four clients a day. What we need to do is to find a revenue-generation system that can scale with the amount of people that are coming out"

Advertising is a natural one.

When you have a popular site, advertising is something nearly everyone invests in at some point. We did try it and we could make some decent money, but advertising only scales if you can scale the content, the visitors and grow essentially the pie of people that are coming to your site.

Our pie was sort of toward serving a very specific population, SEOs, which was not a huge market, it has now become a much bigger market, but it was not a big market.

We built this software service. For anyone of the members it starts at $99 a month, but it started at $39 a month and we still have people that pay that $39 a month rate of our grandfather in early years.

In 2007, after we do this in February, that summer Michelle Golderg from Ignition Partners - the second larger venture capital firm in the Seattle area - calls me, and so does almost simultaneously Kelly Smith from Curious Office.

Curious Office is a small private investment fund, one that you would call today an  angel group, but at the time they were just a private investment firm.

Kelly and Michelle both sort of took me out to lunch a few times, and they said "What are you doing with this SEO thing? Because we think this is going to be a business, is going to be a big market sector. This is going to be an exciting area."

This is one of the things that when I have spoken to people when I was at the Social Media Week in Milan and today here in Rome... Italy really lacks a lot of this specific type of activity, where someone like a Michelle and a Kelly would come to an entrepreneur who is doing something small, but interesting and successful, and say: "This could be really big". I cannot really underestimate the impact, the influence that that had. Having them come to me and say "We think SEO is going to be big. We think that you can take this to a big place."

It is not that they even told me exactly what to do or gave me the ideas. Just them saying: "This could be a $1 billion company" was enough to get me thinking in a different way about where the business could go and what it could and should be.

In November 2007 we took $1.1 million - a million from Ignition, $100000 from Curious Office.

Duration: 2' 54"

Text Transcription

We did found the board of directors.

When we took this investment, we were very lucky. 2007 was a great time to raise money, which meant that there were founder-friendly terms.

Today, right now, is probably the best time to raise money since 2007.

The last six months or so have been absolutely the best time. You can raise at very good rates, you can get good amounts of money. You can get very good deal terms - and this has not been possible for much of the last three years or so.

It is kind of a different story today.

In 2008 we took the money that Ignition and Curious Office invested and we used it to build out some technology that we could not have otherwise done - we really needed this to do. That technology today is called Linkscape. It is essentially our index of the World Wide Web. It tries to match the index that Google, Bing or Yahoo! used to maintain - something like Baidu or Yandex in Russia or Seznam in the Czech Republic.

We had this cartoon created. My favorite part is... Do you see how the hamster is powering the web crawl? We had his crawler food say: "Not with more VC funds." That was my favorite. I thought that was so clever. Yet, no one even read this comic. They all tried the product, so it worked out. This took us almost exactly a year, because we took the money in November of 2007, we launched Linkscape in October of 2008 and it was in December of 2008 that we returned a profitability. We were sort of lucky in that.

We were able to return to being profitable from a single round of investment. There are a lot of companies, a lot of startups, who take multiple rounds of investment before they can reach profitability.

A company that I like very much that is based in Boston, that does a lot of stuff around software for marketing services, is called HubSpot. They just took another, I think $32 million from Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Salesforce, on top of about $33 million that they had raised previously. They raised $65 million.

They never returned to profitability. As they are growing and growing and about to get profitable, they take another round, so that they can grow faster and faster. Which is not my personal bias, but it definitely is a great way to build a big company very fast - and it is something that venture capitalists do look for in traditional kinds of big VC investments.

It is less the case today, because there is like The Lean Startup movement - Eric Reis and all those guys. A lot of angel money is going to these and they do not need those big returns in the same kinds of ways, so you can raise at a leaner size.

Duration: 8' 13"

Text Transcription

One of the interesting things around Linkscape is that, although I designed it for a "me".

I am an SEO expert who has had seven years in the business, been doing this sort of day in, day out and these are all the things I want to see in a tool. This is what I want in software. The frustrating part about that was that there is not a lot "mes" out there. There are not a lot of Rand Fishkin-style SEOs who can use software in that particular fashion.

It was in probably about nine months later that we realized: "OK, we need to rebuild this in a different way."

We launched about a little more than a year later Open Site Explorer, which has gone on to become incredibly popular. It gets a quarter million or so visits a month and a few million requests a week for information. This tool essentially turned into Open Site Explorer over time.

One of the other lessons that I would urge folks who are thinking about startups, is that if you are an expert in your particular field - you have been doing email marketing, energy trading, travel services - and you think: "I am going to build a startup or a software piece that does what I want, that solves my personal problem", that is a really good idea. What is a bad idea is building it only for expert level folks like yourself.

You need to be able to make a market accessible service and that was a big challenge for us. I think it took me a long time.

My VC folks, my board of directors were always encouraging me: "You need to hire a director of product. You need to get someone in who can run the product division, because you are too much in the weeds, too deep in the data to be able to see the big picture." And that worked out. I hired a guy from Microsoft.

Open Site Explorer and pro membership - essentially the service that we offer, the software subscription service, it started at $39. It moves along from essentially what was a collection of 20, 30 tools and resources that anyone can use whenever you need them - which worked well for a specific set of SEO professionals, a subset of our customers - to a single campaign-based web app. That was something that we learned through competitive intelligence.

We saw some competitors in our space building software that was more campaign-based, did everything all in one and seeing the success that those products had and the intuition that we had around... Those products keep people on the service longer than our specific tool set, which in a recurring revenue business is critical to success.

You need to make sure that the people who are subscribing to your service stay with it for weeks, months and years, not just a few weeks or days.

We had about 800 subscribers at the end of 2007 and I believe our membership, which at the time was called premium had gone form $39 to $49 a month. In 2008 at the end of the year we had about 2,500 subscribers. 2009 we got to 4,000. In 2010 I think we ended with just about 7,200 or 7,100 subscribers. This year we are estimating that we are going to double that. And just today I think it is around 10,400 members. It is outpacing this growth - it is possible we will beat that number.

The growth is not like the hockey stick you will see in a lot of presentations from startup guys. What you do not see is the flying up. It's sort of slow steady progress. Five or six years from now if it continues along this growth rate, which is about a 50, 60 percent growth rate depending on the year, it is going to look great, but it is a very step-function process.

It is not the classic Facebook kind of story, where the first two years it is nothing and then it spikes, or Twitter where the first three years people sent 40 million tweets, and then yesterday they sent 40 million tweets. So that process, that scale, is not the kind of business that we have got.

This is today as of a couple days ago, we have got about 10,300 subscribers. Our API, which serves out data from the Linkscape product, has about 20 paying customers and 250 total users. We have 32 employees. We just welcomed a new software engineer.

Our board of directors remains the same, which is relatively rare to see.

Usually when businesses scale, a lot of venture-backed businesses scale, they will bring in an independent outside board member - and we have been looking for someone, but have not found that perfect fit. Since Gillian and I control the board, we can sort of dictate terms.

It's my opinion, my bias, to believe that a board of directors should be run by the entrepreneur. I think most famously... Mark Zuckerberg does that at Facebook, despite not owning 51 percent of the company, he has regulations written into the bylaws of Facebook saying that he will always control the board - which is interesting, but that is what has been done at Google. It is what was done at Microsoft.

A lot of these big companies, I think venture capitalists and investors are coming around to this idea that: "Maybe I do not need to run the company or be able to vote people off, vote the entrepreneur down."

You can see our revenue raised last year. Last year we did about $5.7 million and this number is particularly important for software startup folks.

Your gross margin is going to be extremely important, because it is how people value you.

When we get up a market assessment of SEOmoz's value, they take this number, $5.7 million, and they are going to multiply it by some number that is based on our revenue model and our margin. At this margin and with a subscription revenue business, we are probably worth between four and six times that number. If we were in an advertising-based business and our margins were around 60 percent, which would be pretty good for an ad-based business, that number would probably be two, two and half X. Instead of being worth 20 or 30 million dollars, we would be worth 12 to 15 - and that would be the price that essentially an outside company might come in and offer to buy the company at.

I would not recommend, and I don't think anyone in the startup world would recommend optimizing around margins or towards margin at the beginning of a software-based business. You really want to do that at a later stage, because growth, reinvestment are so important.

Also just to be totally clear, we are talking about gross margin, not net margin. This is essentially just the cost of running the software service. There's no way we would, but if we needed to, we could fire probably 25 of the staff, keep it running with a skeleton crew, just pay the operations in terms of web hosting and that kind of stuff, and that would be essentially what the gross margin is. The cost of structure of running the service, providing the service to customers is 17 percent.

Duration: 5' 9"

Text Transcription

Let’s dive into some of the lessons learned here.

The first big one that comes from those five years of sucking at this entrepreneurship process is: Do not give up.

I have not fully verified these numbers, but from memory it is probably pretty close.

This is our debt, personal debt before we even took venture capital: At the height we had almost half a million dollars in personal debt - which is one of the reasons why today I cannot get a credit card in my name. I have a proper card and I have a checking account but I cannot get a credit card. I can't get a bank loan, I will not be able to buy a house, a car, even rent an apartment without my wife co-signing for me.

That sucks, but at the same time, it was that debt, all these mistakes, all this time that helped me learn how to figure out how to run a real business. In hindsight I would not trade it in, but I can definitely tell you that in 2005, 2004 I had to mostly not think about this.

What I thought about was business: How is the company doing? Are our clients happy? How do we get more clients? How do we get more traffic to the website? ...And not "I am in $400.000 debt, I think I should probably declare bankruptcy".

Another thing that can be extremely distracting and problematic for startups is focusing on too much stuff.

There are a million things going on with your business, there are things around employees, founders, customers, the product, the marketing and you can get lost in numbers. You really can.

I have seen startups who do that, who have essentially more debt than they present, that is 50000 numbers and they do not have a focus around which ones matter.

At SEOmoz we have just a few basic metrics and then more advanced stuff that essentially provides detailed into those. Things like: "How many paying subscribers have we got?" and then a more advanced version that will be on: 

What is the growth rate and what is the acceleration rate? Are we speeding up?Are we adding new customers faster than we were three months ago, 4 moths ago, 5 months ago?

That is an indication that our product, our market is doing the right thing.

We look at average revenue per subscriber - a sort of a top line number. If you take all those people who are grandfathers and payed $39 / $49 / $79 a month - I think the average price that people pay today, across all I remember, is around $90 / 95 but there are people who are paying higher prices as well.

Then we look at the distribution of those revenues: How many people are in each group? Are people more likely to state that they are paying more or less? Those kinds of figures.

We look at subscriptions' duration: How long on average a group, a certain number of members who join us in a particular month, are staying with the service? With this data, you get this idea of: "People who joined in January 2010 tend to drop off after nine or ten months, but people who joined after March 2010 or April 2010... Oh, that is when we had the new open settings for our service, that really kept people out of our service."

We look at cross-revenue margin and profit and, of course, the cost to acquire customers, which historically has been incredibly low, mostly because we do organic marketing.

From those figures, we need to track them really well.

We have weekly reporting that our operation staff does - we use a service called Good Charts, our intern sees this and then we make them available to everyone inside the company.

By getting everybody on board with the same numbers, everyone is thinking about: "What am I doing this week, today, this hour, right now that it is going to help these numbers get better?"

That means that every week we send out an email update with all these charts. We send out data about how the company is doing - we show the revenue run rate.

For example, the revenue run rate if we were to continue operating at this week precise revenue would be $6,5 million. You can get a sense of: "OK, I own 0.5% of the company and today the company would be worth xyz if we were to sell..." Anyone in the company can think about: "This is the value I am creating and I see that the company is more valuable than it was last week, last month, last year." That has a great impact on the culture inside the company of working on the right things.

Duration: 1' 59"

Text Transcription

Virtually everyone in the startup world will talk to you about how important culture is. I have to say that I was not always a believer until we developed one at SEOMoz.

We have something that we call TAGFEE. It is an acronym. It means: Transparent Authentic Generous Fun Empathetic Exceptional - but what we do specifically is not nearly as important as the fact that we have one, and that is what I would suggest to all of you.

Even if you are a startup with two or three people, make sure that you have a culture of: "What is it that we are obsessed about? What is it that drives us beyond the revenue that the company is providing?"

If you look at Groupon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, any of these, they will have a mission statement, something they are trying to accomplish. Not, "We are trying to make 50 million dollars," or "We are trying to make 100 million dollars." It is more: "We want to solve this big pain in the ass problem."

For us, the big pain in the ass problem is: It is hard to promote yourself on the web, it is hard to be visible on the Internet and we do not think that should be the case. We think it should be easier - maybe not easy - but easier for everyone, for companies, non-profits, government organizations, individual bloggers, anyone to be able to send out their message across the web. SEO definitely helps with that, but so do all of the other parts of inbound marketing. That is the mission that drives us.

I think it makes us much more successful than just: "How do we make the most money today?" Because you will make a lot of decisions along the way of the business that you would not make if you did not have this.

You would say: "This will bring us an extra $500 in revenue today. This will bring us $5,000 more in revenue next month. Let's do it." as opposed to: "That does not fit with the mission."

Duration: 1' 41"

Text Transcription

Some of the traits, the big traits, that we seek in the people we hire include that they are really excited about what they are doing.

We now have an interview loop that includes one person - most often me - whose job it is not to find out if the person is a good fit or to find out if they can do the work well...

I will talk to a software engineer; I will not ask him a single coding question, but I will ask him if is he excited about Internet marketing, if is he excited about making this stuff more accessible to people. That really predicts people who are going to do well on the team.

This is something I would urge you to build inside your company. This culture of: "These are the right traits for the people who work here. These are the people who work out and the people who do not."

It's a painful lesson learned.

I can promise you that there is nothing worse as an entrepreneur having to go fire somebody that you hired two or three months ago because you made a mistake. You will do this, because I did this despite hearing this a million times. You will hear yourself saying: "We need to give them more time. We need to train them up better. We need to see if they can maybe come around to these values."

If they do not have those values intact when they join the company, some of that just cannot be learned. There is going to be somewhere better for them anyway.

Like everyone else says, I would urge you to hire slow, be very picky about who you hire, and fire fast.

Get rid of the people who are not working, quickly.

Duration: 1' 39"

Text Transcription

When you have big challenges in startups, just put them into tiny bits - I think this is one of the biggest things that all of the entrepreneurs that are back from tackling really big problems would recommend. They will say like: In the SEO world, I would love to have my own web index that is like Google, but how the hell am I even going to get started? It is impossible! It is going to take so much time, money and resources... I do not even know what it would take to build that." That is definitely how we and every other company were in that space in 2007.

We divided it up into small, manageable challenges.

What was the first thing we had to do? We had to figure out if we can crawl things. We tried to crawl Wikipedia "Look at that: We built a  crawler and it can successfully crawl all the pages on Wikipedia and build an index of them."

"Can I calculate the PageRank? Let's just try to calculate the PageRank only on the Wikipedia index." "Yes, we can do that. Now let's try and scale that up." "Build a little bit bigger... try that again... how we hold all those pages and index... where we put them... what storage system is going to work... Amazon is... EC2 - which is where we do a lot of our hosting... is too expensive to crawl, so we will find another crawler..."

It sounds like an impossible challenge, and in fact it is just a bunch of little challenges that you can do.

Technology entrepreneurs can accomplish remarkable things, particularly when they are told that they can't - another big driver for me.

Duration: 10' 43"

Text Transcription

On the marketing front, I also wanted to preset some of the cool stuff that we have learned and the cool stuff that we do and we have success building.

One of the biggest things that we have found is that - particularly in the transition from consulting to software - is that selling is incredibly painful.

Building a sales team is super challenging, sales people often do not mesh well with engineers, code folks and even many entrepreneurs. That culture I think is a dangerous thing that we have had to watch out for and essentially we have biased against it entirely.

We have zero people who do sales at SEOmoz.

I had a funny phone call the other day from MTV Network, which runs Comedy Central, MTV, VH1 - I think they have some media presence here in Italy as well - and they wanted to know: "Can you have an account manager call us up and walk us through SEOmoz?"

"We do not have any account managers"

"Maybe do you have a sales office in New York?"

"No, we do not have any sales people"

"How come are we going to find out what your software does?"

"...You can try it. You go online and you click, put your email and you can try it, right there..."

That process for us works really well. I wrote a blog post about this: "Do not sell, make people come to you" and how I did not do that when I tried to raise venture capital the second time.

In 2009 I did try to raise a second round of capital for SEOmoz despite the fact that we were profitable and failed at that spectacularly.

With SEOmoz we found that by educating people, by teaching them how to do SEO, how they could do all the kinds of things that I am talking about today, we could build up a great community.

This is what drives the tens of thousands of people who subscribe to the SEOmoz blog, who  follow us on Twitter, who participate with us on Facebook, who come to the site everyday... February was our first-ever million visit month. It has built up this massive community and certainly we do not have a million subscribers, but that community means that we do not have to sell.

People can come and if we can convince one other ten, one other twenty people that our software is interesting, they are going to buy.

Some forms of content that works for us to build all that educational stuff:

The blog - which we update every day.

Updating a blog every day, particularly when there is only one of you writing - which for the first four years of SEOmoz has been me - is terrible. Geraldine would attest, it was 1am, we were back from some work event, had dinner or something and she would go like: "Come to bed" and I: "No I cannot, I need to write...". Every night.

I have this personal feeling of guilt if I do not put something good on the blog, so I never felt good phoning it in, I needed to put a lot of effort in it which means tons of nights staying up till 3am...

It is weird too, because after doing that for a year you think: "OK, now you’re successful". No, even after two, or three, or four you are not, but you keep going. But now the SEOmoz blog is really growing to something.

 We do a lot of "viral" targeted content.

We do essentially: "Hey, we wish there were one of these for our industry". I was talking to Robin outside about a company called Oyster which started out in New York that does hotel reviews.

One of the things they always wished is that TripAdvisor and all those other review sites were not the only places to go for information, because they did not really like user reviews. What they wanted was a paid journalists who goes to stay there at the hotel, takes real photos and then really reviews the place.

That is what they built. They call it Photo Fakeouts, where they show the hotels’ photos side by side with the ones from the real journalist. It is fascinating, it is great content.

We wrote that Beginner’s Guide to SEO that we talked about.
We do industry surveys.
I do a lot of graphic and illustrations. This is because of my background in Flash, but the things about that stuff that is great is that the people who pick this up, who put that in their presentations, their websites will link back to use and they will share the fact that these came from SEOmoz. The citation, that link passes SEO value, visitors, it means good branding for us, etc.

If we are the source where everyone goes to essentially talk about SEO, this is a huge win for us.

 We do a weekly video series... what is weird about that is that if you go to a normal blog post on SEOmoz, you look at our analytics, it is usually read by between 8000 and 12000 people. Sometimes many more, 20000 to 3000 people. 

We have never had a video that has been watched by more than 12000 people, so you might think: "Would not you give up on that content format, since it does not get you as many views and visitors?"

The fact is that the engagement on a video is phenomenal and the quality of branding, the number of people who know me or SEOmoz because they have read a blog post is smaller in comparison to the number of people who know us because they have seen the video.

The only way you can feel that is to get out of the "building" and talk to people, go to conferences and events and forums where you can speak to people in person and then you can feel that impact that video has, it is really phenomenal.

We recently switched our hosting provider to a company called Wistia, if you are doing online video, I think they are phenomenal. They do all the good SEO, the XML video sitemaps stuff for you, it is really good. And there is another really good one based here in Italy that is called ShinyStat.

 We also do a lot of research and data sharing. 

When we have questions that we wish we knew or we think the rest of the Internet world would like to know, we will spend money, time and resources doing that research and then sharing the result.

This is sort of weird, it goes against a lot of long-term business practices, because if you spend money on research you should use that as a competitive advantage.

Our competitive advantage is to share it and be the resource that everyone else uses to refer to that stuff.

For example we compared how Bing and Google rankings are different - there are different elements that coordinates the ranking on those two engines - and share this publicly on the blog and we had a lot of feedback from people inside Google and Microsoft who commented about this.

If anyone of you uses services like Compete.com, Quantcast or Alexa to try and figure out how many visits other sites have, competitive data, let me assure you that data is terrible. Absolutely horrible.

We did a bunch of work on this and we are in the process of redoing this - the preliminary works still looked horrible - Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Google Trends for Websites, whatever you want: Any of these competitive intelligence sources compared to the actual visitor data is just awful. Worst than a 0.5 correlation, which it would be the minimum acceptable in my view.

If you are going on Compete and say: "This guy has more traffic than me," that is a random guess. It is not good, but by sharing this information we have lots of people who refer back to it whenever somebody sights Compete score or Quantcast scores or Alexa data and that is great for us, because its shows tat we are thanking about the industry and try to be a step ahead.

We do a lot of sites presentations. 

The interesting thing about these is that I will speak to small audiences and then prepare a slideshow and if there are so many people in the room it sucks that only those people will get it, so I will put the presentation online and I will tell people that is online. Those people will tweet it, they will share it, email it to other people, it will get thousands of views on SlideShare.

Since SlideShare and Scribd, and a few of these other ones, they often take any resource that becomes popular on their site and feature it on the homepage, this means that I will get 10000 people looking at a presentation that I made from a seed of just a few hundred.

That is a really powerful driver, one of the big reasons that I am a big believer in creating new presentations. Virtually, every time I talk.

We also give webinars on our website.

I would not say we have had a good success with them, but we have found them to be a great customer acquisition and customer retention channel for us. That said, the business I was talking about earlier, HubSpot, their primary customer acquisition channel is a webinar.

They would essentially give a webinar on a topic like social media marketing or the science of tweets and retweets and they will have 5.000 to 10.000 people attend one of those webinars online around the country and then sign up for their services afterwards. They love it.

Duration: 10' 13"

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Some of the channels where we do distribution include:

Forums: 8.583 visits - where we get a surprising amount of traffic.

It is weird because a lot of web forums have this web 1.0 feel like: "That is so yesterday. Facebook, Twitter, Quora, whatever... that is the next generation."

Forums are fantastic for us.

If you go to Boardreader.com one of things that I will often do is search for either our name, our brand name, or our competitors brand names and I will find people, forum threads that are talking about those and I will go participate in that conversation, if it makes sense.

If somebody says: "Yeah I was using SEOmoz, I was using open sites port and I got back this result and I do not understand it." I will leave a response and sometimes they are like: "Oh my God! Did you see the CEO of SEOmoz left their..." I am just a guy, no one should be impressed by that, but they are. They will tweet about it and they will write about it and that forum thread will get a bunch of views and it will be featured, so it is this great virtuous cycle.

I pulled out most of the forum places that sent us traffic: 8,500 hundred visits set from 117 different forums - and I did this the total simple way. These are just sources that contain the word "forums", so you can tease the sound of your web analytics pretty easily.

Blogs: 9.278 visits. 

We participate in a ton of blogs. We get written up in a lot of blogs and blogs do send us a good amount of traffic, but only slightly more than forums.

I cheated again, this is probably a terrible metric, but you get the idea that I could go in and in fact I did go in and do a more sophisticated analysis of this and we do get a lot more traffic from blogs.

The thing about blogs is that we do not just get traffic from the people who write about us in the post itself. We get a lot of traffic from the comments of blog posts.

Someone for example like the Compete or the Alexa thing someone will say, "Did you see that Path is now more popular than Instagram - which are two photo sharing startups in Silicon Valley - and somebody will say, "Oh, that is BS." Then they will link over to our study showing that those figures are inaccurate and that will send a bunch of traffic to us and awareness.

Participating in those comments can bring a lot of value for us as well.

 Search obviously sends us a ton of traffic: 1.494.971 visitors.

The weird thing about search engines, although it does send us a ton of traffic and we do a good job with SEO, we only get... I think it is about 36 percent of our traffic on SEOmoz from SEO, from search engines.

The rest comes from all these other sources that we participate in. I wrote a blog post about this last night and you can see some comments in that blog post this morning that are angry, almost upset that we are not more SEO only, or that we think that there is this idea that you have to be diverse in your traffic sources.

It is my belief that search engines want to reward people who get traffic from all these other places too. They do not want to just leave to people, just rank people who have done a really good job deeming their algorithm, they want people who are naturally popular and important and that is what all these other traffic sources help provide. 

Twitter: 109.620 visitors.

Twitter has been a great tried and tale, in fact it is from us the number one traffic driver from social media, more than Facebook by almost 2x. I would be careful about that bias because we usually find it is the other way around with consumer focused companies and Twitter or LinkedIn will be the bigger one if you are business to business-focused startup.

If you have a business to business product, Twitter and LinkedIn are likely really worth the investment and certainly if you are a consumer, no matter what you are, Facebook is where a good investment is as well. I will show you our Facebook traffic.

Twitter was talking on TechCrunch on two days ago, how like the last three months they have gotten way more popular and how the earthquake in Japan shot up their popularity, the number of people who joined Twitter service - and our data reflects that.

The amount of traffic that we have been getting from Twitter over the last few months has been spiking pretty much. It is interesting to see that.

Facebook: 79.305 visits.

Our Facebook sends... also has been growing in traffic, but substantially less than Twitter and surprisingly and super weirdly the value of the traffic is substantially lower.

My sense is that people who are on Facebook will leave it briefly and then they will come back versus Twitter where it is... I go to Twitter and find cool and interesting sites and information and then I will go to them and spend time on them. So, the Facebook traffic value is very temporal.

 Email 

Email marketing has been phenomenal perhaps. Some of the biggest gains that we have seen in memberships, some of the biggest promotions that we have had have come through email marketing.

If you are a startup you need to get MailChimp, because the first 2,000 subscribers are absolutely free on the service and MailChimp is surprisingly affordable and has great deliverablility rates and fantastic analytics. I am just a huge fan of recommending them. I like their service a lot. They also have a great looking interface. I wish that.... I am little jealous, I love their interface. It is great.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has not been a place where we have invested a ton of effort and yet we still see a lot of value out of it.

It drives probably about a little less than the traffic Facebook does, but it tends to be a much higher performing.

One of the things you can do on LinkedIn is to claim your own company page.

A lot of people who join Linked In for their own personal site but they do not claim their company page and join that. I urge you to do that, because those pages pass links too and you can share all the content that you put up there.

SlideShare - I mentioned that one - it has been a good source for us.
Scribd is the same story.
Docstoc StumbleUpon weirdly sends pretty good traffic these days. 

A few years ago they had 4,000,000 regular users and today they have got 14,000,000, so they are one of those quiet growth stories.

There was a piece in Mashable about how StumbleUpon now sends more outbound traffic to other websites than Facebook does, despite having one fortieth of their users or something - 14.000.000 to 500.000.000, 600.000.000.

StumbleUpon sends pretty decent traffic for us and it is really because we have interesting content in the site that people will stumble to.

Hacker News: 30.867 visits. 

If you are in the entrepreneurship space, you have to read this site - it is a requirement. I think they do it before they will give you the startup stamp on your wrist.

This is like where Silicon Valley happens - it really does.

I probably visit three or four times a day no matter where I am, on my phone. It is obsessive, but it is a way to stay connected to what the Valley is doing even if you are not in the Valley.

I would strongly recommend reading Hacker News everyday and getting linked to Hacker News can be a fantastic way to get in front of investors, other entrepreneurs, other people in startup fields, software engineers - I cannot understand the value of the people who come through here - and it is super spiky, because inside Hacker News you have to be voted up by other users of the site in order to get listed on there.

SEOmoz every now and then have a big spike of a few thousand visits from Hacker News.

It is weird, because the first time you get a spike of traffic it will not provide nearly as much value as the second or the third or the fourth time, because those people who have seen you before and so they are branded with you...

I spoke at something at Los Angeles and a bunch of guys there were like: "Oh! SEOmoz, yeah I..." They don't care anything about SEO or Internet marketing, but they know us because they read Hacker News and so that is a great way to get on people's radar.

Quora: 2.151 visits.

Quora it is another good one for that, because it is so Silicon Valley, tech world-centric and Quora's traffic has been going insane.

I think we had a board meeting in January and Kelly and Michelle were like:"What did you do over the holidays, over Christmas, other than spend all your time on Quora?" Because that is essentially where everybody who is in technology was spending their time over December.

I answered a few questions, like a hundred questions on Quora and we get good traffic from it.

Basically I started answering questions and then... boom. We are getting serious traffic referring from Quora. I would urge you to invest there.

No matter what you are doing, whether your startup is around, you can answer questions and be perceived as an authority among a lot of these early adopters and market leaders by participating in this site.

Duration: 2' 26"

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I wrote a post called Why I Am a Conference Whore.

Mark Suster, who is a very well known venture capitalist blogger in Los Angeles. wrote a post called Be Careful not to Become a Conference Ho.

Essentially urging startups entrepreneurs not to go speak at lots of events. This was in sort of response to a lot startup founders who have been filling lately like "you have to get out of the building".

Do not just build your startup in-house, go talk to your customers, go engage with them, be out and about and participate, so you understand what people want, what they need and how they are using your product and what they like from your competitors.

I wrote a response to that and I did a little chart distribution. You can see my days at the office last year which are about 68%, my days on the road, speaking and in transit.

It seems like I am essentially more days on the road in transit than I am days on the road speaking. Last year I just used my Google Calendar to figure this out, but it is worth it.

The value you get from a one-to-one connection, from talking to other startups, other entrepreneurs and customers of yours in a personal way it just cannot be replicated over email or through a support forum, over the phone.

There is no way to build up a personal relationship that you get, or the value that you get from these in-person connections.

Let's use today. You are a startup guy and you come up to me after this session and you say: "Rand, I would liked your talk. I am planning a trip to Silicon Valley next month. Is there anyone you think I should be visiting with, I know this guy, this guy and this guy..."

If you emailed me, I might reply to that email, but probably I would not have time. If you come up to me after the session, I likely will.

I would probably make an introduction to four or five people for you, tell you where you should go, who you should meet with and what you should do while you are there. That kind of in-person connection is totally different than what happens on the Internet and it can be much more valuable. I would urge you to do that.

Duration: 4' 34"

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All the stuff we have talked about from Hacker News and Quora, SlideShare, email, Facebook, Twitter and search... everyone of these things follows the same process. That process really can be distilled into four simple steps:

I find something new that I think is interesting. Some new place where I think there can value in participating and contributing.
I test it out. I go answer some questions on Quora.
I measure it through my analytics or through our conversion data.
Then I repeat the high ROI ones and throw out the low ones.

The same process is simple to apply to anywhere you go and participate on the web or any channel or any content that you want to try. It is why I am such a huge believer in inbound marketing.

Startups can spend tons of money on customer acquisition, on awareness, on brand building through advertising, through paid search, through brand advertising - back in the '90s through television ads, SuperBowl ads - and yet if you are willing to put in the work, like get down on your hands and knees and scrape for this traffic, you can get a lot more of it for free. It takes your time, it takes your energy, but it does not cost you money.

The last thing I am going to do before I go to Q&A is talk some traffic and financial data. This is our traffic from 2011 - for the last year - and it is a little up.

Most of what we have been doing is refining our on-site marketing process, so our traffic has not been going dramatically up, but here you can see the distribution:

Search sending about 35% or so (2.757.368 users).Direct sending a ton (2.120.028 users)Our feed for our blog: 80,000 subscribers clicking on links - that has been big for us (601.919 users). Social in a big and growing chunk (451.176 users) Unmeasured stuff (1.328.762 users)

What I want to point out is our paid traffic (11.859 users). It is pathetic! It is tiny. You know what the great part about that is? It does not cost very much money to get.

The million the visits that we got in February, or the hopefully 1.1 million that we will get in January. That is kind of what I wanted to share and this is our revenue over the past four years and an estimate of this year's revenue:

2007: Less than $1 million 2008: $600.0002009: $1.2 million2010: $5.7 million2011: A little bit over $11 million - although it is possible there might be less

We definitely didn't start strong, but we have come to kind of an exciting place.

The reason I love sharing this story is because I wish so much that I had been able to do this. That I had been able to learn and talk to somebody who' would been through this before when I was starting out.

It is a painful process.

You feel lonely and alone even if there is people around you. As an entrepreneur, particularly as the CEO or the person who is responsible, you feel alone in this process - and yet you are not. There are hundreds of us, thousands of us, doing this all over the world.

I know CEOs and entrepreneurs in northeast Canada, north of Québec. I know entrepreneurs in London, in parts of China, in Australia. There is a huge startup scene that is booming in Sao Paulo, in Buenos Aires, here in Rome.

There are people and they would love to help you. If you have questions, I would certainly love to help answer them, around any topic. Around SEO, marketing stuff, entrepreneur stuff, VC kinds of things. I am happy to help out.

Video clips originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. First published on April 8th, 2011 as "Entrepreneurship: The Full Story Of SEOmoz Told By Rand Fishkin".