New Age Website Marketing

If your main goal with video is getting your company and services in front of as wide an audience as possible, or make a video “go viral” – this is the approach you should be taking.

However, be aware that virality is an inexact science. Often videos we think of as “viral”, such as Rebecca Black’s Friday or “I want to hug every single cat” do not become sensations overnight – they only go “viral” when a key influencer sets a context for wider public engagement with the content.

Hosting

Host the content with YouTube and Vimeo

Upload it to YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion and submit to any other video sharing sites you can find. Jacob Klein included a nice list of sharing sites in a recent post.

Ensure you optimise both your YouTube channel and video correctly. Check out this guide for a detailed explanation of how this should be done.

Since Google preference HD content, export your content for YouTube with the frame size 1920×1080 pixels. (You can do this even if the content wasn’t filmed in 1080p).

Ensure you submit a closed caption file with the YouTube video – this should be treated like page copy and optimised for relevant keywords accordingly.

If you have a paid Vimeo Pro account – then enable the “community pass”, which allows users to find your content when browsing videos on the main Vimeo site.

Embedding

Embed the YouTube version of the video on your site

Any views on your site will raise the total number of views for the video on YouTube.com and will help to improve the overall ranking on YouTube.com

Since Google own YouTube, they are pretty good about knowing when and where something is embedded – so there is no problem in using an iframe to embed the videos.

Get the “As Seen On” attribution for the video

YouTube provide “As Seen On” links for some videos, which link to a curated page listing all of the YouTube videos embedded on a specific site or blog. These pages pull in text from the pages themselves, so can be a great way of generating brand impressions and referring traffic.

To get the “As Seen On” attribution for your videos, ensure the video is embedded on an accessible page with rich supporting text and images. Then make sure that you’re getting a lot of views of the video on your site.

Video Sitemap

Even for YouTube videos, you should be submitting a video XML sitemap. Although Google have access to all of the metadata for YouTube videos – a sitemap allows you to provide additional information – such as defining the uploader and specifying a meta description for the content.

Content Type

If you want your content to succeed on YouTube (and any video sharing sites), then it needs to be extremely engaging. YouTube audiences are fickle and if you spend the first 10 seconds of their time on showing a branded sting, you will lose half of them.

In order to mitigate against a high bounce rate, you need to achieve emotional engagement quickly. This need is much more pressing than with a text based web page, since the way we engage with video differs dramatically from the way we interpret text. In an attempt to explain this simply, i have put my rudimentary photoshop skills to use and created a couple of informational graphics (“infographics”?)

Cognitive Engagement with Form

Example

Consider that most people who view your videos through YouTube or video sharing sites  are unlikely to have prior knowledge of your brand or marketing efforts. This means that you need to consistently work for their attention  - ensuring each creation is interesting or entertaining in it’s own right.

Don’t put overly commercial content or product videos on Youtube

People rarely go to YouTube to find commercial content and as such, the high bounce rate a video may receive will potentially hinder it’s ability to rank in Google SERPs as well as YouTube – preventing you from getting significant views and brand impressions. Unless you have an exceptionally creative and fun product video (think Old Spice guy), YouTube should only be used to share creative or educationally informative pieces.

Examples of this done successfully:

This April fools offering from Lynx is excellent because it succeeds in driving a context for social engagement from the audience: Is this a joke? Is this genuinely something that has been created? If so, how could it work? could something like this exist in the future?

But you don’t necessarily need high production value to create interesting content, as demonstrated by this simple but fun recording from Oddbins.

Equally, you can be extremely successful with dry or serious videos, providing that the creations are easy to watch and give information that is of genuine interest to an audience. The Distilled protips, which were all created in a single day, stand as an example of how this can be scaled effectively.

Everyone should be undertaking this “Video for Notoriety” approach in some measure. YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine and if you don’t have a presence on there, you’re missing a huge trick.

It’s very rare to be in a situation where you have a video that will not only aid conversions, but will also attract links and do well virally. You will need to be in the unique position of having something that sells your service, demonstrates creative and aesthetic excellence while providing a hook that will generate embeds and links.

For an example of something that hits this mark, I’m going to refer to a video that Rand showed off in his recent LinkLove presentation

If you can build something of this integrated quality, then you have basically won the internet. While it’s awesome to get a video like this, it takes exceptional creativity and investment. For most companies, it’s normally better and less risky to aim to hit different channels with different videos, rather than to put all your eggs in one basket. However, if you are Dollar Shave Club, this is what you should be doing…

Location

You need to place the content on an easily accessible page, targeting a term suitable for getting a rich snippet, keeping the video front and center of that page.

Make sure the page is nicely linked up internally, so you can spread the link equity you’re going to get.

Hosting and Embedding

The first thing you should worry about is getting the ranking and rich snippet

If your video is in the hands of others before you’ve had a chance to get that ranking and claim ownership, then you risk others being able to get results for your content.

Host a secure version on your site, following the aforementioned suggestions for getting rankings and conversions until you have got your nice rich snippet results.

Then aim for links

Put a custom iframe embed code next the video on the page, with partial anchor text for your target keywords in the attribution link i.e. a href=”http://www.dollarshaveclub.comDollar Shave Club Amazing Razorsa/

include social share buttons next to the video.

Outreach like crazy. Be willing to write some guest posts about the video which can be used to accompany the content on any blog.

Then aim for fame

When the outreach dries up, a month or two later; submit the content to YouTube, Vimeo and any other video sharing sites, but optimise everything for different keyword variations — so you don’t risk outranking yourself with your own video on the YouTube or Vimeo domains. 

Clean up the links

A few months later – find anyone who has embedded your content from your “notoriety campaign” – but are linking back to YouTube or Vimeo as a consequence, and outreach to them with the (iframe based) embed code for the secure version on your site. Explain this code is the higher quality version and that you would be extremely grateful if they would switch it over so you can get the referring link attribution. Most people are happy to do this, as after all, they’ve already linked to your content.

N.B. – the reason why you don’t normally take this two pronged “self-hosted and YouTube” approach for video linkbuilding is that by putting the content on YouTube/Vimeo – you will inevitably encourage future links and social shares to point to the these domains, rather than yours. This may be not be a problem and it can be worth sacrificing potential link equity for greater exposure; but if you’re looking to build links and shares over an extended period with evergreen content, it’s normally not appropriate.

Feature analysis

The table and points below compare the features of some of the most popular paid third party hosting solutions.

Pros and Cons

Advantages:

• Notifies you when anyone downloads your content
• Email marketing feature with Mailchimp integration
• Superb interactive heatmap analytics
• “require email to play” feature can be used to increase mail subscriptions.
• “SuperEmbed” embed builder has by far the best feature set of any of the customisable players.
• Inexpensive transcript creation service for videos

Disadvantages:

• It’s slightly cumbersome to enable domain restrictions

Anyone looking build videos purely for ranking and linkbuilding should look first at Wistia. They understand SEO and offer a superb service.

Advantages:

• iOS and Mac OS X Apps for uploading and account management
• Easy to create secure download links for users
• Simple account management interface

Disadvantages:

• Does not have an XML sitemap generation feature, though you can build something to do this with the API
• Customisable player lacks social sharing buttons

Vzaar is a robust and secure service, which allows you to easily white label the player and embed codes with your branding. The iOS app makes managing and uploading new content easily on the move and it’s simple to hook the service up to your Google Analytics in order to monitor views and engagement.

Advantages:

• Extremely good value for money compared with other services
• The customisable player has a great feature set
• Usage limited by views, rather than bandwidth; which makes it easier to calculate ROI.
• Can build free video portfolio microsites
• Loads of great support videos and tutorial content

Disadvantages:

• Does not have an XML sitemap generation feature.
• Can be easy to leave the content unsecure if you get the account settings wrong.

Vimeo Pro is my default recommendation for any businesses wanting to securely host video on a budget. You get a lot of value for that price; and aside from the lack of an XML sitemap generator, there is very little which the service doesn’t provide.

Advantages:

• Highly customisable player, with API for customising Mobile players
• Youtube Syndication (automatically upload to Youtube) – for if you’re taking the “Video for Everything” approach
• Advertising integration (so you can monetize your videos)
• Live streaming feature – for if you are running webinars or conferences

Disadvantages:

• Overpriced
• No XML sitemap generation feature, though you can build one with the API
• Not particularly user friendly for beginners

Brightcove is an enterprise solution, popular with large businesses and developers because of its wide selection of APIs, SDKs and third party extensions. Brightcove has an expansive feature set and offers a great solution for anyone using video in numerous different ways across a site.

I hope you’ve found this post useful. If you have any further questions about hosting, embedding or the wider aspects of Video SEO – please feel free to drop me an email or a tweet

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/f9LI-EJq0Nc/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

Hey party people! We are really excited to announce that the Mozzers are headed to Philadelphia. That’s right! On May 10th we’re having a meetup at the infamous SEER Search Church. You’ll get a chance to see both Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds speak (for free even) and network with other local marketers. If you’ve ever attended one of our meetups or our MozCation events in the past, you know that we’re all about actionable content, great networking and loads of fun (you know the F in TAGFEE).

This, my friends, is the Search Church.

Who: You, local search marketers Mozzers (Whee!)

What: FREE SEOmoz Meeup in Philly

When: May 10 from 4-8pm Eastern

Where: Search Church at SEER Interactive – 1028 N 3rd St Philadelphia, PA 19123

Why: Why wouldn’t you?

This time however, we’re changing things up a bit. We’re not convinced that Rand and Wil are the only ones who know their stuff. In fact, rumor is that Philly has a ton of amazing marketers. So we want to hear from you, yes YOU.

Speak at the Meetup

Yes, you totally read that right. We’re opening up the stage to local marketers! Each presentation will be no more than 8 minutes and must be full of action and win. This is your chance to show your stuff to your local community. Have an amazing link building tactic, or want to show off that tool you built? Then we want you to submit your pitch to speak.

Seriously. Do it right here (by April 11th):

Deadlines Calendar

You have until April 11th to get your speaker submissions in. That gives you one week to get on the ball. You can see the full schedule below.

Other Details

A few things to note:

1. You don’t have to be an SEOmoz member to speak or attend
2. You do obviously need to be present at the event to speak
3. Please only register if you’re able to attend. We do have a limited number of spots and we want ensure everyone who wants to attend, can.
4. GET READY FOR A NIGHT FULL OF WIN

Watch this video to see the amazing “Search Church”:

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/lB-NHhSds1s/meetup-at-the-search-church

Last week, on the very kind invitation of Dmitri Grabov, I gave a presentation in London to the Hacker News monthly meetup group. The event was sponsored and hosted by some friends at Forward, and attended by startup folks from all around the greater London area. Like my presentation in Silicon Valley, the focus was on marketing for startups.

Dmitri Forward worked together to get the event filmed and posted the video online and thus, I felt it would be great to share here. A couple caveats before watching:

• There’s not a lot of advanced, tactically focused content. This talk is geared to startup marketers and founders and probably better for mid-level managers and consulting clients than for “in-the-trenches” SEOs and marketers (who already know all this stuff).
• If you’ve already seen my presentation from the Silicon Valley HN meetup, this has quite a bit of overlap (go to ~30minutes in to see the unique material).
• I’m sharing this version, despite the crossover with some previous work (something I usually don’t do) because I think this may be the best iteration of this particular subject I’ve done to date, and one of the more efficient (the formal presentation is just under 45 minutes).
• Warning – I do use a bit of bad language. Sorry about that! Sometimes I get excited on stage.

My goal is to help more folks in the startup world become familiar with the practices of inbound marketing – content, SEO, social media, blogs, etc. These are powerful channels, but they often don’t get the respect they deserve in these spheres (which both frustrates and surprises me).

Rand Fishkin – Inbound Marketing for Startups: How to Earn Customers Without Paying from HN London on Vimeo.

Hopefully, if you find the video enjoyable and useful, you can spread it to those who need a push to invest in or believe in the great practices inbound marketers undertake.

p.s. I’ve been on the road for the last two weeks, speaking at events in Madrid, Munich, London, Boston and now San Francisco, but return to Seattle Friday and will hopefully be better about consistent posting and whiteboard Friday appearances thereafter.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/_HUcbISeKgE/startup-marketing-how-to-earn-customers-without-paying-for-them

Last week, on the very kind invitation of Dmitri Grabov, I gave a presentation in London to the Hacker News monthly meetup group. The event was sponsored and hosted by some friends at Forward, and attended by startup folks from all around the greater London area. Like my presentation in Silicon Valley, the focus was on marketing for startups.

Dmitri Forward worked together to get the event filmed and posted the video online and thus, I felt it would be great to share here. A couple caveats before watching:

• There’s not a lot of advanced, tactically focused content. This talk is geared to startup marketers and founders and probably better for mid-level managers and consulting clients than for “in-the-trenches” SEOs and marketers (who already know all this stuff).
• If you’ve already seen my presentation from the Silicon Valley HN meetup, this has quite a bit of overlap (go to ~30minutes in to see the unique material).
• I’m sharing this version, despite the crossover with some previous work (something I usually don’t do) because I think this may be the best iteration of this particular subject I’ve done to date, and one of the more efficient (the formal presentation is just under 45 minutes).
• Warning – I do use a bit of bad language. Sorry about that! Sometimes I get excited on stage.

My goal is to help more folks in the startup world become familiar with the practices of inbound marketing – content, SEO, social media, blogs, etc. These are powerful channels, but they often don’t get the respect they deserve in these spheres (which both frustrates and surprises me).

Rand Fishkin – Inbound Marketing for Startups: How to Earn Customers Without Paying from HN London on Vimeo.

Hopefully, if you find the video enjoyable and useful, you can spread it to those who need a push to invest in or believe in the great practices inbound marketers undertake.

p.s. I’ve been on the road for the last two weeks, speaking at events in Madrid, Munich, London, Boston and now San Francisco, but return to Seattle Friday and will hopefully be better about consistent posting and whiteboard Friday appearances thereafter.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/_HUcbISeKgE/startup-marketing-how-to-earn-customers-without-paying-for-them

Last night we had to delay the Linkscape index launch date yet again to April 27th as can be seen on our release schedule. This is the second time we have had to adjust the launch date this processing cycle meaning there will be almost two months between index releases. We know this has a major impact on the SEOmoz community, so we felt like we owed you all a detailed explanation.

Back in December, Rand and the Linkscape team decided to ambitiously try to grow the index to over 100 billion URLs. Such an index would increase our coverage of many of the smaller sites on the web and also help us shape the breadth-versus-depth trade off in our crawl. We’re very excited about this prospect, though the growing pains have proven to be a challenge which required us to tackle several issues all at once. In the interest of transparency, we want to fill you in on what’s been going on.

In no particular order, here’s the scoop:

• We’ve been beefing up our crawlers
• Balancing freshness against growth, and
• Wrangling ornery hardware

It is difficult (at least for me) to comprehend 100 billion of anything. We’ve been in the “big data” business for a little while now, but to deliver an index of this scale at the quality we believe you deserve, we had to revisit some of our basic assumptions. One is the total rate of pages we crawl everyday. Not only was additional hardware needed, we had to improve our strategy for “politeness”: the method by which we rate-limit ourselves to be a good web citizen, showing courtesy and empathy to our neighbors. Over the last four months, we’ve accomplished that goal and are now able to crawl well over double (and soon triple) the amount of pages per month compared to last year.

Simultaneously, we needed to improve our pipeline for turning crawl data into a final index, something we simply call “processing”. Before January, our indexes always contained data from only the prior month of crawling. Depending on the exact duration we took to process the data, it was usually somewhere between 4-7 weeks old by the time it was released. Before any crawler improvements had been realized, the amount of data that we could collect in one month was simply not enough to get us to 100 billion URLs. So, we widened the window to include all data that was crawled in the last 2-3 months. That’s why in January, we were able to launch our largest index to date at 58 billion URLs and again in February at 66 billion URLs.

In the December to January time frame, we started to see an increasing number of hard drive failures during each processing run. It turns out that spinning platter hard drives are one of the most fragile parts of a computer. Therefore seeing one or two failures each run is just a natural fact of life. To account for this, we check point every step of processing, so after such a failure, we can simply restore from S3 and continue from the last completed step. These backups are typically 100-200 terabytes large cluster wide. Historically, the restore process took no more than a day, so even if it happened 3 or 4 times in a month, we would only rarely slip our release date.

In December, that story changed. We experienced five hard drive failures and an additional machine failure, which caused us to restore from S3 a total of six times. Thus, we ended up shipping the index a few days late. In January, we again experienced five hard drive failures. Worse, several of these failures were clustered in one of the longest steps of processing. Since the index itself was growing, the restore step ballooned into multiple days each, causing us again to slip the index date. Additionally, we determined that the raw data stored on each processing machine would no longer fit within the local storage (or ephemeral storage in AWS’s parlance), if we continued to grow the index. We engaged Amazon, our infrastructure provider, to see if they could help us deal with these issues.

As we were already using the largest available amount of local storage in AWS, the only real option was to move to Elastic Block Storage (EBS). This presented two downsides: performance and cost. EBS is not truly local, thus it entails a performance hit. It also costs both for total capacity and the rate of usage (or “IOPS”). Compared to ephemeral storage which is already included in the cost of EC2, this made a huge difference in the total cost to produce our index. Coincidentally, back in January someone asked on Quora how much producing the Linkscape index cost. Moving to EBS would double the total; since, in addition to the EBS cost, we needed to move to more expensive hardware to utilize faster networking. Still, we had no other choice, so we pushed forward. Additionally, the move to the larger machines required us to upgrade the operating system and change the virtualization layer that we were using, incurring more development time, which we paid for at the start of the year.

The good news for March was that after starting the index in late February, we realized that we were very likely to exceed the 100 billion URL goal that we had initially set out to achieve. In fact, we were expecting to release a new index at the end of March that contained over 150 billion URLs and over 1.7 trillion links. With that goal in hand, we started planning out the design and style for Rand’s new facial hair, as was mentioned back in January’s blog post. Believe me, we had some good ones.

Unfortunately, even though we increased the computing power of the machines that we were using, the performance hit of moving to EBS and the huge increase in data size caused way more growth in processing time than we had initially expected. Additionally, even though moving to EBS was supposed to be a more reliable solution, we still experienced hard drive failures. Fortunately, we had also switched to a higher redundancy RAID configuration, allowing us to save time when these drives did fail.

Sadly that leaves us in the state we are today having slipped past the end of March release date with no index ready to launch. So now, Rand’s facial hair is safe, and we’ve disappointed our customers. We’re really sorry for any trouble this has caused, but we assure you that we’re trying to get things working as quickly as we can. We have be working tirelessly on several alternative solutions for increasing the computing power of our processing cluster to get a new index out as quickly as possible as well as trying to avoid this situation in following months.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/h7oaXBW6Y-Y/linkscape-index-delay-explained

Is your website hurting because of over optimization? It’s a question every SEO faces at one time or another. Over optimization penalties have been around for awhile, but Matt Cutts recently announced Google will soon crack down harder on sites that take SEO too the extremes. How do you know when you’ve gone to far? In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, we explore what happens when certain SEO techniques stop delivering value, and when you should switch your strategy to more productive activities.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. I’m an associate here at the world-famous SEOmoz, coming to you from the Death Star Studios. Have you ever seen the Death Star Studios? I’ll put a picture in the post below. Not as cool as Rand’s personal bat cave, which only five people have ever seen, but it’s still pretty cool.

Today I want to talk about over-optimization. I spend a lot of time in the SEOmoz QA. I see a lot of people asking questions which indicate that when you’re beginning your SEO, you have a tendency to maybe take the optimization a little too far. This is becoming really important today. If you’ve been doing SEO a while, you’ve seen over-optimization penalties sort of creep into the algorithm over the past couple of years. Two weeks ago Google announced, through Matt Cutts, he kind of let it slip in a conference that Google was going to start cracking down even harder on overly-optimized sites, sites that use SEO a little too much in an effort to sort of level the playing field. So this is what I want to talk about.

When you’re just getting started in SEO, and we’ve all been there, we’ve all done this in every one of our – at least once – to any website. You’re starting off, and let’s say this is your Google Analytics and this is your traffic, and you start learning SEO. You start optimizing the title tags. You fix your 404 errors, and your traffic starts increasing. Then you start getting into more nitty-gritty. You get your canonical tags just right, you decrease your overly long URLs, and after a time, your traffic instead of increasing, it starts to level off. Your ROI, your return on investment for the optimization that you’re putting in sort of tends to taper, and you’re not getting these dramatic results anymore.

When you’re just starting out, I believe there is a huge dividing line between the beginner SEO and the intermediate SEO, and that line is found right here. When you start reaching those diminishing returns on investment, the beginner SEO will just keep pounding away at it. They’ll just keep optimizing and optimizing and optimizing, and they get a little bump in their traffic or a little decrease and it fuels them like a slot machine, like they’re winning or they’re losing. They just keep playing that game without creating any new value to their website. A lot of times you hear from beginner SEOs that, “Oh, you know, I don’t want to create new content because it’s a small gardening site for my local gardener, and there’s not really much content to create, and I can’t build links because no one wants to link to my content. So I’m just going to keep playing with the title tags to try to fool the search engines into sending more traffic.”

But today with these over-optimization penalties on the way and the fact that these tactics not only are low ROI, but the penalties can make them negative ROI, that by over-optimizing, you’re actually going to see a decrease in your traffic. We’ve seen these for a while, a lot that we are familiar with and a lot that we can guess at.

One of the most common over-optimization techniques that you want to avoid obviously is keyword stuffing. There are a lot of places that you can stuff your keywords that we are familiar with, in the text of the body, in the images, in the navigation links. There are three in particular that we see that Google seems to pay a lot of attention to when done in combination, and that’s the title tag, the URL, and inbound anchor text. When all three of those are at harmony with each other on a really over-optimized basis, we tend to see a decrease in rankings. That’s just from personal experience, not scientifically based by any means. But in this example, if your title tag exactly matches your URL and you have a huge amount of inbound anchor text, say 80% of your anchor text also matches those two things, you’re probably over-optimized. You’re probably doing a little too much SEO to that site, and it does not look natural.

The other areas of over-optimization that you want to avoid are your linked profiles. We’ve particularly seen this in the past few weeks with Google cracking down on linked networks, low quality links. They announced that they are going to be devaluing more administrative links. By administrative links, we mean sites that are related to each other. So if you own a network of 50 sites and you’re interlinking all of those to each other, the value that you are getting is over-optimizing. They are going to be diminished, and you could face a penalty. If you do it too much, you could face de-indexing, like we’ve seen Google do with the linking indexes. Also, going back to the low value links, the directory links, the comment links, you want to balance link profile, because any technique that you take too far is going to be over-optimized. You’re going to get diminishing rate of returns.

Now, if you’re beginning SEO and you want to advance to the intermediate SEO, right here I urge you to make the other choice. Don’t go to the dark side. Don’t go the over-optimization route. Go with the light side. Choose new creation. If you’re beginning SEO, if you want to make this jump to intermediate SEO, the best thing you can do to get high ROI is start creating content today. Starting today, create a content calendar. If you look back in the archives of this blog, go back to like 2005, 2006, you’ll see what Rand did when he was here basically by himself.

Rand Fishkin had a content calendar that was every single day, 2005, 2006. Not all those posts are groundbreaking SEO masterpieces, but that guy wrote every single day, and he built this blog into what it is now. Now you don’t have to write every day for your content calendar, but set a schedule and stick to it, whether it be daily, weekly, or monthly. When you do that, you open up all these new areas of SEO that you haven’t been exploring when you’re over- optimizing.

The first thing you’re going to do is create all these new long-tail opportunities. So here your ability to rank is just for the same 10 pages, 100 pages, 1000 pages of your website. You’re never creating any new ranking opportunities or new long-tail opportunities. You’re not building those for yourself. With the content calendar, you’re now an intermediate SEO, you’re creating all those new opportunities every day when Google crawls those pages.

You’re also creating new freshness. I did a blog post a few months ago about freshness factors. When you add new content to your website, you’re giving Google all these freshness signals that say, “My site is still relevant. It still matters. Crawl me more, index more of my pages.” And just by having that freshness, you’ll see this line increase. That is a high ROI SEO activity. But also when you create new pages, you kind of get a double freshness benefit because you have the opportunity to link back to your old material, your old, stale, 10-page, 100-page website. By creating that new content and linking back to yourself, you’re telling Google these pages are still relevant. Yes, they’ve been on my site for 5 or 10 years and nothing has happened to them, but they are still important. I want you to crawl them. I’m linking to them now. It’s not as strong a signal as external links, but it still gives you that opportunity.

Finally, back here you weren’t creating any links because you didn’t have those link assets. Who wants to link to your sites? This gives you the opportunity to create those link assets, to build the content that people want to link to. If you’re coming into an old website, if you’re taking it over, they are your client and it’s just something that is unattractive, this gives you the opportunity to create something that people actually do want to link to. This will take you from here to here.

That’s it for today. Tell me what you think in the comments below. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Additional Resources:

• Predicting SEO Changes in Rankings, Algorithms, and Penalties
• Is Google’s “Over Optimization Penalty” Its “Jump The Shark” Moment In Web Search?
• Creating an Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/NHS9dBhwrl8/stop-optimizing-and-start-creating-whiteboard-friday

Every week, without fail, I hear someone ask where they should put their SEO budget – in on-page tactics or in link-building. Unfortunately, there are plenty of SEO companies and consultants lining up to give them the answer – and that answer just happens (“coincidentally”) to be whatever the company/consultant is good at. When you’re an expert with a hammer, you start to think you can nail anyone (wait, that’s not right).

Here’s the honest answer that no one wants to hear: “It depends”. No one wants to hear it because they’re back where they started – having no idea what to do next. Instead of leaving you stranded or trying to sell you a hammer for your box of screws, I’m going to walk you through 4 cases and explain how I’d allocate your budgets for each one.

To add to the confusion, “on-page” can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Here, I’m taking a  very broad view – it could mean keyword research, writing good TITLE tags, internal linking and crawl architecture, or even content creation. For the purposes of this post, on-page is anything you directly control in the code or content of your site.

70% On-page, 30% Link-building

The Authority is an established site with a solid, trusted link profile and usually a good base of content. In many cases, it’s a site that’s evolved “organically”, which is a fancy word for “without a plan”. The Authority could be suffering from any or all of the following:

• Keyword research is 5 years out of date
• Keywords are cannibalized across many pages
• Internal links have grown like weeds
• Site architecture doesn’t reflect business goals
• Page TITLEs overlap or are duplicated
• Old but valuable (i.e. linked-to) content is 404’ing

In many cases, no one notices, because The Authority’s strong link profile and solid content keep it ranking well. The problem is that you’re sitting on a gold mine of untapped potential. Of course, The Authority should keep building solid links, but a shift (even for a few months) to really planning and focusing on on-page issues, from keyword research on up, could produce huge dividends.

30% On-page, 70% Link-building

The Perfectionist often comes out in new webmasters. They’ve read 500 SEO blogs and are following all the “rules” as best they can, but they’ve become so obsessed with building the “perfect” site that they’ve hit the point of rapidly diminishing returns. The Perfectionist wants to know how to squeeze 0.01% more SEO value out of an already good URL by moving one keyword.

It’s time for The Perfectionist to remember the 80/20 rule – there comes a point where your on-page is good enough, at least for now. You have to get Google to your site to put that on-page magic to work, and that means building links. It’s important to develop content (which is why I’ve left on-page at 30%), but put almost every other on-page tactic to the side temporarily and spend a solid 6 months developing and implementing a link-building campaign

90% On-page, 10% Link-building

The Hot Mess is a Google engineer’s fantasy (or possibly nightmare). She’s broken every single rule of on-page SEO, which worked fine for a while, but then came “May Day” and “Panda”, and now Google is even talking about penalizing her for optimizing too much. The Hot Mess has let something spin out of control, including:

• Blocked crawl paths and bad redirects
• Massive URL-based duplication
• Excessive internal search, categories, and tags
• Aggressive ad-to-content ratio
• Extremely “thin” content
• Nonsensical site architecture and internal linking
• Keyword stuffing that would embarrass 1998

In some cases, this could be “over-optimization” and an attempt to manipulate the search engines, but in other cases the Hot Mess is just that – a mess. Whatever the cause, put down everything and start fixing the problems now. Chasing new links without fixing the mess is like having your carpets cleaned while your house is burning down.

10% On-page, 90% Link-building

Finally, there’s the Bad Boy – he’s broken every rule in the Google link-building playbook, and they’ve finally noticed. This could be a large-scale devaluation or a Capital-P Penalty, including:

• Paid links
• Link farms, networks and exchanges
• Excessive low-value links
• Aggressive anchor-text targeting

If you’ve been bad enough, you could be talking a serious ranking penalty or even de-indexation. At that point, all the on-page tweaks in the world won’t help you (I left 10% just to keep the site up and running). You have to fix the problem and address the problem links. Bare minimum, you have to stop doing what got you into trouble and show a pattern of positive link-building. You may even have to file for reconsideration. The fix can be tricky, and depends a lot on the situation, but until you fix it, the Bad Boy isn’t going anywhere.

Before I get a ton of comments, I purposely left social factors out of this post. I think the influence of social is growing and it definitely deserve your attention (and budget), but I don’t want to confuse an already complicated issue. Also, at this point, there are no major social “penalties” (small-p or Capital-P), so it’s hard to have an SEO crisis related to social – with the exception of an ORM problem. Still, social should certainly be a part of any healthy mix in 2012.

I’ll try to keep the point short and sweet – when it comes to the right mix, there is no one-sized-fits-all solution. On-page SEO and link-building are both important, but how important each one is really depends on your current strengths and weaknesses. Long-term, everyone should pursue a mix of solid on-page structure, unique content, an authoritative link profile, and substantive social presence. Diversity is the best way to future-proof your SEO – if the algo changes or you hit a snag on one pillar, at least there will still be enough left standing to keep your roof up.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/F6Y52mFuZn0/whats-better-on-page-seo-or-link-building