Posted by Danny Dover

 This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin describes the methods he recommends for outsourcing content creation. Content is extremely important for SEO and users alike so these best practices are important for those of us without the luxury of an in-house staff of copywriters.

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Rand starts this presentation by setting context with his favorite SEO diagram. You can read more about the SEO Pyramid here.

Step 1: Requirements Gathering

Decide what you are trying to accomplish. Are you doing this for sales? SEO? Engagement? Traffic? Brand awareness? Be clear and write down what you want to accomplish along with the metrics you will use to measure them.

Step 2: Locating Potential Resources

You have plenty of options for finding potential resources. You can go offshore, in-house or hire web contractors. For web contractors, you can use the traditional services like Craigslist, oDesk, Elance, Guru or tap into the world of writing communities and long tail bloggers. These last two recommendations while not as established can many times provide superior quality writing with lower budgets.

Step 3: Research Writing Quality & Voice Match

In order to do this, we highly recommend you set up a voice document (a written record of how you would like to sound in your company's written communications and promotions). Give this to the writer before getting a sample and use this as the yardstick after they submit their first sample. This will help you gauge if this person is a good fit for your organization.

Step 4: Scale, Evaluate, Track

Now that you have established a process, you need to put checks into place to make sure the writer is hitting their targets. Look back at the goals you created in the first step and use them to track and improve upon the related metrics.

Remember, from both an SEO and from a human perspective, writing is about quality over quantity. Having one great article that engages readers and earns links far outweighs 100 poorly written articles.

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Posted by randfish

As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we've been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It's terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It's also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they've earned more links and more organic search love.

In this post, I'll walk through examples of those design practices in use and describe how they can help improve your opportunity for organic search rankings and traffic.

#1 - Designing that Elicits & Conveys Emotion

A phenomenal article from Aarron Walter of Mailchimp on ThinkVitamin - Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users - deeply explores the trend of designers using their talents to imprint emotion on users. Personally, I love this practice, and professionally, I see it as incredibly valuable for SEO, too.

Rather than simply providing a user with information, these sites attempt to convey a sense of the companies, products and services they represent in a tangible way.

For McMiller's Sweets, below, the website expresses the brand's humor, whimsy and obsession with their product. I only wish I could buy online - there'd be a few boxes headed for the SEOmoz offices right now.

Box.net, an enterprise-focused software company, aims to achieve an air of simplicity and a feeling of the ease that comes from using a basic, consumer application but targeted at a business audience. Their redesign has me convinced - it's light and airy, it's up in the clouds (perhaps a double-meaning since they host in "the cloud") and it even calls out the "sexiness" of the application.

When users are emotionally invested in the websites they visit, they're more likely to:

• Link
• Share
• Contribute Content
• Participate
• Remain Loyal
• Invest in the Experience
• Browse more Pages

All of these have either first or second-order impacts on SEO in a positive way.

#2 - The Scroll-Triggered Call-to-Action

Sometimes, you don't want to overwhelm content with calls-to-action... At least, not until you're fairly certain your visitor has finished reading. That's where the brilliance of the scroll-triggered call-to-action comes in.

Browse any article on the New York Times website and you'll see this behavior in action, driving you to read the next article in the series only after you've reached the bottom of the current piece:

It's great for boosting page views, but also drives more awareness of those pieces, improving links and driving up visibility for previously less-well-publicized works. My guess is that clicks are quite high.

In the next example, the OKCupid Blog leverages precisely the same tactic:

This use case might be even more brilliant. After wrapping up a remarkable article about what statistics tell us not to do in online dating, my first instinct is to share the piece with some single friends. OKCupid's flawlessly timed, dropdown overlay synchs with this internal compulsion and makes it easy to tweet, like, stumble or buzz away.

Scrolling + triggers = more browsing, more awareness and more sharing (and I think the potential applications for SEO are far greater in quantity than just what's been shared above).

#3 - User Badges

If your users are passionate about your site and their experience or participation, why not make it easy to share?

For years, sites have been offering users the virtual incentives of points, badges and status to encourage greater participation. Andrew Follet from Concept Feedback authored a brilliant piece analyzing this precise behavior and exposing some terrific examples.

We've noticed an interesting behavior as it relates to user badges as well, and it's spurred me to whiteboard the following chart numerous times for those who have online communities considering SEO:

The lesson? Make great communities, encourage participation and reward your users with badges that will make their sites look good. It's the online equivalent of giving out high quality, well designed t-shirts - fans won't just wear them to bed; they'll actually show off your brand.

#4 - The Animated HTML Multiheader

I wrote about the multiheader a long time ago, and the evolution of design has made them tremendously more compelling and useful since then. Case-in-point, Unbounce, who has 5 different messages/features on their homepage all accessible to engines and all part of a single multiheader. I've screencaptured them elegantly "swooshing" in and out of the headline position:

The advantage is two-fold - more content on the homepage that's accessible to search engines (thanks to clever CSS/HTML usage) and everyone who links to any one version is concentrating the link juice singularly on the home page. In some cases, that could cause problems, but in others, it's a great opportunity to leverage design to focus the links you acquire where you need them most.

BTW - Speaking of Unbounce, If you have yet to read Oli Gardner's 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program, you're seriously missing out.

#5 - Sexy, Embeddable Infographics

Infographic linkbait is certainly all the rage these days, and I think it's a well-justified trend. The brilliant part is that you benefit by producing the infographic and other bloggers benefit by sharing it and attracting views, attention and links of their own. So long as the embed works seemlessly and the infographic is compelling, you're off to the link acquisition races.

Some examples I enjoyed came from Smashing Magazine, who put together this piece on programming (and the how-to behind it's creation):

And this smart contribution from Visual Economics:

As with badges, the "beauty rule" applies - the sexier your infographic (and the most interesting/useful/compelling the content), the higher adoption will be.

#6 - Designing Around Illustration (with CSS)

It used to be that I'd see a website built around illustrations and artistry and shake my head in sadness, knowing that the beauty of the UI was unlikely to be experienced by anyone except those coming via type-in. Today, with the amazing progress of CSS, sites like Carbon Made can have their design cake and eat their SEO, too.

Google's "text only" cache shows every word you can see in the screenshot - we've come a long way indeed. And, darn it if that design doesn't make me want to just climb a mountain and jump off a cliff into an octopus-filled lake below... errr.. make an online portfolio (yeah, that's the one!)

For another look, check out Ruby on Rails developers, Pioneers:

Pretty, accessible and indexable, what more could an SEO ask?

#7 - Creative Content Formats Unleashed

Sometimes, you visit a site that stands out from everything else you've seen on the web in the past. Historically, many of those sites have also been tragically obscured from search engines. Nowadays, a new breed is emerging, showing off massive creativity, brilliance in design innovation and a compelling combination of link-worthiness and search-accessibility.

A few of my favorite recent stumbles into this realm include:

Above: Grain and Gram Gentleman's Journal

Above: Sanctuary T Shop (who knew a small e-commerce shop could be this pretty?)

Above: Heart Directed (a great place to find more remarkable creative formats, though lacking the machine readable content to be an SEO example itself)

It's a great time to be on the web, thinking about SEO, design and the brilliant things that can happen when they overlap strategically. Here's to hoping that more of us who invest in organic search traffic will bolster that task with the power amazing design can bring. It's not just more links - it's greater engagement and a higher liklihood that sharing of all kinds will occur. However the search engines evolve, you can be sure this is the type of behavior they'll seek to reward.

p.s. If design inspires you, I'd recommend checking out Drawar and Six Revisions list of 10 Fresh Galleries for Inspiration

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Posted by JoannaLord

We have a lot of changes going on at SEOmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes.

You know what we realized? There sure is a lot of data. While I have always appreciated the reporting features in GA, I find that too often people take the reports at face value and fail to go deeper. It’s unfortunate since it is in those deep dives that you usually discover the data that can change your current course of action. So this post is going to tackle an approach to analytics that is often overlooked and (thanks to Google and their silly naming convention decisions) is rarely used to its fullest capacity. Get excited folks we are going to talk about benchmarking {Woohoo! Insert audience applause here}.

All of you excel spreadsheet lovers out there know plenty of ways to extract data and pinpoint specific red flags or recent successes. In fact, most people use analytics to simply analyze the current state of their account. While this is certainly a priority, it really is one dimensional. Instead of stopping there, why not go further? Why not better understand where your data was, and how you are measuring up? In fact, why not use this data to help inform your internal decisions as a company? It’s like an analytical epiphany—“using past and current data to help guide you moving forward.” Glorious.

While many of the analytics platforms out there have given us a number of ways to compare historical data to current data, we are still limited to two distinct time ranges (for the most part). It’s great to see those two ranges stack up against each other, but that still leaves a lot to be desired. Without going further you miss the "interaction" between those two distinct time ranges.

Benchmarking your data is a great way to discover more about this, often overlooked, gray area. Benchmarking simply means you set a standard at which you compare something else to. When used for data mining, it means you plot two distinct variables (time ranges, metrics, dimensions, etc.) over a period of time and then use these “benchmarks” to infer conclusions when making decisions.

You can then see  a more complete picture of your site’s momentum. In my opinion, understanding your site’s momentum is one of the most powerful metrics an analyst can calculate. If you can say with authority that you know how your site is doing and how it will likely be doing in the next week, month, few months, etc., you are in an ideal place. With data like that you can take more calculated risks.

*First, I want to throw out a disclaimer—a little over a year ago Google decided to integrate “Benchmarking” into their Visitors tab in GA. This just made things confusing in my opinion. The GA feature actually shows your site in comparison to a {very very very limited} industry pool of similarly {not really} sized sites. There is a lot wrong with the assumptions of this feature, but for our purposes here, when I say “benchmarking” I mean the act of plotting two distinct variables over time to extract insight…not the {ridiculous-I-can’t-believe-they-took-it-out-of-beta} GA feature.

The "benchmarking" feature in GA on SEOmoz

Okay now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about how you can benchmark your data to hopefully gather some insight into your site’s performance.

Know your bottom-line (and your "high-line" –yes, I just made that word up)

This is probably the most common approach to benchmarking. It’s a pretty simple way to analyze the current state of your account. You should know your extremes for every metric. For example if you are a company that sells a seasonally successful product, you should know what your lowest conversion rate is for the year, as well as your peak conversion performance. In understanding the extremes you can make better assumptions on how your off season stats are trending. While not the most accurate approach to data mining, benchmarking the extremes of your account enables you to speak intelligently, at any given moment, on how your site is currently performing.

Know your ratios & relationships

Am I the only one that always reads “ratio” as “radio”? I digress. Knowing your metric ratios and how they relate to each other, is a great way to quickly detect when things are headed south. Often, as analysts, we don’t realize something has gone wrong until we see sales are down. While that is an effective method of pinpointing mistakes, it certainly isn’t ideal. Wouldn’t it be nice to quickly identify issues as they actually become issues? Crazy, I know. Well this is exactly what benchmarking the ratios of your site’s metrics can do. At SEOmoz, we use ratio/relationship benchmarking to keep our traffic stats in check. We don’t just plot out how many visitors each section of the site brings in out of the total visitors; we compare those percentages against each other. This gives us a ballpark value to guide us. An example; “the X part of the site brings in roughly twice as much as Y, which brings in about 1/3 of the traffic as Z.”

The great part about this method of benchmarking is you can easily turn it into a visual representation of the different pieces of the pie, and isolate out when things start to shift. Below is an actual example Rand pulled together earlier this week (yes he does that sort of thing for fun! A true data-head!). In this chart we have graphed out the top trafficked pages on our site, and then plotted them against each other to show how they are performing in relation to each other.

Also see a larger, detailed version

You can see the significant drop in the blue segment (our Tools page), which was due to a redirect mistake we made (oops...Rand talks more about that here). By visually representing these sections, we can easily identify shifts in the relationships, which can guide us on where we should focus our attentions (aka fix our silly SEO mistake ASAP!).

Know the norm

Okay I know, I know…I talked a whole lot of trash above on the GA benchmarking feature, and here I am talking about “knowing the norm,” but approaching data analysis this way can be insightful. Knowing and using industry standards in benchmarking can efficiently identify low hanging fruit.

However, the actual GA benchmarking tab is a poor example of this. Keep in mind that sites have to opt into the benchmarking, so (a.) this feature might not even have your industry represented and (b.) you have no way of knowing how many sites these “standards” are calculated on. Also keep in mind there are only three buckets for website “size” in this feature—small, medium, and large. WTF right? Yeah, since when do all websites fit into those three sizes? What am I ordering a latte over here?

With that said, it’s worth knowing the vital metric standards for your industry. If you see that similar sites to your own have a bounce rate of around 40% and you are chilling around 65%, while all the other metrics look closer in range, then you can assume this metric is where you should direct your optimization efforts. This approach isn’t as scalable or as accurate as other benchmarking methods, but it’s definitely worth a mention, if only for peace of mind.

Know the limits

While benchmarking is incredibly effective for things like trending, projecting, and exploring the data, it’s important to know the limits of the process. It is meant to be a discovery process, not a scientific formula. Just like anything else you take away from the data, it is just an insight, not a guarantee. You are making assumptions based on past performances, and performances change. So one word of caution to all of you data-heads out there—benchmarking is a great tool to add to your bag of tricks, but it is only one of many you should be using. Don’t get so caught up in forming relationships between the metrics and dimensions of your site that you lose perspective on the independent variables themselves.

In conclusion

Get in there. I mean it, seriously. I know we are all crazy busy, but that shouldn’t translate into a two minute GA log-in, a quick glance at the vital metrics and a few automated reports. Our analytics are meant to be explored. Benchmarking is one of those processes that may take an extra hour or two, but discoveries made during those few hours can be instrumental in guiding your company’s decisions.

Confession: At SEOmoz we haven’t always been the best with analytics and tracking, but in the past half a year we have refocused our energies on truly knowing what our users are doing, how our site is performing, and finding opportunities within the data. It’s time consuming, and tricky, and what you discover is not always fun to find out, but it has certainly helped us redirect resources where they are needed.

Over the next few months we are rolling out all sorts of good stuff, {the Chrome toolbar launch was just a teaser my friends }. We are using processes like benchmarking to better prepare us for these changes. Taking on new challenges as a company is an awesome thing, but doing it with a little data to steer you, makes the ride even more fun.

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Posted by Danny Dover

Well folks, this may be the biggest tool introduction since Ryan Seacrest started hosting American Idol. ;-) Today we are launching our SEO toolbar for Google's Chrome browser. This sexy beast is full to the brim with SEO insight and time-saving SEO goodness. This free add-on is ripe for picking and available for download right this second.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Whether it's from Twitter, Facebook, email or comments here on the blog, almost every day we get some sort of request for a Chrome Toolbar. We knew there was a high need for it, and wanted to make sure that we didn't rush and put together something unmozworthy. The new toolbar is pretty baller if I do say so myself (which I just did). It works very similarly to a toolbar in Firefox where it displays across the top of the screen, but with the ability to easily drop it down to the bottom of the page as well.

The new Chrome toolbar has most of the same features as the Firefox edition, but if you want to learn more... please keep reading. :)

So How Does This Help Me?

1. Search Results Overlay

This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.

"I get the best 'feel' for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I'm familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." --Will Critchlow

2. Quickly find important SEO information with the Analyze Page Overlay

Our analyze page overlay provides quick access to useful data points which include:

• On-page Optimization Elements – All of the essential SEO on-page elements (title tag, meta description, meta robots, rel canonical) are in one place.
• Location Data – As local search becomes more important, the value of information like server location increase.
• Google cache – Want to see exactly what Google saw when it's bot crawled a given site. The link to Google's cache will get you there.

"The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it's using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using 'view source' and searching through code; overlay FTW!" --Rand Fishkin

3. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties

The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain information.

What if I find a bug?

Reporting Bugs

The best way to report bugs is to e-mail us at customerservice(at symbol)seomoz.org. This is the quickest way to get into our development queue.

Known Issues

1. The toolbar overlays some of the page content. We attempted to inject the CSS into the page and push down the page content, but this ended up breaking some useful sites (like Twitter) so we overlay the page instead , but do now offer the ability to display the toolbar at the bottom of the page, which should hopefully help, when you've just got to see the Facebook nav. :)

2. Because of the way the toolbar is rendered as part of the page, it only shows up when the page loads, so if the toolbar is turned on while other windows already have loaded content, you will need to click refresh to see the toolbar. Unfortunately, this is also the case when you open a new chrome window, since chrome shows cached content on open to appear faster.

We hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to post feedback in the comments below.

Not yet a Chrome fan? Still plugging away in good ol' Firefox? Well we haven't forgotten about you! You were our first love, and can still be downloaded here.

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Posted by Oli Gardner

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

As with that other program, the first and most critical step is admitting you actually have a problem. So go ahead. Shout it out loud so your coworkers can hear: 

“My name is Earl. My conversion rate sucks, and I can't stop sending expensive PPC traffic to my homepage.”

Feel better? You should.

You just passed the “unofficial” first test of landing page rehab, and now you’re ready to take 12 little steps that’ll lift you from that river in Egypt (denial?!?) to a higher place on the conversion charts. This is the intervention your landing pages have been crying out for, so take a deep breath... and let’s get started.

Study the 12-step infographic to see where each step in the program should be applied to the conversion funnel.

(Click to image view full size)

View Full size version  |  Download a poster sized version (24"x13")

MEASURING YOUR PROGRESS - THE CONVERSION SCORECARD

Before we begin, we need a quick breathalyzer test to get some baseline metrics in place and measure how effective your treatment program is. The conversion scorecard can be used whether you’re using a standalone landing page for your marketing campaigns or sending traffic directly to a page on your website (homepage, shopping cart or registration page) - although it is geared slightly more towards the standalone variety.

(Click to view or print the full size graphic with the complete set of 20 questions on it.)

Scoring your page
Answer each of the 20 questions as honestly as you can and tally the number of “Yes” responses to arrive at your score. The goal is simply to get a ballpark sense of how good your page is. Then take all of the “No” responses and create a “To Do List” of things to improve on your page. You’ll find some guidance and tips for making these improvements as you follow the 12-step program below.

Remember that after you leave the rehab clinic and have made some positive changes to your conversion funnel, you should revisit the scorecard to measure your improvements.

View and print out the full sized Conversion Scorecard

STARTING THE 12-STEP PROGRAM


STEP 1 - Use a Separate Landing Page for each Inbound Traffic Source  

The principles of inbound marketing are founded on facilitating multiple streams of traffic. Examples include PPC, email, banner ads and social media. There are two key reasons why you should be using a separate landing page for each source:

• Each inbound medium has it’s only unique style and limitations. Using separate pages allows you to sync up the visual and tonal qualities  with the source. Email for instance can contain a lot more information that a tweet, so the amount of extra information your landing page needs to communicate is inherently different. Imagine also that one of your inbound streams suddenly requires a different offer (perhaps a 20% discount for an affiliate) - with only one page you would have to show this change to all inbound sources.
• With measurement comes accountability. With separate funnel flows, you can measure the effectiveness of each inbound stream and focus your efforts on the one(s) that convert the best.

Doctors Orders: Start thinking of each inbound source as it’s own mini campaign. You want to have multiple rivers bringing boats to your port (rather than many tributaries feeding one river). Print out the ads for each inbound source (PPC, email, banners, social media) and spend time observing their differences - size, tone, language and visual weight. This will help you design appropriate landing pages.   

STEP 2 - A/B Test Your Landing Pages

A/B testing is the process of splitting your traffic between a series of pages to see which performs the best. Anne Holland’s WhichTestWon.com is a fun site that shows examples of A/B tests and lets you pick which version you think would produce the highest conversion rate.

On a corporate level, testing helps to remove conjecture and subjective argument from the boardroom and is a great way of understanding your customers (which messaging and design do they respond to best). It should be done as an iterative process - think evolution vs. revolution.

FACT: Your landing page can always be better. Just like a plant, it needs ongoing attention for best results.

Some online tools/services for testing:

• Unbounce (landing page platform including self serve A/B) - disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Unbounce
• Liveball (A/B & Multivariate)
• Google Website Optimizer (A/B & Multivariate)
• Visual Website Optimizer (A/B & Multivariate)

Doctors Orders: Take the plunge and get a tool set up so you are at least able to start testing your landing pages. Then the fun part of trying new ideas and experimenting can come.

STEP 3 - Match Your Landing Page Message to the Upstream Ad

If the primary headline of your landing page doesn’t match the copy on your ad you’ll be getting a lot of action on your browser’s back button. As an example, consider the following:

Bad message match
Ad: Get 20% off a MacBook Pro
Landing page message: Welcome to Bobby’s Computer Store
  
Good message match
Ad: Get 20% off a MacBook Pro
Landing page message: Get 20% off a Macbook Pro at Bobby’s Computer Store

Seems obvious right? The problem is that most inbound traffic gets sent to company homepages where the messaging is necessarily generic. Using a targeted standalone landing page is key to reinforcing the customer’s belief that they made a “good click”. You will also get a better quality score and thus a lower cost-per-click from Google AdWords if your message match is strong (this extends to the entire content on the page which should be congruent with the headline message).

Bonus tip: If you are driving social media traffic, you can enhance the “social message match” by including an appropriate social icon on your landing page to further reinforce the connection between the source and destination.

Doctors Orders: Learning to construct your campaigns in the right order can help you ensure good message match. Start with a concept based on communicating your product/service/offer to your target market. Come up with your promotional headline and landing page content, then work on a series of ads that closely match the headline. If you do it the other way round (ad first), you are forced into building from what might be the wrong foundation. 

STEP 4 - Context of Use
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A better picture is one where your product or service is shown being used in context. Salespeople will tell you to sell the fire, not the fire extinguisher - the point being that you need to illustrate the need in order to develop desire for the solution.

Effective landing pages use photography and video to provide evidence of how your product or service solves a real problem.

A statement like “Our vacuum cleaner is so powerful it can suck up a bag of nails” beside a stock photo of the product against a white background is far less likely to convert than a video showing (and letting you hear) the vacuum cleaner actually doing the job. An example using photography could show a fold-up ladder in two states. Being tucked into a small cupboard by it’s owner, and then extended to show the owner reaching onto high shelves to retrieve something. Simply showing it in it’s intended context of use will improve your sales. 

Would you really have bought a ShamWow without seeing it in action?

Doctors Orders: Take your product or service and actually use it for real (you’d be surprised how many people haven’t even used the item they’re selling). This will help you to understand and visualize how it should be presented in your photography and videos. If it's an online tool, try observing someone else using it.

STEP 5 - Use Videos to Increase Engagement & Conversions

According to a study by eyeviewdigital.com, the use of video can increase your conversions rates by as much as 80%. By providing users with a passive engagement mechanism you can keep them on your page longer allowing your brand message to seep into their subconscious.

Warning: don’t just throw up a poorly animated Powerpoint presentation - nobody will watch it.

If you are peddling a physical product, show people using it as mentioned in step 4. If it’s an online tool, provide a demo of the primary features while narrating the benefits of it’s use (don’t show every step, make it a highlight reel). If you offer a service, put yourself front and center and communicate directly with your viewers. Make eye contact for maximum engagement and make use of directional cues to guide them to your intended conversion goal. Great videos do this by having the host look and point outside the frame towards other elements on the page - bringing the whole page into the experience.

Usability best practices say to never auto play a video as the audio shock can make people hit the back button immediately, especially if they are in a sound sensitive environment - like most offices. However, this is something you should test on your visitors. My advice if you want to start the video automatically would be to at least allow a shot delay before it starts, and make the controls very obvious in case someone wants to mute or pause the video.

(This is a decent example of a nice pause and transition into video - http://raw.glow.com/dms1825/ - warning: the alerts when you try to leave the page aren’t so nice).

Doctors Orders:  If you don’t use video yet, plan to start soon. For online product demos, try recording a screencast using software like Jing. It’s really simple and cost effective. Once you get a feel for it you can upgrade to more elaborate tools with stronger editing and post-production features. Audio is very important - write a script before you record so you’re not bumbling your way through and try to use an external mic for better quality. 

STEP 6 - Use Directional Cues to Lead the Way

Imagine an airport without the expertly placed wayfinding signs and maps - it would be chaos. If you’ve visited the emergency room at a hospital, you might be familiar with the colored lines they paint on the floor to take you to different departments - follow the yellow brick road. These are examples of directional cues, which can be broken down into explicit and implicit (both of those were explicit).

Directional cues are used on landing pages to guide the visitor to your call to action. Here are some examples of ways to do this:

• Graphical arrows: Take a look at the header area of the lead gen form on this landing page template. When you add a lead gen form to your page, the call to action button is often pushed below the fold. Here, the arrow lets you know that the point of interaction can be found directly below that area.
• Whitespace: Don’t cramp the style of your CTA. Resist the temptation to fill in every pixel of your page, instead give your buttons plenty of room to breathe.
• Color: Classic colors for buttons include blue (link color) and orange. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that it stands out clearly from the rest of the page (e.g. don’t make your button blue if your page has a blue background).
• Contrast: This is essentially the same as the point about color (but thinking in terms of black and white or tonal range).
• Eye direction: It’s been shown that when using photos of people (or animals), that you can improve conversion by having them look at your intended call to action. It makes sense. If you see someone looking up at the sky while you’re walking down the street, the chances are you’ll follow their gaze in case you’re missing something important.
• Interruption: Surprise is an excellent way to get someone’s attention. Breaking established design boundaries gives reason to pause and observe. Boo!
• Encapsulation: Think of binoculars or the viewfinder on a camera and how they focus your vision. You can construct similar experiences using shapes and contrast. Think about archways, holes and windows for inspiration.
• Pathways: Roads or the earlier example from the hospital floor are examples of pathways. You can use background design elements (lines with arrows generally) to walk someone round your page in the order you prefer.

For a more exhaustive study of the effects of directional cues, I wrote a post that uses photography to illustrate each of the methods above: Designing for Conversion – 8 Visual Design Techniques to Focus Attention on Your Landing Pages.

Doctors Orders: Learn to point. It might be considered rude in some cultures, but in conversionland it’s actively encouraged. Make the intended action of your page as obvious as possible - subtlety is for shy folks. Add at least one directional cue to an existing landing page. If your design is quite restrictive, you can try breaking the visual boundaries by placing an arrow outside of the page edge, pointing in towards your CTA - this disruptive visual tactic can be very effective at directing eyeballs.

STEP 7 - Find the Optimal Balance of Data vs. Conversion Rate

Lead generation is about two things - the size of the barrier (how long, personal or complicated the form is) and the size of the prize (what you are giving away in return for the data). If these are out of proportion you risk losing customers.

It’s a delicate balance to achieve: make the form too long and people walk away from the perceived effort, make the questions off-topic or too personal and you wind up with false data. Conversely, if the form is too short you can skew your leads towards those just seeking a freebie instead of real, determined and relevant customers. It can also result in you not being able to qualify your leads accurately.

The other factor that complicates all of this is the giveaway you are offering. If your eBook, coupon or webinar isn’t good enough to warrant the information you are asking for folks will bounce. For a webinar registration keep the info to a bare minimum - name, email and maybe company and role if it’s B2B. If you’re giving away an eBook, it needs to be one of two things: significant in size or significant in it's exclusive data content. Above all, quality is what counts. You can tease people into completing your form to get your super awesome whitepaper, but if it turns out to be smoke and mirrors, you’ll have a lead that’s disappointed and likely to unsubscribe immediately.   

Doctors Orders: This is where A/B testing becomes really useful. Set up multiple versions of your form and test them to find where the balance lies. Is it acceptable to remove a few questions in order to get more leads? Does your conversion rate even get affected by the addition of extra questions. Only testing with your target audience can answer these questions.

STEP 8 - Be Honest About Your Writing & Edit Ruthlessly

Never publish the first thing you write. Unless you are in the business of reportage poetry (I may have just made that name up). Campaigns and their associated messaging need to be refined over time through testing but also through editing. Steve Krug (author of the classic usability book “Don’t Make Me Think”) made the best observation on the subject I’ve heard: delete 50% of your page content, then throw away half of what’s left.

Doctors Orders: Try removing 2 sentences from the main body of copy on your landing page. I bet it won’t hurt as much as you think. If you have 5 bullet points, try going with the 3 most important ones. Keep deleting extraneous words and redundant phrases until your copy is as tight as a Scotsman being asked to pay a bar tab. Like everything you change on your pages, you should make your edits on a duplicate page and run an A/B test to verify if it produces higher conversions.

STEP 9 - Make it Easy to Share

The impulse to share content can be fleeting, so don’t make people work for it. While not applicable to all landing pages, those with special offers or special content (perhaps a great video) - should have a simple way for people to spread the word for you.

There are two great ways to make this work:

1. Use Twitter @Anywhere to add widgets that allow people to tweet your offer. Make it part of the contest rules that they follow you and tweet your message in exchange for entry into the contest (free marketing).
2. Place sharing widgets such as retweet buttons on your confirmation pages (see step 12 for more on this)

Doctors Orders: Design for your audience. If you’re driving Twitter traffic, retweet buttons are familiar and easy to use. The beauty of Twitter @Anywhere components is that they utilize Ajax style interaction and don’t take you away from the page. Similarly if you are funneling Facebook traffic, add a “Like” button to the page. Most Facebook’ers are logged in all the time and the button will add your landing page into their timeline with a single click. 

STEP 10 - Leverage Social Proof & Trust Devices

Testimonials work, if they’re real. Avoid stock photos and scripted hyperbole as most people can spot a fake testimonial a mile away. Try a mixture of testimonials that describe how your product or service has benefited someone’s experience, coupled with the enthusiastic style that say “you guys rule!”. I’d only use the latter from a well known industry expert or celebrity.

To modernize your landing pages, illustrate social proof by showing your standing in a relevant social network. There are many widgets available that can show how many people like or follow you. Social capital and the herd mentality of network participants can help convince prospects to become customers.

Doctors Orders: Ask 10 of your customers for a fresh testimonial and add the best to your landing page. Remember to state your usage intentions and ask for a photo if possible. If you have a decent social network presence, try adding a live feed widget based on a specific phrase or #hashtag search to show who and how people are interacting with your brand.

STEP 11 - One Page, One Purpose

Imagine a web page that exhibits the same tendencies as a kid with ADD. If your content can’t decide on one thing to do at a time, then your visitors certainly won’t want to take the time to figure it out.

The principal of congruence states that each element on your page should support a single focused objective. A good way of looking at this is to imagine a series of arrows all pointing to the center of a circle where there is a big button (your CTA). Each arrow represents a piece of content on your landing page, and you need to ensure that they are all in conceptual alignment.

Contrast this to those same arrows all pointing in different directions (conceptually).

To maintain focus, don’t talk about other products or services - you can use a different landing page and ad source for those. An exception to this is on an ecommerce product page that provides the ability to add extra products to the cart as add-add-on's to your main conversion goal.

Doctors Orders: Try this exercise. Explain the purpose of your campaign to a colleague. Now read the content of your landing page out loud and ask her to stop you if you veer away from the central purpose as previously stated. If this happens, remove the offending content and start over. You will notice a lot more about your writing style by saying it out loud. For visual elements, try writing the goal of your campaign on a piece of paper, then print and cut out the images from your landing page and place them around the goal. Remove or replace any that don’t seem to be in total agreement with this goal.

STEP 12 - Post-Conversion Marketing

Post-conversion marketing is one of the most overlooked stages of the conversion funnel. The confirmation page from your lead gen form, ecommerce checkout, or registration form is the perfect place to start capitalizing on the positive mood of a newly qualified customer.

In the case of lead gen, you achieved the conversion goal of your lead gen page and you are probably going to start sending your new lead a series of email messages to encourage them to step up to the next level. Note that it can take up to 6 or 7 contact incidents to make this happen (according to email provider Constant Contact).

To increase your engagement potential, try to add your leads to other channels in your sphere of marketing influence (from your confirmation page). This amplifies the reach of your messages and can be the difference between being heard and being forgotten.

Some common examples include:

• Follow us on Twitter (so they see regular updates)
• Like us on Facebook (so they see updates and become part of your community)
• Download our free eBook (to keep your brand in front of them and increase your “thought leadership” score
• Visit this page (send them to other content they may find interesting)
• Share this with your friends/colleagues (leverage their network)
• Bookmark us on Delicious

Doctors Orders: Go beyond a simple “Thank you” on your confirmation pages. Start by adding one new link to the page and track how much extra traffic visits that target. 

WHAT NOW?

Now you have the tools and advice to break those bad conversion habits and rehabilitate your struggling marketing funnel. Did you do the scorecard exercise? Are you on the epic end of the scale or the “I did like, 19 things wrong!” end of the scale? The scorecard is there to provide you with a "to do list" of conversion improvements. Take every question you answered No to and create a personal task to fix it. Then implement a new A/B test to see how well your new landing page fares.

SHARE YOUR PAGE & SCORECARD SCORE
Show me your landing page and score and see if I agree with your assessment (I’ll run through the checklist too).

Good luck with your rehab, and remember, your landing page can always be better.

Oli

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Posted by RobOusbey

At a small or medium sized company, you might be part of a very small team with responsibility for SEO, or you may the only person - and it might not even be your full time job.

Sales

Example:

RobTech's sales funnel typical begins with the visitor filling in an enquiry form on the website, then having an online product demo with a member of the sales team. After the demo, people either buy the software, turn it down because they don't like it, or turn it down saying that they like it but can't buy it right now (often because of the cost.)

Conference Speakers

Example:

RobTech's Product Director speaks at five or six conferences each year. He sees many people finish their presentations with a website URL, and maybe even a link to download the slide deck. Instead, he makes sure that all RobTech's presentations are made available with extras. A page on their site contains the slide deck, high quality versions of the images used, full data sources for charts and tables shown, and links to each of the other RobTech resources and white-papers mentioned in the presentation.

Public Relations

Example:

Copywriting

Example:

The girl who manages the knowledge base for RobTech (basically a very dry list of error messages and how to resolve them) came up with the idea of 'The Top Six Moments of Dr Nick Riviera', which was simply ten embedded YouTube videos, but got to number one on Reddit, and received a lot of links. The guy who writes technical descriptions for the website wrote a short page about "Ten things you don't want to hear your dentist say (while he's peering into your mouth.)" which was well received by bloggers and got a few good links.

Personnel / Human Resources

Example:

RobTech have updated the standard template for their job adverts; alongside the request to email your CV and cover letter to the HR Director, they also say 'find out more about the company and what's it's like to work here on our recruitment page.' A fair number of these links are nofollow-ed, but a good number do pass value - and this change came from just a 15 minute conversation with two people who'd never heard of SEO before, so the ROI here was technically awesome.

Procurement

Example:

Designers & Creatives

Example:

After the new website had launched, RobTech's designer had a few days free. She took some of the rejected designs that weren't used for the site, had a developer turn then into HTML files, and offered them up as free downloads. The page has received a significant number of links from free CSS template sites; they've since added a collection of free vector images which did very well on DesignFloat.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Example:

RobTech gives an annual donation to local dog shelter (the CEO is an archetypal 'dog person') - and the shelter now has a badge in their sidebar, thanking the company for their donation. Even more successful has been the 'technology recycling' drive the company runs one weekend each year. This year they put up a page on the site about the event, which received links from a variety of local sites, including the mayor's website.

Summary

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Posted by randfish

Today, instead of playing in the uber-rare Seattle sunshine, I spent the day polishing off the PRO Training seminar schedule and it looks amazing. I'm excited to see these sessions myself (and I rarely sit through presentations). Check it out for yourself below; if you're inclined and available, we'd love to see you.

Oh, and don't worry, I'm not cruelly sharing when we've already sold out. We still do have some seats left. Dates are Monday & Tuesday August 30th + 31st with the tools training half day Wednesday, September 1st. However, I would strongly urge you to register soon, as we've sold out by early August in each of the past 4 years.

Top 5 Ways Our PRO Seminar is Different

1. "Tips" Focused Content
   Many sessions that I attend have discussions and opinions as featured content. Although I think that can be great, our focus is 100% on providing value you can apply back to your sites + campaigns immediately. I've talked to every speaker and reviewed every outline - the sessions at our seminar are exclusively focused on making you smarter, faster and better at your job.
2. Single-Track, Deep Dives by Only the Best Speakers
   Rather than panels of 2, 3, 4 or more speakers on an hourlong session, we have only a few sessions each day, enabling us to pick only the most talented, compelling speakers for our event. You can't pitch to speak at SEOmoz - it's by invitation only and those invites come because we've seen you speak many times and been seriously impressed. There are only 14 speakers in total at the event and every one is an oustanding presenter - we know because we've watched them.
3. The Same Incentives for all Participants
   At many events, the real revenue comes from sales of booths, promotional materials or sponsored sessions. SEOmoz has none of these. Our primary goal with the PRO Training isn't to make money (being fully TAGFEE; this year, we anticipate the seminar to generate less than 4% of our gross with relatively slim margins), but to spread knowledge of SEO in a deep, meaningful way and meet many of our community members in person. We also pay for our speakers' transportation and hotels so they don't have the burden of selling to recoup travel costs.
4. Less than 1/2 the Price of Other Events
   With a PRO membership, the event costs just $649. Add in a hotel for 2 nights and a flight from most US locations and it's still less than a single ticket to many of the larger conferences (e.g. the on-site price for Web 2.0 NYC or SES SF is $1,995).
5. No Vendors, Pitches, Booths or Sales
   There's no expo hall, no sponsors, no SWAG in a bag, no salespeople seeking to close a deal at lunch, nada. This event is about learning from experts, networking with peers and coming home with phenomenal, actionable information.

The Full PRO Training Schedule

Monday, August 30th

• 9:00am - 9:45am: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP
  • The expansion of new results types in the search result pages has SEOs asking if traditional rankings are dead. They're not, but there are a whole lot more opportunities to get SEO traffic. In this session, Rand Fishkin explores the world of real-time, social, news, images, video & expanded listing results with specific recommendations for how to get included, stand out and win clicks.
• 9:45am - 10:30am: How to Win Rankings and Influence Competitive Local/Maps Results
  • As Google Maps and the 3/7/10-pack results have become more competitive, SEOs have been thinking less about the question "what are the local ranking factors?" and more about "how do I get maximum visibility in local results?" David Mihm explores the answers with specifics about how to draw eyeballs and clicks from the maps listings.
• 10:30am - 10:45am: Morning Break
• 10:45am - 11:45am: The Science of Twitter Success
  • What makes some Twitter updates spread across the web while other languish in obscurity? Hubspot's Dan Zarrella examines the science of tweets, retweets and clicks and provides specific, actionable tactics for how to improve the results marketers derive from promotion of their content on Twitter.
• 11:45am - 12:30pm: Presentation Off: How to Pitch SEO
  • Distilled's esteemed director, Will Critchlow, has never lost against Rand, but they've also never faced off in the US. Watch Rand and Will on SEOmoz's home turf as they break down how to pitch SEO internally to your team/managers or externally, to a potential client. Specific strategies of how to win the battle for marketing dollars will rule the day. Voting to be determined by a show of hands immediately following the presentations.
• 12:30pm - 1:30pm: Lunch
• 1:30pm - 2:00pm: Earning Direct ROI on Social Media
  • Social media tends to send traffic that clicks once, visits fast and leaves without much engagement. Yet, we know that over time, these branding touchpoints and positive references can lead to awareness, influence and, ultimately, conversion. In this session, SEOmoz's community manager, Jen Lopez, shows real life examples of how social media can lead directly to conversions. She'll also cover how to track clicks to and conversations about your site/brand that happen across the web and map these to the metrics that predict web success.
• 2:00pm - 2:45pm: Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO
  • Large sites frequently struggle against indexation, navigation and organization issues. In this session, Marshall Simmonds, chief search strategist for the NYTimes, About.com, and many other large content-based sites will present solutions for effectively analyzing the problems inherent with large sites, identifying solutions and implementation. Specific topics include controlling faceted navigation, creating index-worthy category and sub-category pages as well as XML sitemap & internal link optimization.
• 2:45pm - 3:00pm: Afternoon Break
• 3:00pm - 4:00pm: Uncovering a Hidden Technique for SEO
  • You're familiar with optimizing for a keyword by placing it on a page and acquiring anchor-text targeted links, but this session goes in a completely different direction. We'll be pulling back the curtain on a new way to rank higher, and a process to do it! Led by Ben Hendrickson, SEOmoz's Senior Scientist, this session will go heads down in the math and science of how search engines crawl, index and rank web pages.
• 4:00pm - 4:30pm: Constructing Effective SEO Audits
  • As the director of consulting at SEOmoz, Lindsay built dozens of audits for clients like Microsoft, Etsy, SimplyHired and more. In this presentation, she'll share her methodology for delivering a site audit that clients and managers will appreciate and actually use!
• 4:30pm - 5:30pm: Conversion Rate Optimization
  • One of the web's foremost experts in conversion rate optimization, Tim Ash will be sharing case studies and specific tips for how to make more of the visitors who click into customers.

Tuesday, August 31st

• 9:00am - 9:45am: 10 Sites the Earned Amazing Links: How they Did It & What we Can Learn
  • Sometimes, the best way to learn is through direct observation. In this session, Rand will walk through 10 sites that achieved top rankings through remarkable link acquisition strategies. He'll explore not just where they earned links, but why those links were created and what other SEOs can take away from the success stories.
• 9:45am - 10:30am: Reverse Engineering Your Competitors' Rankings
  • Why does that page rank above yours? Until you know the answer, you're optimizing in the dark and potentially wasting massive amounts of time, energy and resources on metrics that won't move the needle. In this session, Wil Reynolds, head of digital agency Thinkseer, walks through their process for strategically de-constructing the search results, determining the keys to ranking and executing on those metrics.
• 10:30am - 10:45am: Morning Break
• 10:45am - 11:30am: Manual Link Building: That's Right; It Still Works
  • Picking up links one-by-one may not be highly scalable nor incredibly fun work, but it does work. In this session, Distilled Consulting head of US operations, Rob Ousbey, walks through the power and process of manual link building. If you're ready to put your shoulder to the grindstone, you can have a serious impact on your business with these tactics.
• 11:30am - 11:50am: Top 10 Tips for Community Building
  • The power of user-generated-content and user engagement to build up a site's reach, branding and SEO is phenomenal. SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin walks through his top tactics for attracting an engaged audience.
• 11:50am - 12:10pm: Top 10 Tips for Blogging
  • Blogs are still one of the most powerful ways to build content, draw in links, grow your branding & attract new customers. Ian Lurie, founder of Portent Interactive and Conversation Marketing has a list of unbeatable tips to maximize the value you get from blogging.
• 12:10pm - 12:30pm:Top 10 Tips for Paid Search Optimization
  • Paid search will draw in $25 billion dollars in the US alone this year - a lot of that won't make much of an ROI. Joanna Lord wants to make sure that doesn't happen to you. Join her as she walks through 10 amazing tips to get high value out of paid search without spending a fortune.
• 12:30pm - 1:15pm: Lunch
• 1:15pm - 2:00pm: Designing Your SEO Strategy
  • Formerly the head of technical marketing at Yahoo!, Laura Lippay's responsibility included managing SEO across dozens of the web's most visited sites. In this session, she shares her process from years of experience and her popular blog series on SEOmoz covering the design and execution of an SEO strategy.
• 2:00pm - 2:45pm: Advanced Keyword Selection + Targeting
  • The basics of keyword research are well known, but discovering terms and phrases that are on the verge of becoming popular, in the middle or tail of the demand curve or have cyclical demand can be a huge advantage for your website. Tom Critchlow, Head of Search for Distilled, presents killer tips on how to select the right keywords and use them in the right ways to maximize your search traffic potential.
• 2:45pm - 3:30pm: The End of Analysis Paralysis: Tracking What Matters & Ignoring the Rest
  • Too often, the overwhelming quantity of data we get from tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, Conversion Rate Tracking + Testing Software can overwhelm us. SEOmoz's Joanna Lord is here to put an end to the overload and give striking examples of how to build an analytics dashboard that records what matters and ignores what doesn't so you can make the right decisions about what to invest in.
• 3:30pm - 3:45pm: Ice Cream Break
• 3:45pm - 4:30pm: How to Make SEO Data Reporting Sexy
  • Ready to take your data visualization skills to the next level? Join Distilled's Will Critchlow as he remakes the tedious process of SEO reporting on keywords, links, traffic and SERPs into something not only beautiful, but useful and ready to apply to the real world. Your clients & managers will be head over heels when they see the amazing, actionable data visualizations you present.
• 4:30pm - 5:30pm: No More Secrets: SEO Veterans Spill the Goods on Tactics that Work
  • 6 Expert Practitioners of SEO will share their most powerful & actionable tips for all things web marketing. If you're seeking an unfair advantage over the competition, listen closely - it doesn't come any better than this. Join Ian Lurie, Will & Tom Critchlow, Laura Lippay, Wil Reynolds & Todd Friesen for a remarkable session.
• 7:00pm - 12:00am: SEOmoz Annual Garage Party!
  • Bowling, billiards, beer and more! Don't miss our favorite party of the year, replete with free drinks, food and entertainment.

Wednesday, September 1st (Tools Training)

• 9:30am - 10:30am: A Deep Dive Into Link Research w/ Linkscape, Open Site Explorer & Keyword Difficulty
  • These three tools comprise the most powerful resources available for advanced link exploration, algorithm reversing and competitive analysis. In this hour, Rand Fishkin shows how to apply the full spectrum of data to strategize, measure and acquire links.
• 10:30am - 10:45am: Morning Coffee Break
• 10:45am - 11:45pm: Getting the Most from the New (REDACTED UNTIL LAUNCH)
  • Obviously, I can't provide a description without giving too much away. Needless to say, though, it will be big :-)
• 11:45pm - 12:15pm: Adding Value to Your SEO w/ Q+A, the mozBar + SEOmoz Labs
  • Rand walks through the best practices and some hidden ways to employ PRO membership utilities from Labs, Q+A and the mozBar. There's a lot of information and functionality to be found here and with Ran'd guidance, you'll be able to get maximum value from these products.
• 12:15pm - 1:00pm: A Sneak Peek Into SEOmoz's Product Roadmap & Call for Suggestions
  • Join Adam Feldstein, head of Product at SEOmoz and Rand Fishkin, CEO, for a look at the product roadmap for SEOmoz over the next 6 months. We'll be soliciting your feedback, too, so please come ready with your ideas!

Bonus: Oilman is Our MC!

We've employed copious quantities of beer, cookies and B-rated action movies on DVD to compel Todd Friesen, aka Oilman, to MC the event for us. We're honored to have Todd run the show, make sure our panelists stick to their time slots and badger anyone who tries to hold back critical information. In exchange, he's promised to wear his pearliest white hat and make sure every attendee has a phenomenal experience.

That smile means he's up to something... (via jenn.matthews)

Thanks Todd! We're showing our appreciation by bolstering your follower count on Twitter.

Looking forward to seeing many of you at the PRO Seminar and showing off our big August launch too!

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Posted by Danny Dover

 Guess who's back. Back again. Danny's back. Tell a friend. (My co-workers hate me ;-p) This week's Whiteboard Friday is about how to get an SEO job. In it, I divulge the secret of how I suckered my way into how I earned this job. I also do the worst impression of my life and finish with a shocking twist that I guarantee you won't see coming!

See my stats for this video

Embed Video:

Apply for an Internship

• Leverage Start-ups - Start-ups are particularly well suited for interns because most of them can't afford to pay people :-)
• Use the "Godfather Approach" - Make the company an offer they can't refuse. (Try working for free and provide your own laptop in exchange for an internship,)

Dive Right In

• Build Test Sites - After reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO, try building simple sites to target long tail terms.
• Offer to Help Charities - Like start-ups, charities tend to not have a lot of extra resources. Take advantage of this by volunteering.

Create a New Niche

• Leverage What You Already Know - Combine your current knowledge with what you want to learn to become the best in a given niche.
• Educate Others For Free - Earn links and share the love by teaching others about what you learn.

Join the Community

• Participate in Blogs/Social Media/Conferences - Get your name out and build your network by participating online.
• Take Advantage of Osmosis - Get into an environment where you learn simply by being in the right place.

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!

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Posted by richardbaxterseo

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A simple example expanding a list of options for a user searching for flights:

Improving your navigation can have a positive impact on your site architecture. By making sure these fundamentals are covered, you can build your marketing efforts on a solid foundation knowing your website is crawlable and super-friendly to search engines. What are your favorite examples of great navigation?

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