The anatomy of a robust inbound marketing campaign has similarities to the human spine. The human spine has five ordered sections – cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacrum and coccyx – all of which are required to be in working order to live a pain-free, normal and productive life.

An inbound marketing strategy has five ordered sections, too – owned and earned media, landing pages, lead nurturing, sales interaction and retention. And all of them are required to widen the sales funnel, create acceleration through it and to optimize Marketing’s impact on revenue. If there’s a problem with any of the sections Marketing’s impact on revenue will not be optimized and the inbound campaign will be in poor health.

Owned and Earned Media

This is the section that most marketers equate with inbound marketing – publish lots of owned and earned blog posts and articles frequently, organically distribute them through social media and watch Google drive traffic from its SERPs. This process produces lots of benefits, but without a strategy for the other sections it will be difficult to show real ROI.

Purpose: Generate traffic, educate prospects, grow brand, produce thought leadership, build community, produce outside advocates, reduce churn

Tip: Publish blog posts with frequency and consistency. According to Kuno Creative’s Content Marketing Manifesto, publishing five to ten posts per week led to a 633% increase in leads versus just two to three posts per week.

Landing Pages

This is a critical aspect of an inbound marketing campaign. Having lots of good free content is great, but morally bribing website visitors for their email and IP address using gated content is just as important. Once this information is captured, the visitor is no longer anonymous and their content consumption can be tracked and scored. It also allows for future email communication.

Purpose: Capture email and IP addresses

Tip: Analyze and value the inbound and outbound marketing channels that led to conversion with attribution modeling. Use this data to adjust tactics in the first section.

Tip: Deploy A/B or multivariate testing to optimize call to action click-through rates and landing page conversions.

Lead Nurturing

With email addresses captured and other attributes known (other form fields, website behavior, social media profiles, IP address, etc.) lead nurturing, segmentation and scoring can begin. Delivering the right content on the correct channel at the best time separates the wheat from the chaff and empowers the wheat to organically identify themselves as sales qualified leads over time. It also creates an efficient method for identifying and removing unqualified leads from the funnel.

Purpose: Generate more sales qualified leads faster (widens the sales funnel while creating acceleration through it).

Tip: If lead nurturing is a new or unrefined tactic access Eloqua’s Lead Nurturing Toolkit for tactical refinement.

Sales Interaction

Marketing should only deliver leads that are worthy of a sales person’s time. Analyzing and adjusting lead score criteria over time is critical to ensure this happens. However, just as critical is the open flow of communication and lead feedback between Marketing and Sales.

If the inbound marketing strategy is effective, Sales should find their prospects to be highly educated, qualified and ready to do business.

Purpose: Efficiently generate customers

Tip: Connect marketing automation tools with a CRM to help facilitate closed-loop marketing and open communication between Sales and Marketing.

Retention

A big portion of the retention initiative is accomplished by producing copious amounts of earned and owned media, building passionate communities in social media and being highly visible online. These are all activities that should already be deployed if the inbound marketing campaign is healthy.

In addition, Marketing can produce and deliver advanced content created specifically for current customers. This content can be in the form of surveys, guides, cheat sheets, training videos, process infographics, etc. However, this can all be for not if deliverables aren’t fulfilled and expectations aren’t met or exceeded.

Purpose: Reduce churn

Tip: Marketers should keep open communication with fulfillment and account management in order to feel the pulse of current customers. This can help identify possible future churn to target with content before it’s too late.

In high school, anatomy class was a place for students to giggle about the curriculum. However, understanding and implementing the entire inbound anatomy presented above is no laughing matter. In today’s ultra-competitive environment getting inbound right can mean the difference between business success and mediocrity. Getting it right tomorrow may mean the difference between business success and failure.

About the Author: Chad H. Pollitt is Director of Marketing at Slingshot SEO. Since 2002, he has played an integral role in designing, developing, deploying, executing and tracking robust web marketing strategies for hundreds of companies and organizations and is an internet marketing expert. He holds a BS in Entrepreneurship from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, an Internet Marketing Masters Certification from the University of San Francisco’s prestigious School of Business and Management and is a Certified HubSpot Partner.

As Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility, and my rice turns out Perfect Every Time®” – or something like that. My SEO friends are already reporting that their customers are asking to have links removed, and this has the potential to get ugly fast. I think this is, on balance, a good tool (one particularly handsome SEO petitioned Google for a text-file-based disavow back in December of 2011), but it also has the potential for serious destruction.

I. Who Should Use It?

I’m going to write this post backwards, for two reasons. First, if you’ve read about the disavow tool, you’ve already seen how it works, so I’ll save that for last. Second, if you haven’t read about it, I don’t want you to just run off and use it before I get my sermon on. So, sit down in your pew and listen.

Especially now, with almost no data about the tool’s effectiveness, there are really only a few groups of people who should consider using the disavow tool, in my opinion. If you fall into one of these groups, then proceed – with caution…

1. You’ve Received Bad Link Warnings

While people have had mixed reactions to Google’s bad link warnings, and there has been at least one false alarm, bad link warnings in Google Webmaster Tools are currently the only direct signal from Google that they have a problem with your link profile. The warnings look something like this:

If you’ve received a direct warning, you’re pretty sure which links are suspect, and you haven’t been able to get them removed, then the disavow tool may be for you.

2. You’ve Been Manually Penalized

I hesitate to add this one, because determining if you’ve been penalized can be more art than science, but if your site has clearly been hit with a manual penalty, you’re reasonably certain that penalty is link-based, and you haven’t been able to get those links removed, then disavowal may be up your alley.

3. You Were Denied Reconsideration

If you’ve been trying to fix (1) bad-link warnings or (2) a link-based penalty for months, with no success, then disavowal is a logical next step. Google has not been forgiving about these situations, and even if you’ve filed for reconsideration, will often not take action unless the majority of your bad links have been removed. Sometimes, that’s just not feasible, so now you have one more option.

4. You’ve Been Hit By Penguin

Diagnosing Penguin can be a bit tricky, but your best clue is a clear traffic drop on or immediately after April 24, 2012 (the release date of Penguin 1.0). To the best of our knowledge, Penguin primarily targeted aggressive link-building strategies, especially excessive use of unnatural anchor text. If you can fix those links (diversify anchor text and/or remove bad links), that’s your best option, but if you’re still struggling with Penguin then the disavow tool may be useful to you.

Keep in mind that we’re still unclear on the Penguin update cycle, specifically whether you can recover outside of a Penguin data update (and there have only been two of those – May 25, 2012 and October 5, 2012 – as of this writing). Add to this Google’s statements that disavowal could take weeks, and the new tool is far from a magic wand for dispelling Penguins.

This has no real relevance to SEO, but Facebook added a Penguin emoticon this week <(“), and it’s the greatest thing ever. Please use it with reckless abandon.

5. You’re a Victim of “Negative” SEO

If you think that you’ve been a victim of a link-based attack (someone has purposely created bad links to harm your site), and you haven’t been able to get those links removed – which is, unfortunately, common in these situations – then disavowal is a new weapon in your arsenal. I hesitate to mention this because negative SEO, while very real, is also very rare. The vast majority (90%+) of people who think they are victims of negative SEO are usually suffering from other SEO problems. So, make sure you’re solving the right problem before you start disavowing links.

II. Which Links Are Bad?

Even if you’re sure that bad links are your problem, discovering exactly which links are bad is an outright perilous journey. Here’s the problem – most links, even low-value links, still help your rankings. So, if you start removing absolutely every questionable link, you could be throwing out a lot of SEO babies out with that polluted bathwater.

Many posts have been written on how to dig into Google Webmaster Tools links, Open Site Explorer, Majestic, etc., and those techniques are incredibly useful, but please be very, very careful. You don’t just want to assign a number to your links based on Toolbar PageRank or Domain Authority and start disavowing everything under some arbitrary limit.

This is a very advanced and difficult topic, but I’m going to try to provide some general advice on pinning down which links might need removing…

1. Assess Your Risk Level

This is step one. If you’re worried about a potential future penalty and are proactively removing links, please do not start taking a hatchet to your link profile. You risk doing a lot of damage to fix a problem that you don’t even have yet. Not to sound conspiratorial, but what is Google going to think when your currently unpenalized site submits 500 links for disavowal?

On the flipside, if you’ve been decimated by a penalty (manual or algorithmic) and lost the majority of your traffic, the downside to cutting out a chunk of links is a lot less. If you’re considering any kind of drastic measure, like completely moving to a new domain, then I’d certainly give the disavow tool a shot.

2. Isolate the Diseased Links

The more you can isolate the diseased portion of your link profile, the more effectively you can target treatment without damaging your site in the process. To do that, you have to understand the nature of your particular disease. For example, if you were hit by Penguin, you might want to start by looking at links with certain exact-match anchor phrases. If you were hit by Negative SEO, then you probably want to target links with anchor text that’s clearly suspicious or out of place.

Let’s look at a real-world example. A while back, Rand decided to challenge the black-hat community to hit SEOmoz with negative SEO, thereby shaving roughly 20 years off of the marketing team’s collective lives. Long story short, SEOmoz survived, but what if we hadn’t? How could we isolate and target the suspicious links?

One of the clearly anomalous phrases this attack tried to rank us for was “dog snuggies”. So, I might start by loading up Open Site Explorer, and clicking on the “Anchor Text” tab. From there, I’d browse the anchor text until the suspect phrase appeared, and then click [+] to see the links using that phrase:

Not to out anyone, but since this was sort of an open challenge, I think I’m pretty safe here. The link in question is at – http://performinsider.com/2012/04/dog-snuggies-are-real/ – and it’s very clearly not kosher:

Let’s pretend that this link is damaging us, and that we’ve tried to get it removed unsuccessfully. In Section III, we’ll go about disavowing this link to show you how it’s done. Please note – this actual link is nofollow’ed, and because of SEOmoz’s overall authority, isn’t doing us any harm. Normally, we’d leave it alone, but I wanted to illustrate the process with a real example.

3. Weigh Inaction vs. Over-reaction

This comes back to your risk assessment in (1). If you’re trying to be proactive or solve a small problem, then use disavowal conservatively. Maybe you’d be best focusing on a handful of your absolute worst links, disavowing them, waiting, and seeing what happens. In other words, if time is on your side, then move slowly. If you’ve already taken damage, then the price of inaction is too high. You’re probably going to have to cut deep and risk over-reacting, because that risk is less than staying where you are.

III. How Does It Work?

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations – I’m going to show you how to go about disavowing some links. First off, this tool isn’t directly available from the Google Webmaster Tools navigation. You have to be logged in with “Owner” level access and then enter the URL to the disavow links page. You’ll see something like this:

Before you continue, you’re going to need the list of links you want to disavow. The new disavow feature is a bit of a hybrid, a blend of GWT and a flat file that you upload, not unlike a Robots.txt file (except that it doesn’t have to live on your server). This text file can be a combination of comments, links to block, and domains to block, and it looks something like this:

There are only really three options at this point:

Use “#” for comments (very helpful later)
Use full URLs on their own line to block a specific page
Use “domain:” followed by a root or sub-domain to entirely block it
Proceed with extreme caution using option #3 – you’ll end up disavowing every link from that domain, even the potentially good ones. Google has also suggested that, while they’ll usually honor sub-domains, it’s a bit open to interpretation. So, if you have terrible links from one sub-domain and great links from the root domain, I’d be very careful.

Remember our “dog snuggies” example in Section II? Here’s what our disavow file for SEOmoz actually looks like:

Going back to Google Webmaster Tools, click on [DISAVOW LINKS] and you’ll get a warning. Click the button again, and you’ll get the same warning plus a file upload option:

Click on [Choose File] and browse to your file on your local computer (again, it doesn’t have to be on your web server). I’ve named mine “disavow.txt”, but Google doesn’t seem to care what name you use. Click [Submit] and the screen will change to reflect the uploaded file:

If you’ve done everything right, you should be having heart palpitations right about now. Just one step left – click on [Done]. Congratulations – you’ve just sent a disavow request off into the ether, from whence it may never return.

What Have I Done?!

I wish I could tell you. Dave Naylor’s blog has the only report I’ve seen of a possibly successful disavowal (his team apparently beta-tested the tool), but the evidence is indirect. This is one of the main reasons I’m urging caution – there’s still a lot we don’t know, and Google is refining the tool and process as they go. If people abuse the disavow tool (and they will, eventually), then the data you submit could potentially even be used against you – or against the sites that you’re flagging. I don’t believe this is Google’s current intent, but you have to keep your eyes open.

So, once again – breathe. Used wisely, we all have a new tool in our utility belt. Used poorly, you’ll hit Robin in the face with a Batarang when you meant to reach for a grappling hook.

One problem: If you’ve started with a base Joomla! installation, odds are that those thousands of people itching to get their hands on your products probably aren’t even going to be able to find your website in the first place. In contrast to WordPress (which is what you could consider Joomla!’s primary competitor) Joomla! Is simply not quite as search engine friendly right out the box. In fact, I have found that you actually need to go through a number of steps (11, to be precise) in order to get a Joomla! website into a position where it really performs satisfactorily when it comes to on-site SEO factors.

Having developed a number of Joomla! websites over the years, I would like to share with you the exact guidelines that I give to the junior web designers at Red Giant Design Studio to make sure that our websites compete admirably in the rankings.

Without further ado, let’s get stuck into the meat of this tutorial.

1. Make Sure You’re on the Right Type of Server

This is the first step for a reason. It’s important.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you are using an IIS (Windows) server to host your Joomla! website, you are going to get so frustrated that your Mac may end up at the bottom of a swimming pool. (This may or may not have happened)

The reason I say this is that URL rewriting just never seems to gel well with any rewrite module that IIS can use. Rewrite modules are also a nightmare to get set up if you are using a shared hosting account. I’ve also, on occasion, had issues with the installation and configuration of Joomla! on an IIS server.

For practicality and succinctness’s sake, I would simply recommend that you save yourself endless headaches and get your Joomla! site set up on an Apache server with mod_rewrite installed. Your nerves and the SEO components you’re going to install will thank you.

2. Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess 

Because you are going to want to enable URL rewriting to make those URLs a whole lot more attractive than they start out, you are going to need to rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess – which is the version used by Joomla! and mod_rewrite.

3. Enable SEF URLs and URL Rewriting

In your Joomla! Global Configuration, set the “Search Engine Friendly URLs” and “Use URL Rewriting” options to “Yes”.

Search Engine Friendly URLs is the setting that removes all the dynamically generated gobbledygook from your URL and replaces it with the alias of the menu item that you’re using on the page.

URL Rewriting is the setting that removes the /index.php/ from the URL. For this to be enabled must have mod_rewrite enabled and must have a .htaccess file.

The balance of the settings are really left more up to your discretion. I tend to prefer leaving the other three off. You may like to turn on the option to include your Site Name in your page titles, particularly if the site has a lot of content. Personally, I like to micro-manage everything and craft each title separately in most instances.

4. Remove “/images/” from your Robots.txt file 

This is something about Joomla! that has always left me bewildered. In the automatically generated robots.txt file that is created on installation, Joomla! includes a disallow rule for the images directory, instructing the search engines not to search or index your images folder.

As you may well know, images can generate a sizable chunk of your traffic from Google and the search engines if you have them correctly optimized.

Because all the image optimisation in the world won’t help you if you are telling Google not to bother with your images directory, I highly recommend that you remove the following line from your robots.txt file:

/images/
5. Install JCE Editor

Not only is JCE Editor free, but it provides a whole bunch of really cool features which will help you put together and maintain your site.

My favourite two things about JCE are the fact that you can instruct it not to strip code that you add through the editor and the fact that it provides a great interface through which you can add images, coupled with Alt tags and image dimensions.

It’s a really good component for Joomla! and I highly recommend you use it.

6. Use Alt Tags and Image Dimensions

This tip is really not specific to Joomla! but it is important nevertheless. The JCE editor allows you add the Alternate Text to describe your image as well as add the dimensions right within the image upload tool.

In case you weren’t aware, adding image dimensions to your images allows the “space” to load before the actual image does. This should help improve your load times a bit.

7. Manage Your Meta Data

Although meta keywords tags are pretty much redundant these days, your meta descriptions and title tags are still rather important.

I came across a pretty useful component quite recently, called SEO Boss. The only feature of this that I actually use is the meta tag manager, but I have found this to be extremely useful.

To edit meta data for your Joomla! website normally, you need to navigate to each menu item/article and edit the descriptions and page titles manually. With SEO Boss, you’ll find a single screen that lets you edit all of your meta data directly from that interface.

The only drawback to SEO Boss is that it may not gel well with all of your installed components, in which case you’ll need to go and manually edit those through the relevant component’s own interface. For everything else, however, it’s great.

8. Choose www. or non-www. and Redirect

Joomla!, unlike WordPress, doesn’t automatically redirect your website to either the www. or non-www. version. This obviously poses a canonical problem, which you need to correct manually via your .htaccess file.

To redirect from non-www. to www. add the following code to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Alternatively, you can redirect to non-www. by adding this code instead:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.yourwebsitehere.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourwebsitehere.com/$1 [R=301,L]

9. Be Consistent When Linking Internally

When it comes to CMS websites (especially Joomla! ones) duplicate content can become a bit of a problem. The key to combating this is to ensure that you link consistently to internal content.

By this, I mean only creating links to either the www. or non-www. version that you chose above, only linking to pages using a trailing slash or no trailing slash, or pages with a suffix (.html) or no suffix. Only link to a single version of a page, ever.

Remember, it’s not duplicate content if nothing is linking to it for Google to find it.

You can’t really control the way others link to you, but you can set an example. If people are linking to you incorrectly, you can add further redirect rules to 301 redirect to the correct links.

10. Speed Up Your Website!

It has to be said that Joomla! doesn’t do page speed very well straight out of the box. The good news is that you can speed things up significantly by doing three main things: Leveraging browser caching, enabling Gzip compression and compressing your images.

10.1. Leverage Browser Caching

Without getting into too much detail, you want to utilize browser caching to instruct your browsers to cache certain types of content found on your site, as well as tell them how long to cache them for. My suggestion is to simply add the following code to the bottom of your .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html “access plus 1 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 1 years”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 1 months”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 1 months”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 1 months”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 1 months”
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access plus 1 months”
ExpiresByType image/ico “access plus 1 months”

You can, of course, tweak the code if your content needs to be held in the cache for shorter/longer periods, or if you would prefer not to cache certain types of content.

10.2. Enable Gzip

A good way to improve load times is to use Gzip to compress your code. I tend to only do this once I’ve got my whole site set up, but it’s generally a good idea to use it.

To enable Gzip via Joomla!, simply navigate to Global Configuration > Server and switch the option for Gzip compression to “Yes”.

Note: This will only work if mod_gzip is installed on your server.

Depending on your host, you may also be able to enable server size compression through your hosting control panel. I recommend enquiring from your hosting provider how you can go about this.

10.3. Optimize Your Images

Image optimization is something that every web designer should ensure happens, regardless of whether you’re using Joomla! or not. It’s ridiculous how many times I’ve come across websites loading 350kb images that can easily be cut down to 25kb. If you’re not an expert when it comes to Photoshop, you can download highly optimized versions of your images using Google’s Page Speed tool.

Through the above methods and other really minor tweaks, we generally manage a Google Page Speed score of 95+ and I can honestly report I find that many of our Joomla! sites actually perform better than similar WordPress sites that we’ve developed.

11. Install Xmap

Xmap is quite simply the best sitemap component that I’ve found for Joomla! thus far.

It seamlessly generates XML and HTML sitemaps for your website and there are many plugins available for popular Joomla! components such as Virtuemart and sh404sef.

Simply navigate to Xmap and create a new sitemap. Choose the menu items you want to include, set their priorities, click “Save” and voila! You can then create a menu item for your HTML sitemap and grab the link for your XML sitemap to add to Webmaster Tools.

12. BONUS: SEO Components to Make Your Life Easier

I have found that with Joomla 2.5+, SEO is a lot easier to implement without the use of unnecessary 3rd party plugins. Just in case you would like additional control over your SEO settings, however, here are two of my favourite 3rd party SEO components for Joomla!:

Sh404sef – This is a really great component for Joomla! that allows you to do a whole lot more than SEO and is also the one that I tend to find is a bit easier to configure.
Artio JoomSEF – JoomSEF is similar to sh404SEF, but also has a free version available which you can test with. It probably isn’t quite as powerful as sh404sef does and, last time I tried it, it was a little tiresome to configure. That said, it’s still a powerful component and allows you a lot more control over your SEO, if you feel you need it.

Taking the above steps into account, I have found that we are able to get our Joomla! sites into a position where their rankings aren’t hurt by on-site factors that haven’t been dealt with correctly. There are always additional tweaks that you can make which may or may not help you, but this should be a great start for you, particularly if you are just starting out with Joomla!

I’m a strong believer that on-site optimization simply needs to be good/solid, without having to be exceptional. This is especially true when considering the recent algorithm changes and the mindset of Google trying to handle poorly optimized, but trusted, sites a bit better.

Have you got any other tips and tricks for optimizing a Joomla! website? Perhaps you’ve had a bad experience with Joomla? Let me know in the comments.

Read more information : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-your-joomla-website-in-11-super-easy-steps

This week, Rand looks at the future of On-Page and how to move beyond the keywords to drive traffic and delivery for a better experience.

Video Transcription

“Howdy, SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about getting on-page SEO right in 2012, the modern era and beyond. Old school SEO, on-page SEO is still very much in the forefront of people’s minds.

In fact, if you’re an SEOmoz Pro subscriber, you’re actually seeing a lot of the kind of classic, old school stuff that’s easily measurable, the keyword targeted optimization inside your on-page SEO reports, and that stuff is important. It still matters. I’ll talk about that. But there’s a lot of new stuff that we need to be thinking about as SEOs in terms of what true on-page optimization means in the modern era.

So let’s start by taking a little history lesson here. Old on-page SEO had some sort of classic best practices, like, “Oh, these things correlate best to pages that perform well in Google,” which doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s causal. But it does mean that lots of people who are succeeding are doing these things right, and so maybe we should follow in their footsteps.

This is classic is stuff. It’s keyword usage, keyword phrase usage. It’s title tag one to two times and at the start of the title element. It’s the keyword used maybe a few times exactly in the body content and partially in the body content. That can vary by how much, and it probably has nothing to do with density, but we do want to get it in there. We probably want to get it into the top paragraph so that people who are reading find it relevant.

We want to put the keyword in the URL if possible. We know that the URL gets put on other web pages and linked to us, which means we get some anchor text out of that. We could be putting the keyword in the H tag, H1 tag, Hx tag. We were kind of confused. We don’t really know whether this actually matters.

That could be one of those very low correlation elements at least in terms of ranking. So we’re not really sure whether that’s important. But we do know we want to put it in the headline so that when somebody gets to a page they see, “Oh yeah, look. There’s the keyword I was looking for in this article or this blog post or this e-commerce product page or this category, whatever it is, is about the thing that I want.”

Keyword in the ALT attribute. We have an image, and that image has an ALT attribute and the keyword is inside. The ALT is in the code of the image tag itself, and we want the keyword in there. That looked like it had a surprising correlation with pages that do well.

We want keyword in links pointing to the page internally on our own site, those internal anchor texts phrases. People would jump through all sorts of hoops to try and get that done. Yeah, we want to throw in some related terms and phrases, kind of fitting that topic modeling stuff.

Great. Good. This stuff is not unimportant anymore. It’s not like this has lost all its value. But it’s definitely not the only thing that we need to be thinking about in 2012. I mean on-page optimization has grown and expanded just like all of SEO has. This is the kind of stuff that I’m talking about for the modern day on-page optimizers.

So first thing and most important is that SEO isn’t that new anymore, and search isn’t that new anymore. Just ranking for something used to produce a lot of value in terms of getting visits and getting brand awareness and maybe getting direct conversions in a lot of cases. But unless we do this, that we overlap the searcher intent, what users want, and the page content purpose, we’re missing out on that.

People abandon search results much more quickly than they used to. Rankings doesn’t necessarily lead to the traffic. We see click-through rates sometimes on position two, three, or four being higher than on position one because something is more interesting about the listing. You see abandoned rates seem to be taken into account, maybe not directly, maybe indirectly by Google and by Bing.

So something else is going on. And this, if we can solve this equation, solve this Venn diagram, I promise wonderful things will happen with your SEO. It’s something that we didn’t always think about in the past that we need to, and that is: What is this user looking for? That’s the red circle here.

The user wants something when they do a search. Let’s say I search for creative watches. I’ll show you guys my watch. It’s very cool. Right?
Creative watch designs, can you see that? It’s my ZIIIRO watch. It’s super cool. You should search for it. It’s ZIIIRO. I’m going to drop this down here.

That ZIIIRO watch is very creative. They do terrible SEO on their site. I apologize for that, but regardless. So if I’m looking for creative watch designs and what the page delivers to me is watch brands that I’ve already heard of, that aren’t particularly creative, and they’re not unique or useful to me, maybe some people have that. Maybe the overlap is going to be in here for some folks. But you’ve got to pick.

You’ve got to make this bigger. Please get as many of the people who want the thing that they’re typing into the search engine and what the page provides, make that overlap. If you can make that one circle in this Venn diagram, you win. You win at SEO. This is incredibly important.

All right. Make listings in the search results themselves outstanding. This means Sschema.org. This means rel=author. This means video XML sitemaps. This means all the kinds of new markup that are available to put in a search results. So I want my rel=author so that I can appear in a little picture here next to the search results because I know that having my profile picture there increases click-through rate.

I’ve seen it before in tests with SEOmoz stuff where we rank one and two for something. Or we’ll rank number one and we’ll rank number two with a rel=author listing, and we get more traffic on that one. Oh, my gosh, clearly we know that that’s getting a higher click-through rate.

We want the keyword phrase in the title, but we need that title to be useful and interesting and sharable. It should be fascinating. That headline needs to sell something beyond just, “Yes, we have the keyword you typed in on the page.” It has to compel and entice you. The headline and the meta description and the URL, they’re an advertisement.

If you think of this the way you think of your AdWords copy or your ad copy for an advertisement that appears in print or appears in digital media somehow, that’s what you’re seeking. You’re trying to draw someone’s attention in and make them interested in clicking this. So just having the keyword targeting to try and rank well is no longer the only thing we’re worried about.

Very important today, too, I wrote about this on my blog, the dot.com or the brand name of the website appearing in the URL is something that people look at very, very heavily. They bias their clicks by what appears in the URL because they’re starting to recognize domain names as brands and prefer some domains over others. So you better be building up a brand name strategy.

If it’s online-watches-that-rock.info as opposed to rockingwatches.com, I could imagine rockingwatches is a brand and I never head of it. Maybe it’s interesting. I’ll go check it out. But online-watches-that, no, I’m out. That brand is pulling me in even if I don’t quite recognize it yet. So these outstanding search results are now a part of your on-page optimization.

Pages that load fast, it’s almost weird. We were in this era of broadband, and it’s like, “Oh yeah, things are getting so fast.” But that’s actually stopped. So broadband rates have expanded, especially outside the U.S. In particularly Scandinavian countries, in some parts of Europe, in some parts of Eastern Europe, some parts of Asia, Taiwan, they’re getting much faster broadband than the U.S. is.

The U.S.’s broadband unfortunately due to some monopolies here and some government lobbying and all that sort of mess, our broadband rates are actually not expanding as fast. So having pages that load fast, that aren’t hugely intensive, that take four or five seconds or less is really important. Having responsive design where this title and menu element and the images get shrunk down so that all that side bar content or maybe the heavy advertising and stuff makes it’s way into a smaller page on a mobile device or on an iPad, or an Android tablet, or those kinds of things is extremely important.

You can see conversion rates and click-through rates, sorry, time on site and crawl rate, all these things that influence not just how search engines interact and how you rank, but also whether your index and how you perform with users. So incredibly important.

And then two last things, pages nowadays have to be socially sharable. That means if you have any content that’s sort of targeted at things like Pinterest, you better have that great image that can fit in there. If you know that your posts are going on Facebook, you better have a graphic that fits the proportions, that shows up well when the URL is shared on Facebook, shared on Google+.

You want to have that special markup that makes you appear in Twitter’s results like Twitpic does and Lockers is doing. SlideShare is doing this. They’re all adding those tags so that content can appear directly in the body of tweets, which is really, really smart, because they know that their content’s being shared there.

It also means that you have to worry about the title and the meta description tag which makes its way now into Google+ and into Facebook as the description on the side next to the URL. That socially sharing thing is something we never had to worry about in classic SEO.

But the last point is, oh yeah, all this stuff that mattered in the past
,the old on-page SEO, still matters today. A lot of it still matters today for that classic SEO kind of ranking things and a lot for usability types of stuff and even for branding. You want that keyword in the URL so that matches to the description there. You want the keyword in the title, and you want it probably at least in the headline so that when someone reaches the page . . .

All of these worlds, these worlds of usability and user experience and social and SEO, are all coming together. It’s not just classic SEO anymore. It’s not just social media marketing anymore. It’s not just content marketing. If these practices don’t work together, we don’t really get optimized the way we want to.

So on-page SEO, in 2012, is a big, big broad thing. I hope these tips will help you not just to rank, but to perform.

All right everyone, thanks for joining me. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.”

Read more : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-onpage-seo-right-in-2012-and-beyond-whiteboard-friday

In case you missed it, here’s a brief overview of the Custom Audiences feature and tips on how you can use it to your advantage.

What Are Facebook Custom Audiences?

Let’s say you have a current email list of all of your existing customers. You’ve introduced a new product that you think would be valuable to those customers, and you’d love to be able to run Facebook ads that show only to those customers. Up to this point, you didn’t have a way to do this.

Now, with Facebook Custom Audiences, you now can upload your customer email list (or a list of phone numbers or Facebook User ID’s) for Facebook to hash the data against its users to find matches. Pretty cool, eh?

Odds are that if you have 1,000 customer emails, they won’t all be currently on Facebook. However, many of your customers might have used the same email when they bought from you as they did when (if) they signed up for Facebook. You’ll probably be surprised at how many people from your customer list have the same email that match back to their Facebook account. To test this new feature out, we uploaded some of our customer lists and were seeing anywhere from 50-70% match rates. Not too shabby.

The other beautiful thing about Custom Audiences is that not only do you have a new, custom audience that you’ve created from your own customer data, but you can layer on any of the other Facebook Advertising targeting options on top of it. For instance, let’s say you upload the emails of your current customers and found 70% of them on Facebook. Now you have a Custom Audience of these folks. You can now say that you only want to run a Facebook ad to the people in this list who include the filters of living in Seattle and not liking your fan page yet. The options for targeted marketing are pretty limitless.

Some of you might have concerns about privacy. It’s important to note that Facebook will hash (or encrypt) all of the email addresses, phone numbers, or Facebook user ID’s that you upload before matching it to Facebook profiles. Here’s Facebook’s own explanation of this:

“Facebook calculates the hash of the email addresses and phone numbers that people have given us and stores these hashes with the corresponding person. When an advertiser imports their hashed audience list into power editor, we compare it with our hashes to find all the matching user IDs. If an advertiser imports a hashed email address that we don’t have, it won’t match anything. Facebook won’t know the original email address or phone number because it was hashed before it was uploaded.”

How Can I Use Custom Audiences?

I was pretty excited after reading the Custom Audiences announcement, and I started brainstorming the countless ways to use them. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Drive Facebook Likes: This one is pretty obvious. Now that you can mash your offline lists to Facebook profiles, you can easily set up a Custom Audience of your current customers or people who’ve signed up for one of your email lists (basically anyone who’s had a brand impression with your company) and start serving them ads to try and get them to like your FB brand page. You’ll want to make sure you select the option to only show ads to the people in this Custom Audience who don’t already like your page.
Drive Sales/Conversions: If you’re a business that collects email addresses for lead gen purposes, why not upload those as a Custom Audience and then serve Facebook ads to that group? For example: if you sell products and know that your customers tend to buy product A before buying product B, upload the list of emails of all customers who’ve bought product A and then serve them ads promoting product B. Maybe you’re a B2B business and 20% of your customers are in your mid-tier product plan. You can serve those customers ads trying to get them to upgrade to the next product tier. Maybe you’re an online florist and Valentine’s Day is approaching. Why not upload an email list of all your customers and then use Facebook targeting to focus on only the customers who are in relationships or married, and serve that group a Valentine’s Day promotion? The possibilities are endless.
Drive Newsletter Signups: If your company has a newsletter that you send out on a regular basis and you can pull an email list of all customers who haven’t signed up for the newsletter yet, upload that group as your Custom Audience. You can then serve ads promoting your newsletter to those customers.
The potential targeting options with Custom Audiences is pretty vast, so I’m sure there are plenty of opportunities I missed. Now that we’ve discussed what the Custom Audiences are and some ways to use them, let’s quickly talk about how to set them up.

How Do I Set Up Custom Audiences?

In order to use Facebook’s Custom Audience feature, you’ll have to use a 3rd party vendor (SalesForce, AdParlor, Alchemy Social, GraphEffect, Kenshoo, Nanigans, Social Moov, and Optimal) or the Facebook Power Editor. Check out the link to learn about what the Power Editor is and how to download and start using it.

Once you have it downloaded, you’ll want to click on the Custom Audiences tab on the top nav and then click “create audience”. Continued discussion at : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebooks-new-custom-audiences-what-they-are-and-how-you-can-use-them-part-1

The unfortunate reality right now for most websites is that your rankings will not recover completely in the short term, whether you do nothing or something. Once Google has filtered out your lower quality content that previously gained easy rankings, it will take some effort to recover your rankings for those previous positions. Not to fret however, there are things you can do to help move this process along.

So What Should You Do?

First determine how much you were affected by the Farmer Update. This could be the first diagnostic clue on how significant your new changes should be. Look at your detailed analytics reports and determine the drop in organic traffic for your major keywords and even long tail keywords. See any patterns? What areas were the most affected? If you lost more than 75% of your traffic it could be mean there is some serious content quality issues going on with your site. If you lost much less, then you probably have less to do, and Google is just polishing your overall valuable content footprint in the index for you. You could also have sections of your website that are dragging down the overall rankings for other pages. Identify them.

It seems one of the most overwhelming strategies so far is blocking off the thin and auto-generated content sections of your website from Google. Google has indicated that low quality pages on one part of the site can effect the overall ranking on another part of your website. This was a tip shared before the update by Google’s JohnMu. He recommended blocking the crawling and indexing of any content that is not unique or valuable to users.

What is the best way to do this? Forums members are discussing the ways they are doing this. Here are some strategies from separating your thin/lower quality content from the rest of your site and other tactics being used to fix their websites.

• Address the most significantly impacted pages first, get rid of them
• Use Meta Robots noindex, follow tag on individual pages
• Delete the pages permantantly
• Don’t delete, improve the content of the page immediately.
• Reduce the number of internal links
• Improve the content X ad density ratio. More unique content on ad heavy pages.
• Remove redundant pagination
• Use the rel=”canonical” attribute on duplicate pages
• Do nothing quite yet, watch and see what happens
• Revisit those dark and forgotten parts of your website, eliminate any junk
• Address boilerplate content. Reduce it, or consider making it unique for each page
• Give Google feedback on the update and how it impacted your website
• Submit a reinclusion request once you have cleaned up portions of your website

Some gems from the thread:

Netmeg makes an excellent recommendation on determining what pages to fix:

So the first thing I am doing is taking the same advice I’ve been spouting in the AdSense forum for years – take an objective look at my site, and measure percentages.

If nav + ads + header + footer > content; then fix.

If nav + ads + header + footer < content; probly ok.

Tedster suggests:

Even if weak pages do help drag down good pages on the site, it still seems to me that addressing the “Biggest Loser” pages first makes very good sense. In other words, even though there is a site-wide component at work, the greatest power of the update is focused at individual URLs.

What is clear is we are still not quite sure how these changes will impact the rankings in the short and long term. That will take some time to figure out. I think it will be important to monitor the forums where webmasters are making these changes and recording their postive/negative impact to figure out the best strategy for your website. Stay tuned.

Continued discussion at http://www.seroundtable.com/how-to-regain-your-rankings-after-the-farmer-update-13074.html and WebmasterWorld.

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