Me With John Carr

At my last SEO for Africa I introduced a new initiative called SEO Buffet. The concept is simple: I’ll give you free advice for your website and profile you on my blog if you bring me food from your cultural background!

The first person to respond was John Carr. John is a Toronto based real estate agent who is trying to get his website, PrimeTorontoNeighbourhoods.com increased visibility in the search engines. John brought up a delicious assortment of chicken, beef, cheese, and vegetable empanadas that were representative of his Chilean culture.

Here was my advice for John:

1) Pay Attention To Your Titles

You need content to rank in Google and John has created a blog which is updated regularly using WordPress (http://www.primetorontoneighbourhoods.com/blog/). When you’re using a blogging platform you want to carefully select the titles of your blog posts because whatever you choose will impact your title tag, URL, and header tag (three of the most important ranking factors).

Make sure you put your keywords in the proper order and as close to the start of the title as possible. For example, if John was trying to rank for “Lawrence Park Homes” he should write a post with a title like “Lawrence Park Homes – Recent Trends” instead of something like “Recent trends for people looking at buying a home in Lawrence Park.” In the second example, the keywords are split up (home in Lawrence Park) and are at the end of the post. Put them together and move them to the front of the title to get the best results.

Delicious Empanadas from Chile

2) Get Links

You can have the most optimized content in the world but if you don’t have external websites pointing to yours then you won’t rank very prominently in Google. I encouraged John to think about people who might be willing to link to him.

A quick example is the real estate company he’s affiliated with. He pays a regular fee for using their services and should insist that they also link to his website from theirs. Other opportunities are to think about everybody he does business with on a regular basis and moving the offline partnerships online. This blog post will get him an extra link but he needs to go out and get more links to overthrow his competition.

My two programmers enjoying lunch!

3) Build Resource Guides

This last point is more focused on conversion than on SEO. John has picked a number of niche neighborhoods to sell in and attracts a number of people to the site who come, never contact him, and leave. It’s important to build as much value up front as possible to build the relationship because the next real estate agent is just around the corner trying to get the same customers. I recommended he build a resource guide for each community he specializes in. Profile what the neighborhood is known for, what the entertainment is like, how good the schools are, where the parks are, etc… basically all the information someone who is interested in the neighborhood would want to know. John already has the information in his head from his years of experience, he just needs to put it into a document and make it free online as a PDF if prospects leave their name and email. Now he’s able to build the relationship by offering tremendous upfront value and become the agent of choice.

I also recommended that he allow people to sign up for updates about their neighborhoods of choice so they could get notices when new homes came on the market. It’s a service any agent will offer but if you allow people to sign up for it themselves online you make it easier for them to do business with you.

I hope you enjoyed the first post in this new series – stay tuned for more SEO Buffet posts in the future! And thanks John for the great food!

What do you think of John’s website? Would you give him any other recommendations?

I’ve love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

(Photo Credit: Jeff McNeill) This is a special edition of SEO University where I have a guest post by Elisa Gabbert. Elisa was introduced to me by Byron Gordon, a great guy who I’ve worked with for a couple of years at the Search Engine Strategies conferences here in Toronto. When Byron asks me to check something out, it’s usually good!

Byron said I should check out WordStream’s new keyword tool located at http://www.wordstream.com/keywords. For years I’ve been a fan of using Google’s free tools, namely the Google Keyword Tool and the Google Traffic Estimator Tool. They are both free, provide great data, and it comes directly from Google – what more could you ask for?

I posed the question to Byron and he put me on to Elisa who wrote this guest post. I look forward to your thoughts on WordStream vs. Google after you read the post.

“At WordStream, we recently launched a new free keyword tool. One of the questions we get asked frequently is how the tool compares to the Google keyword tool (in fact it gets asked so frequently we put it in the FAQ).

Let me try to run down the pros and cons of using each tool.

Where Google’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool is similar to many of their products in that it has two core strengths: it uses Google data, and they give it away for free. If you’re in a market (and there are many) where Google is the dominant player, having access to Google’s data can definitely be useful. And Google has a lot of data.

The tool also provides several columns of numerical stats including both local and global monthly search volume and search volume trends, as well as information like advertiser competition and estimated average CPC which can be useful for the PPC advertiser. Aside from keywords and related terms, WordStream’s tool currently only shows you an estimated relative volume.

Where WordStream’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool taps into the company’s huge data sources, but they’re not giving you full access to that data. For example, a search for “britney spears” returns 72 results. Performing the same search on our tool yields over 37,000 keywords. We only show you the top 100 within the tool itself, but you can enter your email (or sign up for a free account) and we’ll send you the full list, all 37,563 keyword phrases, free of cost. So we are giving you a lot more to work with, including many long-tail terms, and this is really valuable for large PPC accounts or affiliate marketers especially.

Another advantage to our keyword tool is a greater diversity of keyword sources. We aggregate search query data from Internet Service Providers, browser toolbars and search engines—amounting to more than a billion unique keywords and over a trillion search queries—and we carefully weight the data to avoid bias toward any particular source. So our data is more comprehensive.

The “related keywords” feature allows you to select related terms and synonyms and include them in the results with your original query. Again, this is important for keyword expansion and can tell you what other phrases your audience may be using to search for related topics.

There’s also a filter feature so you can weed out terms that aren’t relevant to your search.

Finally, WordStream’s keyword tool is faster than Google’s. You get results pretty much instantaneously.

In the end, the point of using any of these tools is to get keyword suggestions, and it’s important to remember that they are in fact just suggestions—many of them may be irrelevant to your website or business. The more data you start out with, the more usable, actionable keywords you’re going to end up with after you drill down and figure out which terms are going to be most relevant and valuable for you. Then you can get to work optimizing your web copy and PPC campaigns based on those keywords, which in turn gives you more data to analyze (like which keywords drive the most traffic and conversions, and which aren’t delivering any value). This creates a cycle of data-driven decision making.

Our view is that keywords in and of themselves aren’t worth anything. It’s what you do with your keyword list that matters. That’s why we developed the tool. We hope that dedicated search marketers will stick around to learn the benefits of keyword management—tools and strategies that help you group, organize and act on all that raw keyword data to get real results in return.”

Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, a software manufacturer specializing in keyword discovery & management software for SEO and PPC. To get in touch with Elisa, you can send a note to egabbert at wordstream dot com, follow her on twitter, or check out the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog, where she’s a regular contributor.

What do you think about the WordStream Keyword Tool? Are you going to give it a try? I would love to hear your thoughts on the tool if you comment below!

Today I want to continue the series and talk about the most basic component of generating links which is:

Write Quality Content

If you want people to link to you then you need to write content that is worth linking to (also known as “linkbait”)! Create interesting, relevant content that your target audience would find valuable. Identify what pains or problems your customers / readers are facing and give them solution that is easy to digest and makes them curious to learn more.

So What?

Your content should answer the question So What? Why should readers care what you are writing about? Your customers are bombarded with more websites and articles than they know what to do with! Unless your content can answer the So What? question, readers will move on to find an expert who will.

300-500 Words

How long should an article be? A guideline that I always recommend is at least 300 and aim for 500. If the article is below 300 words then it’s harder to get picked up in the search engines. 500 seems to be an ideal number because it’s enough to get your thoughts out on a specific topic. Keep your articles short and focused. If you’re writing over 1,000 words it’s better to split the content up into two 500+ word articles. This way your articles will be more readable, will stay focused on one topic, and you can get more search engine traffic to two shorter articles than one long one.

Look To Niche Social Networking Sites

To get ideas for what topics to cover and how to position your content check out a niche social media sites that caters specifically to your audience. For example, if you target small business owners, you would want to look at BizSugar.com.

A quick glance at their Hot Topics show what small business owners are currently interested in. It will also show you the types of titles that attract attention. The titles of the top 5 articles are:

• Franchise Mathematics; How Many More Franchise Broker Networks Do We Need?
• Six Ways to Improve Employee Morale Without Breaking the Bank
• Why Your Twitter Followers Aren’t Leads…Or Are They?
• Act Like a Child and Increase Your Small Business Marketing Skills
• The 7 Ages Of Your Business – From Enthusiasm To Exhaustion

Notice that two of the titles ask a provocative question and two others include a top 6 or top 7 list. Asking questions and creating lists are proven methods to drive interest in your articles. Even if all you change is your title and keep the content of your articles the same you could see significant changes in how many people find them and link to you.

Get Your Content Into Google

You can write the greatest content in the world but if Google doesn’t know about it, you won’t get traffic or links. If your website is not very popular then Google might only come every six months to see if you have anything new. You don’t want to wait six months for them to pick up your articles! The easiest way to get your content into Google is to use their AddURL tool.

It’s a free tool that Google created to help you add pages into their index. Simply go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ then put in your URL, type in the letters that appear in the box and press “Add URL” – you’re done!

If you’re adding many pages at a time then you might want to consider creating a sitemap of your content. This requires slightly more technical skill but it’s worth it if you are writing a lot of content and want Google to pick up all of your pages.

I’ll continue the Link Building Tactics series in the coming weeks and hope that in the meantime you focus you efforts on developing quality content that makes people want to read on, keep it to around 500 words, and tell Google as soon as you create the content so you can get indexed right away.

I’d be curious to know what piece of content got the most links for you?

The idea is pretty simple. Assuming that you’ve picked your keywords and have done all the possible optimization on your website, how should Google rank you if your competitors have done the exact same thing? The answer is through links. If your competitors have hundreds or thousands of quality links and you’re a brand new site with no links then you are not going to outrank your competitors.

The Quick Way To Find Links To Your Website

If you want to check to see how many links the search engines are picking up for your site, Google offers a number of free tools for webmasters. The first and the easiest is to do a search for link:http://www.YourWebsite.com. If I put it in for EvanCarmichael.com, here is what shows up:

The Real Way To Find How Many Links You Have

According to this result Google is showing that 529 webpages are linking to my site. You should take this number with a huge grain of salt because Google will only show you a fraction of the real links that it actually recognizes.

If you really want to find out how many links Google recognizes you need to go to the Google Webmaster Tools page (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en). If you have not yet claimed your website then it’s time to verify it with Google! It will give you access to tons of free data on how Google sees your website and give you insights into what you need to work on.

If you have already claimed your site and want to find out the number of links you have simply load your Webmaster Tools, click on your domain name and go to Your site on the Web > Links to your site. Here is what it looks like for my site:

According to Google Webmaster Tools I have 25,473 links to my site and 6,788 of them are going to my homepage. If you continue with the report you can see exactly which external website are linking to your homepage as well as all the other pages on your site. With the link:http://www.evancarmichael.com showing only 529 links, Google was only reporting 2% of the actual links that they recognize for my site!

How Do I Use This Information

Two of my favorite ways to use this information are to check for links you think should be there and thank and build relationships with current linkers.

“Finding out who is linking to you can be a great opportunity to connect with the website owner who set up the link, thank them, and potentially build even more links to your site!”

Check Links – Have you recently received a couple of links but you’re not seeing them on Google’s list? Sometimes Google can take months before they pick up new links and they may not find all of them (Google isn’t perfect!). If Google didn’t pick up the new links yet don’t wait and hope for them to find them, tell Google they exist by submitting the link to their add URL tool. I used to use this tool every time I got a link, now I only do it for the high profile ones. I want Google picking up those links as soon as possible! Most people who know about the add URL tool use it to submit their own pages but you should also submit any page that has a link to you that you know about and Google hasn’t picked up yet!

Build Relationships – One of the features I love about Webmaster Tools is that they show you exactly who is linking to you and what pages they are linking to. I’ve found so many links to my site that I didn’t even know existed before! Finding out who is linking to you can be a great opportunity to connect with the website owner who set up the link, thank them, and potentially build even more links to your site! It’s a great way to build relationships and people are usually surprised that you cared enough to write to them!

Over the coming weeks I’ll continue this series on link building and will share with you some beginner and then more advanced tactics on how you can generate more links to your site and boost your Google rankings!

What have you done to build links to your webpage?

• 1) Firefox Extensions (https://addons.mozilla.org/en‐US/firefox/) – Add-ons are extensions of the browser that add new functionality to Firefox or change its appearance
• Pros: Tools work right within your browser, very quick, very powerful, and very free
• Critiques: None ‐ critiques usually resolved with extension updates
• Cool: Audit a clients site live: SE issues, opt. improvement – SEO Extensions: SEOpen, Search Status, Web Developer, Groowe Toolbar, CustomizeGoogle, SEO Quake – Others: PDF Download, Google Image Preview, Roboform
  
• Cost: FREE

• 2) IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com/) – IceRocket is an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs.
  
• Pros: Real‐time monitoring of blogs/social media, Link, topic & trend tracking tools
• Critiques: Can’t search videos directly, Some searches take up to a minute to load
• Cool: BigBuzz Search
• Cost: FREE

• 3) Google Geo Search (http://www.contentranch.com/google-geo-search-tool/) – The Google Search Tool is a simple tool that creates a url to the official google search page based on the location and data center you choose.
• Pros: Search Google by region, Simple to use, quick and streamlined
• Critiques: None
• Cool: No ads, No clutter
• Cost: FREE
  

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• 4) Domain Report Tool (http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm) – The Domain Report tool will check Google, Yahoo! Search and Live Search to see how many pages for each site are indexed in each engine.
• Pros: Tally & compare search engine indexing, Determine competitor search presence
• Critiques: No export option, Can take up to 5 minutes
• Cool: Free! Even without ‘Bruce Clay’ subscription
• Cost: FREE
  

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• 5) BackTweets (http://backtweets.com/) – Search for links on Twitter.
• Pros: Search Twitter for links to your site, See’s through compressed URL’s, Sort results by date or user
• Critiques: None
• Cool: Set up regular RSS updates
• Cost: FREE
  

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• 6) Know’em (http://knowem.com/) – KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media websites.
• Pros: Check brand‐name availability for 120 social networks, Very quick and easy!
• Critiques: Occasional network error when pinging site(s)
• Cool: Promote brand cohesiveness, Monitor brand/identity theft, Can automatically register your username for extra$$
• Cost: FREE

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  7) Backlink Checker Tool (http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php) – Enables webmasters to check their pagerank, monitor the PR of competitor’s backlinks, estimate a value of their site, and more.
• Pros: Quickly oversee a site’s backlinks, Show which links have the ‘nofollow’ tag, List anchor text for incoming links as well as their PageRank
• Critiques: Don’t forget the ‘http://’ or it returns no results
• Cool: Smartpagerank.com also has other useful tools
• Cost: FREE

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  8) SpyFu (http://www.spyfu.com/) – Spy on your online competitors and download competitors keywords and adwords.
• Pros: Great competitive insight on PPC & Organic, Works in browser, quick & thorough, Free stuff is good – though you can subscribe for more
• Critiques: Busy interface, Not intuitive as to what a particular button/tool does
• Cool: Dashboard: charts and data mash‐ups
• Cost: FREE plus subscription options

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  9) GSiteCrawler (http://www.spyfu.com/) - Windows Generator for Google SiteMap Files.
• Pros: Crawl simulation provides detailed spidey‐vision, View canonical and duplicate content issues, aborted URLs, page, file sizes and more, Automatic XML sitemap creation
• Critiques: Large sites may take a few hours and need to be run overnight, Crawlers will get stuck in a loop on sites with dynamic URLs
• Cool: One‐stop audit shop, Exports multiple reports
• Cost: FREE

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  10) Google Insights for Search (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#) - With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
• Pros: Identify phrases by topic/brand/category you want to rank on, Geo‐target where to sell your products, Identify product seasonality, Identify if news stories relate to spikes in searches
• Critiques: No “real” search frequency number only relative comparison
• Cool: Breakout tool identifies phrases rising in search frequencies
• Cost: FREE

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  11) Epiar Negative Keywords Lists (http://www.epiar.com/ppc-negative-keyword-lists/) - Negative keyword targeting is becoming increasingly popular to weed out worthless impressions and clicks in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
• Pros: Save 5% to 40% on PPC spend! And maintain/increase sales, Quick! Set of 14 or 19 online questions, Premium NKL custom keyword research per PPC campaig, Instantly generates list of top 2500 or 5000 negative keywords
• Critiques: Not free
• Cool: Premium NKL prioritized: Top 250 for Yahoo! or Top 65 for MSN
• Cost: One time fee; no subscription

What other tools do you find useful to help you manage your online business?

Just like I did yesterday, today I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from today’s workshops. I again stayed mostly to the Geek Track to get really deep on technical issues and tactics to build more traffic. Thank you everyone for the great feedback that you left on the blog from yesterday’s post.

The first workshop that had a lasting impact for me was Information Architecture, Site Performance Tuning and SEO from the Geek Track. Shari Thurow, the founder of Omni Marketing Interactive, discussed site architecture and how to optimize it to perform as quickly as possible. It’s been mentioned a few times at the conference so far that Google will soon (if it’s not already) look at page load time as a factor in your website rankings. If your website takes a long time to load then you won’t rank as high. This is of particular concern to me because as my site has grown, it’s been taking longer and longer to load – fixing the page load time is definitely a high priority item on my task list!

One of Shari’s suggestions was monitor your broken links (are your links working?), crawlability (is your page structure too complicated for Google to follow?), and indexation (are your pages being indexed into Google?).

“It doesn’t matter if you use sub-domains or sub-directories, as long as you do it consistently – pick one and stick with it”

She also advises entrepreneurs to focus your links on what makes sense to the user. Don’t cram websites full of links to try and boost your rankings for those pages. If it doesn’t make sense for the users then the search engines won’t give you the rankings. Also make sure to make your link structure easy to remember. Use your keywords in your URL – it’s better for SEO and people can remember it!

For example, if you had an article on New York real estate you want the link to be www.domain.com/New-York-Real-Estate.html instead of www.domain.com/article.php?id=443. People are more likely to remember and tell people about the article with the keywords in it.

Finally, she discussed sub-domains versus sub-directories. For example, if it would be better to use www.EvanCarmichael.com/Marketing or marketing.EvanCarmichael.com. Her response was that it doesn’t matter if you use sub-domains or sub-directories, as long as you do it consistently – pick one and stick with it. Shari is the author of When Search Meets Web Usability and I’m looking forward to checking out her book and putting her advice to practice!

The next workshop that made an impact was my favourite from last year. It was Tool Time: The Search Marketer’s Free-to-Cheap Goodie Bag from the Nuts & Bolts track. Last year it was my favorite workshop and I was looking forward to coming back this year to cover it. The speakers went over so much information and provided so many useful tools that it was difficult to keep up! I’m going to wait for the slides to be posted to the website and will post my update here as soon as it’s up!

Today was an information filled day with a host of excellent speakers and lively discussion. I stayed mostly in the Geek track and thought I would share some of the valuable information from two of my favorite presentations of the day.

The first workshop I attended was Signals: What Relevancy Indicators Are Search Engineers Watching For Today? One of the panelists was Marios Alexandrou who is a SEO Manager for Acronym Media. The bulk of Marios’ talk was on universal search. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, universal search refers to search engines like Google showing more than 10 blue links when you do a query. Instead you get video results, news results, maps, images etc thrown in as well.

Here is an example using the key word “Paris”

As you can see from the Google search results, three out of the top six results are not the blue text links that we’re used to.

The top result is a Google Map of Paris, France. The #5 result shows videos about Paris from YouTube and the #6 result shows recent news about Paris from Google News.

If website owners were to try and rank for this keyword with a regular webpage, they would only have a one in three chance of doing so because half of the ranked pages are from universal search.

Marios provided the following suggestions for entrepreneurs who are trying to get on page 1 for their important keywords and what universal search can mean for them.

#1 – Can’t get the top spot with a website? Try video!

YouTube videos are frequently popping up into the search engine results and if you optimize the video titles they can often be far easier to rank for than a regular website. If you’re having a hard time getting to that coveted #1 ranking, consider using a video to try and knock off your competition.

#2 – Dominate the rankings – Push out competitors!

So you rank #1 and #2 for your important key words – why not take over another spot in the top 10 with a video and another spot with a Google Maps result and yet another with Google image results? The more your site is featured on that first page the less your competition is going to get. Don’t settle for just the top two spots.

“Page load time will likely be a future factor in search engine rankings – the faster your pages load, the more you will be rewarded with high rankings.”

#3 – Engage more with your users!

Some people love the text content while others prefer the videos, search, maps, and news. By optimizing for all the different universal search categories you can cater to all the different tastes of your potential customers.

Two other interesting thoughts that came out of Marios’ presentation and discussion:

• SearchWiki – Google wants your vote and they are paying attention to how people are using the SearchWiki rating mechanism
• Page load time will likely be a future factor in search engine rankings – the faster your pages load, the more you will be rewarded with high rankings

The other speaker who I really enjoyed hearing today was Mike McDerment. Mike is the CEO & Co-founder of FreshBooks, an online invoicing company that caters to professionals and entrepreneurs.

Mike’s talk was part of the workshop Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions and was special because it was different – he focused on the importance of making your website a business. It’s great to rank well in the search engines but if it doesn’t lead to a lot of business, who cares? Mike shared his story about how his website was originally designed for search engines and he got traffic and did get some customers but he wasn’t where he wanted to be.

“Nobody expects the personal touch from a website and by reaching out FreshBooks generated media attention as well as earned customers for life.”

By switching the design to focus on the customer and not the search engines he was able to see a massive increase in business. Mike is heavily customer-service oriented and has managed to create a 30-person company which truly cares about their clients. He tries to go out of his way to make sure that his customers are happy, which is rare for an online business. His talk reminded me a lot of what Tony Hsieh from Zappos preaches about excellent customer service.

It was refreshing (no pun intended) to hear someone talk about buildling a business and not just how to rank in Google. Some of Mike’s advice included:

• We are all in service businesses, not technology businesses
• Giving outstanding customer experiences should be the main focus of your business
• Relationships with customers is the currency of your success
• Take care of your staff and they will take care of your customers who will take care of your business
• Follow the 4E Mantra of: Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday

Mike also shared a story about a customer of theirs who was on Twitter and mentioned that she was stood up by a date that night. The FreshBooks team, which makes a regular habit of following their customers, responded by Tweeting that they would never stand her up and then sent her flowers. Nobody expects the personal touch from a website and by reaching out FreshBooks generated media attention as well as earned customers for life.

Mike’s session was a reminder that we all need to think about the business of our business, provide outstanding customer service and not just worry about ranking #1 in the search engines.

I’m looking forward to another great day tomorrow and I’ll keep you posted with another update!

“Although bigger isn’t always better, the biggest social media site is the right place to start.  And at 104.1 million unique visitors, Facebook reaches a lot more segments than just college kids these days.”

I’m also fortunate enough to have been able to connect with two of the experts who will be presenting at SES Toronto this year. I asked them about what factors they see as being important for website owners in the year ahead. The two interviewees were Greg Jarboe and Amanda Watlington. Here is a little more about them:

Greg Jarboe

Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization firm, public relations agency and video production company. Founded in 2003, SEO-PR has won a Golden Ruler Award from the Institute for Public Relations and PR News, and was a finalist for SES Awards in three categories: Best Social Media Marketing Campaign, Best Business-to-Business Search Marketing Campaign, and Best Integration of Search with Other Media.

“Over the past year, the change in the search engine world that’s had the biggest impact on my business has been the recognition that the #2 search engine isn’t Yahoo!  It’s YouTube.”

Amanda Watlington

Amanda Watlington is owner of Searching for Profit, a search marketing consultancy focusing on the interaction of the consumer with businesses, using search engines, RSS, blogs, podcasting, or other new media to deliver their messages. An industry thought leader and an internationally-recognized speaker, Amanda has led sessions on search marketing, web strategy, and social media at Search Engine Strategies, Webmaster World, Ad:tech, and DMA. She shares her views of where search marketing is headed on her blog, Blogs and Feeds, and as a blogger for Search Engine Watch.

I asked them both the same questions – here are their answers:

1)      What are you 3 favorite tools website owners should know about that you would consider “hidden gems”?

The first hidden gem is Wordstream. It’s a new keyword tool for taking long keyword lists for search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns and putting them in buckets that are segmented intelligently.  Another hidden gem is Radian6.  It’s an automated solution to monitor and analyze a variety of social media, including blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.  The third tool has been around for a while, but it’s unfortunately a hidden gem: Yahoo! Site Explorer.  It allows you to explore all the pages indexed by Yahoo! Search and find pages that link to that site or any page.

2)      In your opinion, how important is it for website owners to reduce their page load time and do you recommend they enable gzip compression?

I do think reducing page load time is important.  Gzip is a popular data compression program.  It’s main advantage is much better compression.  However, gzip 1.2.4 may crash when an input file is over 1200 characters. (info on gzip compression here: http://www.gzip.org/)

3)      LinkedIn, Twitter,YouTube, Digg, or Facebook? If website owners could only pick one to invest their time into, which would you pick and why?

I could say it depends on your target market, but that would be dodging the question.  Or, I could say YouTube, because I’ve just finished writing a book entitled, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day, but that would be self-serving.  So, I’ll say Facebook.  Why?  According to Compete, Facebook had 104.1 million unique visitors in April 2009, YouTube had 77.8 million, Digg had 37.8 million, Twitter had 19.4 million, and LinkedIn had 12.1 million.  Although bigger isn’t always better, the biggest social media site is the right place to start.  And at 104.1 million unique visitors, Facebook reaches a lot more segments than just college kids these days.  Plus, with more than 52,000 Facebook apps, there are countless ways to connect with social networks of friends and family.

4)      What change in the search engine world over the past year has had the biggest impact on your business?

Over the past year, the change in the search engine world that’s had the biggest impact on my business has been the recognition that the #2 search engine isn’t Yahoo!  It’s YouTube.  According to comScore qSearch, there were 9.8 billion expanded search queries in the U.S. during April 2009 on Google, 3.2 billion on YouTube, and 3.1 billion on Yahoo!  That’s game changing.  We’ve also found that video content can generate more links and higher rankings than text content.    In fact, The Technorati Attention Index for May 14, 2009, shows the top site with the highest number of blogs linking to it in the past 30 days was YouTube with 60,644, followed by The New York Times with 17,374,  guardian.co.uk with 8,039, The Wall Street Journal with 7,513, and The Washington Post with 6,891.  What does this mean to search engine marketers?  You are more likely to see a YouTube video in the top results pages than a news story, blog post, or website page.  That’s a change with a big impact.

5)      Which session (apart from yours) are you most looking forward to at SES Toronto and why?

I’m looking forward to the keynote by Emanuel Rosen.  I’ve read his book, “The Anatomy of Buzz,” and can’t wait to hear about his latest book, “The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited.”  As for one of the conference sessions, I’m looking forward to “How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively with Your IT Department to Get Things Done.”  Why can’t we all just get along?

1)      What are you 3 favorite tools website owners should know about that you would consider “hidden gems”?

There are lots of tools that a website owner should know about. I personally advocate trying a large number of tools and then determining which suits the individual’s workflow best. Here are three tools that I consider really powerful: Spyfu for keyword research. It is an excellent second line of research that enhances and enriches the data gathered from Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker. With Spyfu, I particularly like the Keyword Kombat feature that lets me clearly see comparative strengths and weaknesses relative to competitors. A second tool that I consider valuable is Crazy Egg. I use this tool on a regular basis to check how users are interacting with my pages. This gives me quite a few insights into how I can improve conversion and improve the user’s experience.  I must include in my tool kit the Web Developer Plug-in for Firefox. It is a super tool for analyzing sites. I use this in conjunction with YSlow to understand how a site is performing.

2)      In your opinion, how important is it for website owners to reduce their page load time and do you recommend they enable gzip compression?

Page load time is important for both users and search engines. Users want to receive the information immediately and are increasingly impatient. Speed issues also impact search. Every site has a “crawl budget,” and performance issues can impede how much of a large site is crawled. Managing performance is essential to indexing for large sites. Gzip compression is a recommended speed enhancement. The choice and recommendation would, of course, depend on the site. As I indicated above I use YSlow as part of my tools for evaluating sites. Speed is an issue.

“If I was looking to promote my business, YouTube is the place that I would choose to target. Twitter is the current media darling, but I’m not sure that I would recommend it at this time over YouTube.”

3)      LinkedIn, Twitter,YouTube, Digg, or Facebook? If website owners could only pick one to invest their time into, which would you pick and why?

My choice would be YouTube since the sheer volume of traffic that comes to the site is so huge. YouTube’s traffic is the second largest online. It is also readily optimizable so the site owner can ensure take measures to get maximum performance from their videos. If I was looking to promote my business, YouTube is the place that I would choose to target. Twitter is the current media darling, but I’m not sure that I would recommend it at this time over YouTube. As a professional, I would urge the website owner to have a personal LinkedIn account and a Facebook page. Both are good networking tools. I personally prefer LinkedIn.

4)      What change in the search engine world over the past year has had the biggest impact on your business?

The biggest impacts have come from the global recession. As a result I have seen an increase in the demand for SEO services as businesses that previously were prepared to spend lots of money on SEM are now reconsidering the virtues of SEO.  Many are taking budget from other marketing efforts to put them into SEO and SEM. There is also an increasing demand that search deliver results.

5)      Which session (apart from yours) are you most looking forward to at SES Toronto and why?

I am keenly interested in the future and use conferences to tune up my radar for what is the next big thing. For this reason I am looking forward to the session entitled “Follow the Carrot: Cool Mobile Apps.” As search migrates to the phone we all need to understand mobile marketing. Overall, the session line up is so good that it will be difficult to chose one session vs. another being held at the same time. I am moderating the session “SEO Then & Now: What’s the Same? What’s New?” which should be very interesting, but at the same time there is also a session entitled “Signals: What Relevancy Indicators Are Search Engineers Watching For Today?” that should be an excellent forward-looking session. Overall, this should be a terrific conference.

Thank you to both Greg and Amanda for spending the time to answer these questions. To learn more from them you can always attend SES Toronto! If you’re planning on coming out let me know and we can have lunch together.