Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Win of the Week: Getting Back to the Basics of Benefits & Specifics Produces 225% Gain

Take a look at the two ads below. If you were an avid collector of luxury watches, which ad do you think you'd click on?

 

PPC Ad #1
Watches - Ad #1
PPC Ad #2
Watches - Ad #2

 

The ads are fairly unique. The URLs are the same, but everything else is different. Which ad do you think generated more than three times as many clicks?

Made your decision?

The winning ad is ad number one. It was written by BoostCTR writer "brescia33," and it increased CTR by 225%. Where the original ad was getting 1 click, the new ad is getting 3.25 clicks, more than TRIPLE the original ad's performance.

So why did the new ad win? And why did it win by so much? Let's take a look...

The Original Ad

The original ad is somewhat vague. After reading it, I'm not really sure why I should click the ad or what's going to happen when I do.

If the only benefit is to "show off" my watch collection, why would I take the time to do that? Why should I "broadcast my style"? To whom will I be broadcasting it?

Unless I'm a vain person who likes to show off for the sake of showing off, I'm unlikely to click on this ad -- even if I do have a killer collection of luxury watches! (Side note: I only have one watch. It's a solar-powered watch I got for $70 on Amazon.)

Because the original ad is vague... and the primary benefit will not appeal to most collectors... it fails to generate as much interest.

The Winning Ad

The winning ad gets more specific. After reading it, I know three things: 1. I will find luxury watches for sale. 2. I will be able to show off my watches to other collectors. 3. I will be able to sell my watches if I want to.

It doesn't take a mathematician to see that the winning ad includes three benefits where the original ad only includes one. On this basis alone, the new ad is much stronger.

But there's more...

What do watch collectors most want to do? Expand their collections, of course! By advertising the opportunity to buy up more luxury watches, the winning ad hits the watch collector's core motivation right away.

Plus, the winning ad answers the nagging question: With whom will I be sharing my most prized timepieces? After all, it wouldn't make sense to show off your watches to somebody who knows nothing about watches. So the detail about "fellow collectors" is actually very important.

Fellow watch collectors are the only people on earth who will understand and appreciate the value of your collection. And so the winning ad -- with just two words -- creates a sense of community with people who might otherwise be hard to connect with.

Be Specific & Avoid Vague Slogans

You must always be specific in your advertising.

The slogan "Broadcast Your Style" might be appropriate when paired with a company logo, but it's not appropriate for a PPC ad targeting a specific search phrase on Google.

If a searcher has to think too hard to figure out what you're trying to communicate, he'll just move on to the next ad. Clarity and specificity are king when it comes to PPC advertising.

What do you notice about this ad contest? Feel free to leave a comment below.

By the Way...

The BoostCTR writers are chomping at the bit to improve your ads. They've collectively spent thousands of hours improving pay-per-click ads on both Google and Facebook. They increase CTR and conversions by 30% on average, sometimes as much as 225% or more. Best part: You can put 'em to work... risk-free for 30 days!

ryan-healy About the Author: Ryan Healy is a direct response marketer and BoostCTR writer. Since 2002, he has worked with scores of clients, including Alex Mandossian, Terry Dean, and Pulte Homes. He writes a popular blog about copywriting, business growth, and lifestyle design. See his 2012 business predictions here.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/11/getting-back-to-basics-raises-ctr

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SEO Lemons

Sharing is caring!

Please share :)

Embed code is here.

SEO Market for Lemons.

You can embed the above graphic on your website here.

Have feedback? Please contribute in the comments.

Thanks to John Andrews for highlighting the above industry trend.

Categories: 

Source: http://www.seobook.com/seo-lemons

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Social Media Coordinator / EF EDUCATION FIRST / Toronto, ON, Canada

EF EDUCATION FIRST/Toronto, ON, Canada

Passionate about travel? A world of opportunity awaits you at EF Educational Tours!

As a result of the continued growth of the student educational travel industry, we are expanding our Marketing Team to include a Social Media Coordinator.

This is your chance to convert your skills in marketing and passion for travel into rewards and success in a fun and energetic organization that respects, supports and rewards its team members. Why wait to earn a competitive salary, generous vacation time, travel advantages and full benefits? Take advantage of this opportunity and have it all now.

The company:

EF Educational Tours is a leading international private education company offering teacher-led educational tours to students for more than 40 years. EF tours enhance student's learning by enabling them to experience first-hand the world's best historic, cultural and natural sights. With a progressive business model, a dynamic environment, and a strong vision for continued growth, EF is currently seeking a Social Media Coordinator for EF's Toronto office.

The position: The Social Media Coordinator will assist in creating the strategy, managing and growing the EF Educational Tours Canada presence through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other strategically relevant online properties. There will be a heavy emphasis on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube as well as our company blog.

This position is located in Toronto, and will report to our Vice President, Web and Digital Marketing. The position requires travel to Boston.

Responsibilities include:

Assist in defining our overall strategy and lead efforts to drive customer engagement through social media efforts.
Respond to comments and customer service questions on our social channels and other sites.
Manage day-to-day relationship with internal/external partners as needed
Provide in-depth reporting and analysis of all social media marketing performance
Stay abreast of industry trends, competitors and best practices
Regular travel to Boston is required.

Your qualifications:

2-4 years of applicable work experience.
Firm understanding of the Digital landscape
Demonstrated success in managing products and programs in highly competitive and growing markets.
Results-oriented, attention to detail, ability to prioritize and meet aggressive deadlines
Must be able to thrive in a team environment
Knowledge HTML is a plus, but not required
Ability to juggle multiple projects simultaneously in a fast environment
Excellent verbal, written and presentation skills.
Online marketing experience in the travel or educational industry is a plus
Marketing/Advertising Agency experience a plus but not required.
Broad understanding and experience in online marketing tactics.
Proven history of initiative, creativity and self-direction
Bachelor's degree require

EF Educational Tours Canada Web Properties:

www.eftours.ca www.efvoyages.ca www.efschooltrips.ca

Compensation: You would earn a competitive base salary plus bonuses. You would enjoy 3 weeks of vacation in your first year with the company and 4 weeks in the second year. You also would be entitled to full health and dental benefits.

Does this sound like you?

Then a world of opportunity awaits! Join a winning team and start growing with a great organization.

Apply To Job

Source: http://jobs.searchenginejournal.com/job/social-media-coordinator-toronto-on-canada-ef-education-first-dd969a8e38/?d=1&source=rss_page

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Supporting U.S. student veterans with a new scholarship

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/1lUVdC8-1Qo/supporting-us-student-veterans-with-new.html

seo experts search engine marketing sem experts search engine optimization internet marketing

Supporting U.S. student veterans with a new scholarship

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/1lUVdC8-1Qo/supporting-us-student-veterans-with-new.html

seo experts search engine marketing sem experts search engine optimization internet marketing

5 Blog Redesign Mistakes That Kill SEO

SEO, when done right, never interferes with web design, but sometimes redesigning a site can unknowingly interfere with search engine optimization. This is why teamwork among SEOs, designers, marketers and developers is critical during a blog redesign process.

Here are 5 common web design mistakes that kill search engine optimization:

1. High-traffic pages are removed or deleted

The blog redesign process often identifies site content that is no longer a priority, but pages should never be deleted. Older blog posts often bring in a high volume of traffic, and those aged URLs create domain authority and page authority for organic search traffic. Instead of removing pages, protect your SEO and visitor experience by using 301 permanent redirects to ensure visitors via organic search and referral sources can still find relevant content.

2. Top-level keyword terms are omitted from new copy

Assuming you are following SEO best practices for copywriting, this won't be an issue. But too often the blog redesign process forgets to take into account previous keyword research, and text is altered without undergoing an SEO review. The top 3 essential SEO copywriting elements to review (and likely maintain through the blog redesign) are title tags, meta-descriptions, and on-page content like subheadings, bolded text and anchor text for links.

3. The new design does not leave enough room for copy

On January 19, 2012, Google announced a page layout algorithm improvement that looks at the web design layout and the amount of content above the fold. Blog redesigns that emphasize images and ads in the top half of the page mean valuable real estate for great copy is diminished, hence hurting your search engine optimization. Visitors who need to scroll down the page to see the content often decide to bounce, immediately returning to search results. This negative signal indicates to search engines that your content should be downgraded in the results. Avoid this by ensuring the web design allows for adequate room for copy in the top half of the page.

4. The beautiful design takes longer to load

A blog redesign might introduce Flash, a heavy image-based design, too many externally referenced files or extraneous code, all of which can slow down page load times and annoy users. Site performance and bounce rates due to slow load times should be monitored and fixed as needed. Webmaster tools for Google or Bing are useful tools for tracking site speed and page load times.

5. CMS changes affect URLs

Different programming languages and content management systems can affect the URL structure and file extensions used on the blog. These changes?in addition to folder structure changes, which are commonly introduced when categories are changed or removed?should be handled using 301 permanent redirects from the old URL to the new URL.

As you can see, it is easy to unintentionally introduce a blog redesign that negatively impacts search engine optimization. For this reason, it is highly recommended that you bring all partners to the table during the redesign process so that you can reap the benefits of a great web design while ensuring your search engine optimization remains stable or improves.

Considering search engine optimization factors during the blog redesign process should ultimately leave you less stressed at the site launch, and save you money ? avoiding SEO problems is much easier than fixing them. Don't paint yourself into a corner by redesigning without SEO planning and keyword research.

About the Author

Monica SherrettMonique Sherrett is the owner of Boxcar Marketing, a Vancouver-based online marketing company that handles online marketing projects related to blogging, content strategy, search marketing and web design. For free advice, follow the Boxcar Marketing blog or Twitter @boxcarmarketing. Or ask for a quote on your online marketing project by emailing monique at boxcarmarketing.com.

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/31/blog-redesign-mistakes-that-kill-seo

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Businesses That Blog Generate 2X More Email Traffic [New Data]

peanut butter and jellyintroductory3

Peanut butter and jelly, Brad and Angelina, sun and sand, puddles and boots, blogging and email. What do these all have in common?

They’re all better together!

A new study of over 6,000 HubSpot customers shows that among those who use email marketing, companies that blog get 2X more traffic from their email than those that don’t. In this data, "Email Traffic" includes two main sources: traffic from traditional email marketing and lead nurturing campaigns, and traffic from blog post email alerts (emails to people who subscribe to the blog via email).

These numbers show that blog emails and traditional emails from customers who blog, taken as a whole, generate more traffic than traditional emails from customers who don't blog.

email traffic and blogging data

Interpreting the Data

Email traditionalists might look at this finding and say, "Bah! You're conflating two types of email. Of course emails from blogs are going to generate more traffic! Content isn't that important to traditional email marketing."

But this is old-school thinking. Look at the critique closely. That emails from blogs are going to generate more traffic is intuitive to most marketers -- yet many of those marketers continue to pump out traditional emails bereft of engaging content. Blog emails work because they include remarkable content. Include equivalent content in your traditional email marketing -- and repurpose the quality blog content you already have -- and your engagement will shoot up.

Marketing Takeaway

As a marketer, I think this study has a simple takeaway: if you want to make email work, you need to focus on the content.

How do you focus on content? Create a blog that covers topics your buyer personas find useful, and come up with creative ways to repurpose that blog content (as well as content from other assets like videos, ebooks and webinars) in your emails. A good example of this is the State of Inbound Marketing Report we included in one of our HubSpot emails, featured below.

describe the image

If you want to learn more about creating a great blog or creating compelling email offers, read this business blogging ebook, and our introduction to email marketing. And it's important marketers invest in the quality of their email content considering the rapid depreciation of email lists. Approximately 25% of your email list expires every year, and you'll have trouble rebuilding it (or even see more rapid rates of depreciation) without investing in consistently creating quality content. Or worse, you could become addicted to the crack of purchased email lists.

If you don't believe me, just read the story of this marketer who set off to do sophisticated email marketing -- marketing automation, actually -- without the right kind of content. The results were catastrophic. As he said, "We ... quickly discovered that marketing automation is a beast – it devours content. If you don’t feed it, it dies."

What types of blog and email marketing content do you find the most effective?

Image credit: spcbrass

killer-marketing-content-ebook

Connect with HubSpot:

HubSpot on Twitter HubSpot on Facebook HubSpot on LinkedIn HubSpot on Google Buzz 

 

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HubSpot/~3/2H9SALkILhU/Businesses-That-Blog-Generate-2X-More-Email-Traffic-New-Data.aspx

web hosting seo experts search engine marketing sem experts search engine optimization

5-Step Guide for Creating & Optimizing Video Content that Ranks on Google: Part 2

Part 2: Optimizing YouTube Videos

Yesterday we posted Part 1 of this guide, which discussed:

Today we cover Part 2of the 5-Step Guide For Creating & Optimizing Video Content that Ranks on Google, in which we continue with:

While Part One of the guide deals primarily with video content creation ideas and recording your video content, Part Two covers how to upload and optimize your videos on YouTube so that they rank as high as possible on search engines.

Step 3: VSEO: SEO for Videos

Google normally "scans" the text of a page to figure out what a piece of content is about. But Googlebots can?t actually watch videos to determine their subject matter, so VSEO relies heavily on what Google can recognize: your video titles and descriptions.optimizing-video-content

Your VSEO work starts after you upload your video. Search-optimize your YouTube videos through the:

  1. Title - Conduct some keyword research and find the keywords you want to associate with your video, using your top keywords in the title.

Continuing with the winter scarves example, I might have a title along the lines of ?How to Wear a Winter Scarf: 4 Stylish Scarf Tying Techniques,? which has two long-tail keywords: ?how to wear a winter scarf? and ?scarf tying techniques,? which I got when I popped ?winter scarf? into my keyword discovery tool. Remember, long-tail is just as valuable for VSEO as regular SEO.

  1. Description - For the description, it?s smart to include a link at the beginning and end of your description, giving viewers multiple chances to get to your site. Create a paragraph description with your top SEO keyword discreetly imbedded. Throw a call to action in there as well.

  1. Tags ? In the tags section, put in your keywords and variants. To tag phrases with more than one word, enclose the keywords in quotes, such as: scarf, scarves, ?winter scarf,? ?cozy winter scarves?

  1. Location Tagging ? Once your video is uploaded, tag your business?s location. This allows your video to be uploaded to Google Maps and Google Places, letting you be included in those search results as well.

  1. Captions and Subtitles ? Uploading closed captions and subtitles is another handy way to add crawlable SEO text to your videos.

  1. Thumbnail ? Make sure the thumbnail you choose for your video is interesting and stands out.

  1. YouTube Profile ? Don?t forget to focus some of your SEO energy towards your YouTube profile. Include your URL in the profile as well as ?follow? links for your blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc. in the ?About Me? section.

Step 4: VSEO On Your Site

Once you have your video up on YouTube, you?ll probably want to have it embedded on different pages of your website too.

Don?t forget to submit a sitemap. Submitting a video sitemap is another important way of letting Google know about your video content and getting it indexed correctly. Build a sitemap for each video and submit it to Google; it boosts your ranking and tells search engines the content of the video, where the video is on your site, and its original spot on YouTube.

You can easily submit a video sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools.

Also make sure to have a robots.txt file that includes your XML and video sitemaps. The robots.txt file tells search engines what to index and verifies to Google that the locations you?ve submitted do in fact exist.

Step 5: Getting Your Video Noticed

  • Sharing and Liking: Start off by promoting your video the way you would any other web content?share your video on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
  • Video Reply: Try submitting your video as a ?video reply? to other related videos, which brings traffic and further establishes to YouTube the subject of your video.
  • Link to Your Video: Your site will have your video embedded or will be linking to it on YouTube, but you?ll need outside links to your video as well. Use the link building techniques you?d use with regular web content. One technique is to see who is linking to the top videos in your category and then reach out to those sites asking if they?d be interested in linking to your video.
  • Blog About Your Video: One easy way to get a link to your newly established YouTube video is to write a blog post centered around the topic of your video, and then link to your video in the post. Also consider writing something you could submit as a guest post?as long as you are writing some quality content, there are plenty of venues that would welcome a post with a video.

 

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.

Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/11/rank-on-google-with-video-content-part-two

clickbank experts copywriting experts internet business link popularity link exchange

Social Media & Communications Manager / Directed Electronics / Greater San Diego, CA

Directed Electronics/Greater San Diego, CA

Summary:
The line between traditional �??Press�? and Social communication is ever evolving and changing. This key position directs these areas with vision and passion, while delivering measurable results for the company. Position is responsible for all communications between Directed and our various audiences (Trade, Consumer, Sales, etc) and mediums (web, print, POP, sales collateral). This position is the �??voice�? of Directed, ensuring consistency of message and details regardless of the audience and mediums. The ability to work in a fun, fast pace environment that demands results is a must. If you have a passion for communication and gadgets, this is the position for you.

Duties and Responsibilities:

�?� Responsible for all communications between Directed and various audiences and mediums
�?� Actively monitoring and managing all social communication touch points
�?� Creating online �??BUZZ�? to bring additional consumer and PR exposure to our various products and services
�?� Daily outreach to press to help maximize Directed's exposure for products and services (minimum 2 hours per day)
�?� Create, receive approval and distribute all press releases
�?� Exceptional writing skills: with the ability to change writing styles to suit the specific audience
�?� Work collaboratively with senior executives in the organization
�?� Create consumer and trade copy for various products and services (highly technical)
�?� Proof reading (grammar and technical)
�?� Additional tasks and responsibilities to be defined by the Vice President of Marketing
�?� Responsible for content, writing, and publishing Sales Manger weekly update, which includes data-basing questions from the sales manager, and retrieving answers from the appropriate departments
�?� Main point of contact for Trade and Consumer Press outreach
�?� Create video scripts, work with in-house and outside resources
�?� Available for on-air press opportunity coverage (experienced public speaker, charismatic presenter)
�?� Media and advertising buys, competitive analysis, monitoring advertising ROI
�?� Create text and message for sales collateral and product information sheets
�?� Updating product descriptions and images on Directed's various consumer and trade websites
�?� Ability to travel as needed, and dedicated to delivering projects on time
�?� Responsible for creating control documents and procedures as necessary
�?� Working with creative director to ensure message and recommended imagery are communicated effectively
�?� Interacts with consumers and dealers for highly elevated complaints, owning the issue and driving a quick resolution
�?� Creates and executes company email campaigns
�?� Basic level of market research and analysis


Experience:
Proven track record of creating social communication campaigns and generating online press coverage
Minimum 3 years online marketing experience, preferably with an agency
Minimum 5 years PR experience, preferably with an agency
Ability to manage and execute on numerous projects at the same time

Education:
Bachelors Degree in: Marketing, English, Business or communications
Certified in Microsoft Office Suite


Apply To Job

Source: http://jobs.searchenginejournal.com/job/social-media-communications-manager-greater-san-diego-ca-directed-electronics-d12d7b877e/?d=1&source=rss_page

seo experts search engine marketing sem experts search engine optimization internet marketing

SEO Lemons

Sharing is caring!

Please share :)

Embed code is here.

SEO Market for Lemons.

You can embed the above graphic on your website here.

Have feedback? Please contribute in the comments.

Thanks to John Andrews for highlighting the above industry trend.

Categories: 

Source: http://www.seobook.com/seo-lemons

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Buzzstream Review: How Does it Measure Up?

Buzzstream recently rolled out a beautiful UI update and I've been impressed with their offering for awhile now.

We like to review products which we ourselves use , as well as products that we feel are impressive. For me, Buzzstream fits both of those characteristics.

Buzzstream is a tool that I am fully adding to my toolset for 2012 and I think you should give it a shot as well.

What is Buzzstream?

Buzzstream has two products:

  • Buzzstream for Link Building
  • Buzzstream for Social Media

We will be focusing on the link building tool in this post. Buzzstream for Link Building focuses solely on link building functionality from soup (prospecting) to nuts (tracking, reporting, relationship management).

One of my favorite aspects of this tool is it's dedicated nature. It focuses on making link building more collaborative, more scalable, and more effective. It does all three quite well and reinforces the belief that sometimes a dedicated tool is the answer.

Why Buzzstream for Link Building?

Link building has come so far in recent years with respect to things like degree of difficulty, requirements of quality, as well as the need to track links and manage relationships.

Link building is such a key piece of an online marketing campaign (not just passing link juice but bringing in targeted, quality traffic and building up brand equity) to the point where I think having a robust tool for it makes a lot of sense; especially when you can use a tool like Buzzstream for it.

Here are some of the key features of Buzzstream that we'll be covering here:

  • Link Prospecting
  • Link Reporting and Tracking
  • Contact Management
  • IMAP Email Integration
  • Buzzmarker - Link Bookmarking Tool

Buzzstream Dashboard

The dashboard gives you a good, high-level overview of your account's history and tasks.

You can filter the history by:

  • Showing complete history (notes, emails, twitter, logged calls, blog comments)
  • One of the above mentioned history fields
  • Show for all projects or a specific project
  • All items for/from a user or for/from a specific user

The filtering capabilities are solid and make project spot checks very easy. For a quick export of your history, in .csv format just click on the folder to the left of the task area (in the right column).

Here is what the dashboard looks like:

To the right of the history pane is the task pane as well as recently viewed link prospects. The task pane also offers some good filtering capabilities:

I like the clean, visual look of the dashboard as well as the quick and helpful filtering capabilities. If you are running multiple campaigns with multiple members involved then I think you'll quickly appreciate the way Buzzstream has structured their dashboard.

Link Prospecting

To begin your link prospecting search, you can go to the Websites link and jump right in.

Then click on the Prospects icon to start your research. Here, you will need to set up a profile and up to 20 keywords and keyphrases for the search. I usually name the search after the main keyword I'm looking for, so in this case we'll rock SEO Tools and I'll throw in a couple more specific keywords for the search function.

In addition to prospecting you can specifically search the following countries:

  • USA
  • Canada
  • France
  • Germany
  • Ireland
  • Israel
  • Japan
  • Mexico
  • Netherlands
  • South Africa
  • Sweden
  • Spain
  • UK

You also have your choice between website results, news results, and blog results under the Search Type option.

Also, you can have this auto-run daily for new results (which is a great feature!) as well as have notifications sent to a specific person (you or a team member or contractor) when new results arrive.

If you no longer wish to receive results but want to save the search for later, just click the inactive button and reactivate when needed.

Another cool feature here is the blacklist feature. Dump in sites you wish to exclude from your searches on a per project or account-level basis. This is extremely helpful for streamlining new prospecting searches across your entire account. Block out competitors, your other properties, sites you know you'll never get a link from, etc).

Working With Link Prospects

When you open the profile again you are presented with the results.

The results come with default columns but you can click the Columns icon to play with tons and tons of additional, useful options

Click on that and get all these column options:

Buzzstream Data

  • Website
  • Assigned To
  • About
  • Most Recent Activity
  • Primary Contact
  • Job Title
  • Tags
  • Relationship Stage
  • RSS Feed
  • Links
  • Type

Dates

  • Date Added
  • Date Added To Project
  • Last Modified (any project)
  • Last Modified (this project)
  • Last Viewed (any project)
  • Last Viewed (this project)
  • Last Communication Date

Metrics

  • Followers (twitter)
  • Following (twitter)
  • Updates (twitter)
  • PageRank
  • Compete (UV/mo)
  • Inbound Links - SeoMoz
  • MozRank
  • Juice Passing Links
  • Domain Age
  • Overall Rating
  • Domain Authority

Address

  • Address Type
  • Address Line1
  • Address Line2
  • City
    State
    Zip
  • Country

Social Networks

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Google Plus

Contact Info

  • Preferred Contact Method
  • Email
  • Phone
  • "Contact Us" URL
  • Suggested Profile Info

Prospecting Metrics (for keywords in your search)

  • Highest SERP Position
  • Average SERP Position
  • SERP Count - Top 10
  • SERP Count - Top 20

Buzzstream does a good job here of giving you control over so many different options. The other nice thing here is you can add a bunch of metrics or customize whatever you want, do a quick export, and set everything back to normal if you don't want or need all these metrics every time.

Here's a snippet of what the results look like with no filtering:

From here you can do all sorts of filtering with just about all of the options I outlined above. You can also click on a specific link and manage it at any point:

From here you can do just about anything:

  • Add a task, tag or note
  • Assign it to someone
  • Update the relationship stage
  • Rate the link
  • Put your own custom field in there
  • Copy or move it to another project (love this feature)
  • Remove it from the project
  • Check the WhoIS information
  • Approve it for the project
  • Add to your block list

Also, you can see the Twitter, FB, email, and phone icons next to each link. Buzzstream will pull those in when available. You can also add a site yourself but clicking the Add Site button where you can add as much or as little info as you have or want:

What I like to do is update the search with all the SEO related metrics and then filter (not looking for addresses or anything at this point, just SEO metrics).

Here are the filtering options:

The options pretty much cover everything you can add as a metric to their prospect results page. You can also create a specific filter and save it for future use (a big time saver for ongoing prospect research).

Once you are done filtering out the junk you can begin to work the prospect list by:

  • Assigning it to an employee or contractor or yourself :)
  • Updating the contact history by adding notes about contact history
  • Update the relationship stage

Once the link is secured you can simply add it to the tracking and reporting component by clicking on the link and selecting "approve".

There are so many filtering options and editing options, as mentioned above, that I really encourage you to get in there and play around with it. You can customize it to fit your specific link building needs (big or small) which is a really nice feature to have (a tool that can scale up or down with you and your business).

Link Reporting and Tracking

I went ahead and approved the link-assistant.com domain as being a link I recently secured. To work with approved links you just need to move on over to the Links tab:

Again, you have a ton of filtering options here:

Buzzstream, via the Column tab, gives you lots of helpful data on a per link basis to help with overall link management and reporting:

You can also import all your links by clicking the import tab (Buzzstream gives you a template to use for this right from the import dialog box)

From here the next logical step is to set up link tracking to automatically notify you of any changes to links you are tracking.

Link Tracking

Buzzstream offers automated and manual link tracking. Buzzstream will let you track the following link data types via their automated backlink checker (this runs every 2 weeks) and manual link checker:

  • Newly verified links
  • Links that have changed (anchor text, no-follow, and so on)
  • Links that have been removed
  • Previous linking pages that are 404's
  • Cache Date

You can select who receives this report, and the manual report via email. Manual reports can be completed by going to the links tab and clicking on the Run Backlink Checker Icon:

The report is then delivered to the specified email address (can be changed in project settings) in short order (longer for bigger checks of course).

I would recommend targeting the more important links here. There is a lot of churn on the web and link tracking tools, that are cloud based, do have tracking limits (Buzzstream comes in at 500 links for the basic plan, 25,000 for their Plus, and 100,000 for their Premium Plan). They also have a solo plan for 1 user and up to 1,500 tracked links.

They offer custom plans as well.

Link Reporting

The link reporting is good and is one area where I think they can use some improvement (ability to spit out anchor text distribution reports, upload logos,
automated report emailing, etc).

To generate a report you click on the pie (mmmmm pie) icon on the Links page:

Once you click there you get 2 options:

Link Report - reporting on link opportunities and completed links

Spend Report - reporting on the cost of links that cost money

Here is the dialog box for the Links Report:

Export options are PDF, HTML, and XML for Word and Excel.

The Spend Report is clean and simple to read, here is the dialog box for that:

The reports are quick to generate and clean. I think if they add some more customization options it will be a homerun; it's still better than most reporting options out there.

Keeping Up with Contacts

You can store, add, and access key contacts and their contact information within the People tab

Buzzstream People Tab

As with their other options there is a wide variety of filtering and column customization capability to help you slice, dice, and keep track of key contacts within a specific project (or through an entire account).

You can add in pertinent contact info like their name, numbers, associated websites, social network information, and so on. You can also keep a history of calls, notes, and emails (more on emails in a minute) right inside the contact's information center:

Buzzstream Contact Dialgo

IMAP Email Integration for Conversation Tracking

This is one of my favorite features. You can configure Buzzstream to automatically populate contact history on your link outreach campaigns:

Buzzstream Email Feature

If you are managing a team, or just your own link campaign really, this is a great feature to have. In addition to the other contact management features I mentioned above, this feature adds another layer of helpful contact management. Having CRM functionality inside of a link building tool is quite helpful when we talk about things like scaling link building campaigns and managing teams

When you add your email account you can also send email from Buzzstream. You can select any number of "People" or contacts that you want and work through them one by one by creating an email template (see below) and quickly customizing it to the specific person you are targeting

Using canned responses in Gmail is similar but the difference here is the integration with Buzzstream and the ease of going right through a selected list of contacts (and having it saved in their contact history automatically).

Buzzstream Outreach

Lots of people use BuzzStream as a database of all their prospects/partners and then slice and dice them for campaigns. So, for example, suppose you are trying to secure guest posts. You go to All Contacts (contacts for your whole account, not just one project) and select everything tagged "finance" that's a "guest post" type and that's linked to you in the past.

After that, you take those contacts of known finance guest post opportunities, copy them to a new project and then work that list. You cover a lot of this in your filter descriptions. Essentially, use the tagging and filtering system to build your own database for rinse and repeat solutions.

You can also track Twitter stuff (which can get out of hand quickly in terms of back and forth contact, real time) and works the same way as Buzzstream's IMAP integration.

For the Twitter tracking you can basically import a bunch of twitter lists into BuzzStream, start retweeting their content and then filter to find everyone you've retweeted three days ago (filter by: Communication History=tweet, contact modified=3 days ago).

Save this filter and you have a list of people to follow up with on a regular basis. You can then send a template-based email that refers to the retweet and use that as a quick in to perhaps securing a link opportunity.

The Buzzmarker

Buzzstreams' Buzzmarker gives you the ability to save a prospect's information from any browser. To set up the Buzzmarker you just go into your settings and drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar :D

Buzzstream Outreach

Here is a snippet of the Buzzmarker dialog box:

Buzzstream Outreach

Anytime you come across news stories, blog posts, and Twitter feeds that you want to store for future work inside of Buzzstream all you do is click on the Buzzmarker

The Buzzmarker pulls in lots of information and gives you options to do a variety of things like:

  • Add a task for the clipping
  • The ability to gather and note link information like acquistion method and link type, also checks to see if the site is linking to you already
  • Add contact info and social media profiles
  • Links through to contact info search in Google, Pipl, as well as Twitter and Linkedin Profile search via Google, Twellow, and Linkedin

Give Buzzstream a Shot

If you are looking for a strong link building tool which incorporates any of the features below, you should give Buzzstream a try:

  • Built in Link Prospecting
  • CRM Functionality
  • Scalability
  • Ease of Use
  • Permission and Access Control for Teams
  • Link Tracking and Reporting

Buzzstream is a quality link building and link management tool that is certainly worth trying out if you are engaged in link building activity. The reporting is stronger than most other options out there but I think they can do even better with it after seeing what they've done on the inside. If you do try them out let us know what you think in the comments!

Take it for spin, they have free trials available over at Buzzstream.Com.

Source: http://www.seobook.com/comprehensive-review-buzzstream

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February Linkscape Update: 66 Billion URLs

Posted by randfish

After some wrestling with Amazon's EC2 and the tragic loss of many hard disks therein, we've finally finished processing and have released the latest Linkscape update (previously scheduled for Feb. 14). This new index is, once again, quite large in comparison to our prior indices, and contains a mix of crawl data going back to the end of last year. In fact, this is technically our largest index ever!

Here are the latest stats:

  • 65,997,728,692 (66 billion) URLs
  • 601,062,802 (601 million) Subdomains
  • 140,281,592 (140 million) Root Domains
  • 739,867,470,316 (740 billion) Links
  • Followed vs. Nofollowed
    • 2.21% of all links found were nofollowed
    • 57.91% of nofollowed links are internal
    • 42.09% are external
  • Rel Canonical - 11.11% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
  • The average page in this index has 71.88 links on it
    • 60.98 internal links on average
    • 10.90 external links on average  

We also ran our correlation metrics against a large set of Google search results and saw very similar data to last round. Here are the latest numbers using mean Spearman correlation coefficients (on a scale of 0 to 1, higher is better):

  • Domain Authority: 0.26
  • Page Authority: 0.37
  • MozRank of a URL: 0.19
  • # of Linking Root Domains to a URL: 0.26

Our evaluation process also check the comprehensiveness of our crawl data against a large set of Google results, and in this index, we've got link data on 82.09% of SERPs. This is slightly down from last month's 82.37%, which we suspect is a result of the late release. Crawl data ages with the web, and new URLs make their way into the SERPs, too. To help visualize our crawl, here's a histogram of when the URLs in this index were seen by Linkscape:

Crawl Historgram for Feb. 28th Index

We always "replace" any older URLs with newer content if we recrawl or see new links to a page, so while there may be some "old, crusty" stuff from December, the vast majority of this index was crawled in mid-to-late January.

In the next few weeks, we're working on a new, experimental index that may be massively larger (2-3X) this one, and closer to what's in Google's main index at scale. This is very exciting for us and we hope, for all of you who use Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, the Linkscape API and tools from our partners like Hubspot, Conductor, Brightedge and our newest API partner, Ginza Metrics (check out some cool stuff they're doing with Moz data here and in the screenshot below).

Ginza Metrics Backlink Tool
Ginza Metrics' New Backlink Analysis Tool

If you're interested in chatting about using Moz data in products, drop Andrew Dumont a line and he'll be happy to help. And, as always, feedback on this latest index, our tools or metrics are greatly appreciated.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/LqtfIVDccfs/february-linkscape-update-66-billion-urls

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