Having content that goes viral can seem like the luck of the draw, but there are a number of steps you can take to improve your odds. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, we will show you a few things you can do to increase your chances of having that well crafted content spread through the internet like a wildfire. Thanks for watching and don’t forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about how to give your content a better chance of going viral, and from virality, what I really mean here is not just getting links, which are obviously very helpful from an SEO perspective, but getting social shares, getting mentions on other blogs, getting talked about, getting emailed around. The virality of content determines how successful that content is going to be in the broader Web, in the scheme of all things that are inbound, not just SEO, not just social, not just community stuff, but overall. There are a few things that you can do that will significantly help your efforts to earn that content virality. So let’s talk about a few of them.

Number one, the right format or the right UI or UX, user experience. What I’m talking about here is a lot of people think that they can take the same way that they produce content normally, keep on doing that, and sometimes that works, especially if you have a very, very clean site, maybe it’s in a blog format and it’s got nice width. It’s not too hampered by advertising and surrounded by that kind of stuff. But oftentimes you will see that content can perform better when it’s in a separate type of format. So let’s say you’ve got a traditional page layout that has content section here but a big header up here and a top ad and a bottom ad and a bunch of sidebar stuff. And maybe you think, “You know what? I’m actually going to clean that up to something that has branding but minimal branding, got a great headline, got the content right in there, and that’s the focus of the page.” So the users who come to it can easily, above the fold, find the content that they’re looking for, that there’s compelling visuals.

These visuals are particularly important because both Google+ and Facebook, if you do any sharing on either of those platforms, remember that they’ll automatically insert an image from the post, and oftentimes the user can select which image. If you’ve got a couple compelling images that look great when scaled down, that look great when you’re going to share them on Facebook or on Google+ or that somebody else who is going to copy those images and put them on their site, oh man, much, much more successful.

Even if you have literally just a piece of writing, if you can have some sort of a visual element that is compelling, that’s interesting, that draws in the reader, that’s relevant, you’re going to do much, much better. Flickr Creative Commons is great for this. Drawing your own stuff is great for this. Charts and graphs are great for this. Even licensing out someone to do a tiny amount of work for a few hundred dollars around building a visual for you, taking some of the data or some of the insight that you’ve learned that you’re putting into that content can be really helpful to help it go more viral.

Then doing things like, you know, you’ve got to have the design look and feel professional. It has to be modern and updated. Clean is very, very good for getting that sharing principle. You can see this happen all the time with content that’s shared on major media websites, where it’s the print friendly version that gets emailed around, that makes its way around Twitter and around Google+ and Facebook and goes on LinkedIn. It’s almost always the one that people will link to in a Reddit or a Hacker News or on Stumble Upon. Print friendly versions, just make that the default for content that you want to have virality.

Then finally I’d also be looking at the title friendliness itself, and the URL actually matters a lot now too. So if you’ve got a pre-existing CMS, when you go to bit.ly or you to goo.gl or whatever your URL shortener is, you might want to try something like this, getting the customized one. So for example, you’ll see that when I have content that I like to share a lot, I might say for example, “Oh, let’s make this content say inbound startups, and that’ll be my slide share presentation.” So now you don’t have to remember some long URL. It’s just bit.ly/inboundstartups, and that will take you right to my presentation here, that URL functions. Customizing this portion of the shared URL can be very helpful if you can’t control it. If you can though, go with something easy, simple, short, not too many parameters in there. This will also help you. I might even, for some things, recommend dropping the slash articles or the slash blog and going just with /catchy-subject, whatever that subject line is. You ‘re going to shrink down the title so that it’s easily understandable so if somebody ever sees that URL or hovers on it, they think, “Oh, that sounds interesting. I should click that link. That might be cool.”

Number two, great, fantastic way to make sure that your content is going to at least perform decently on the Web is to get buy-in from your influencers, the influencers in a community, before, not after, not during, but before you ever publish it. So I’ll give you a great example. I got an email last Friday from a guy in the search world and he said, “Hey Rand, my company, we produce this big report. We’ve got this cool infographic, lots of interesting data about stuff that’s happening in the world. Would you take a look at this? Tell me what you think. Do you think your community would like it?” And I wrote back and said, “Yeah, I really love this. I think it’s excellent. I don’t even have any changes. I think this is going to do great, and I’d be happy to share it.” This person didn’t specifically ask me for a share and I think that’s why. What they asked me for was feedback.

That feedback, coming from people who have a powerful forum, 6,000 RSS readers, 500 people following them on Google+, you can find these people. You probably already know about them in your niche or your sphere, who they are, the key bloggers, the key Twitter accounts, the key Google+ accounts, the key people on LinkedIn, the people who run popular websites, the influencers. Then you can essentially draw them back to whatever it is that’s your content in here, and they will be much more likely to share if you ping them about it beforehand. They’ll also give you feedback like, “I don’t really think this is going to play well,” or “If you did this, it’d be very interesting, but I don’t see what you’ve done as particularly unique or valuable. I probably wouldn’t share it.” Or no response at all. If you get lots of those, you know that you’re not hitting it out of the park with this content. You’re going to have to do something else, try something else. That’s great to know before you hit that publish button.

There’s a bunch of things you can get from them. So if you’re thinking, boy, I just can’t get these people to share what I’m producing. I don’t know what I can do, get them involved in the actual content itself. So rather than you writing an opinion blog post saying I like this particular thing and that particular thing, you can instead go and gather. Hey, can I solicit your review and opinion on a subject, and then I’m going to gather that from several experts and publish that. I’m going to run a survey of you and 20 other people who are influencers in the field about particular things, about some data from your sites, your projects, your experiences, your businesses, whatever it is, or your opinions on this matter. I’m going to interview you or do some lessons learned stuff. I shared a great link last week that was a bunch of video interviews of entrepreneurs, and this type of stuff performs tremendously well because all of those people who are involved in the project, from an interviewee perspective, they are all going to share it after it’s produced because you write back to them and you say, “Hey, the interview is now live. The data is now live. The review is now live.”

You can request input from their communities. For example, when SEOmoz does the SEO Industry Survey every two years, we always ask, hey, would you share this with your community so that we can get the input of people who read Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch or SEO Book or Search Engine Journal, a variety of these places. HubSpot, etc.

If you can’t directly reach out, you can always mention these people. So if you, for example, gather things that they’ve tweeted, said on their own blogs, you’re getting quotes from them, you’re getting data they’ve shared, you’re using numbers from them, anything like that, you can say, “Oh, by the way, we mentioned you or we’re going to be mentioning you in an upcoming piece, would you like to take a look at it and review and let us know if it’s appropriate or okay, if this is accurate?” That process of interacting in an authentic way, both to confirm that you do have accurate data and that you’re doing the right thing with them, gives them a buy-in to, “Oh, I’m going to go check out this article. Huh, this is interesting. Yeah, this looks great, thanks very much.” Or, “Oh I have this little bit of feedback for you.” Then when you publish, you can say, “Hey, we hit publish. It’s now live. Thanks again for reviewing. If you would share with your community, that’d be great. Here’s the shortened link or here’s a tweet you could retweet.” This kind of stuff works phenomenally well. This process of getting that early buy-in ahead of time is so powerful, and it just makes sure that the content does much better than it normally would.

The third and final thing that I’m going to mention here – topic, timing, and seeding. So this is essentially the process of figuring out what works best in your community, and that’s from a topical perspective. Copyblogger has a lot of good posts about how to write a compelling headline and what’s going to be popular right now. But I would think about it this way. If it’s being mentioned in the news, so for example if I go to, let’s say this is Google Insights or Google Trends or the news timeline, and I see mentions it is at the steady state point but has a spike here, this is where I want to be writing about that topic. Or maybe right after, when there’s usually that second bump of people having a discussion about it. If you can, you might even want to catch it here, before it goes hot, and then you’ll have a chance to appear in things like Google News and you’ll have a chance to be mentioned in all the articles that talk about that subject thereafter. This is great for anytime you have a timely or trending type of topic.

You also want to, in addition to all these influencers you talk to, there are likely a few people, these are your buddies, your friends, people you connect with on a regular basis, you’re emailing with them, you follow each other on Twitter. Do them a favor. Start sharing some of their content. When they tweet things, retweet them. Build up those relationships. Almost all of you probably have a few of those already. Leverage those. Email them in person and say, “Kenny, I know you’ve got a small Twitter account. It’d be awesome if you could share this. If you ever need the same favor from me, just ask.” Almost always, especially if those are close relationships, personal relationships, you’ve hung out in a bar before, you’ve bought each other dinner, you know each other well, you’re going to get that. I think that’s a great way to leverage the real world social network for online social networks. Obviously, you have to be careful not to abuse this. You want to be sharing stuff that these people would ordinarily want to share and be interested in.

Then finally timing stuff. I can tell you for B2B content, Saturday and Sunday are just straight out. However, the reverse is true for Facebook, where the most sharing and the most time spent on Facebook happens on the weekends. Now, not surprisingly, that’s not B2B Facebooking. That’s personal Facebooking. So it better be the kind of stuff that’s going to play well with your mom and your grandma and your brother and that kind of stuff. B2B, Tuesday through Thursday. Don’t do Monday. Don’t do Friday. With the exception of, it appears that some of the best content or most successful tweeting happens on Friday morning, sort of Thursday night going into Friday morning. That’s when people seem to be tweeting and retweeting a lot of stuff. This is from some research from Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. You can look into that. The timing of social media, I believe, is his presentation.

So don’t necessarily take my word for it. Test, test, test. If you’re sharing content and producing content on a regular basis, you will figure out the right times to share, who you can start seeding things with, who’s reliable and helps you get that content out there, what topics work well, what sorts of headlines work well for your audience. It’s going to be different for everyone. So don’t just trust these. But do test and observe and watch your click through rates, using something like a bit.ly, watching your analytics, seeing what works when you share things and how long it takes for them to go and what sources indicate. Sometimes you’re going to share with this one guy and he’s going to populate it to tons of places. One of my favorite features for this is Google+’s ripples, where you can actually see, it’s almost like this. It’ll actually show you a timeline of this person shared and then these 13 other people shared and 1 of them produced 10 more shares. That stuff is very powerful, and you can observe it on the regular Web, on the rest of the Web, across platforms if you’re carefully watching analytics or your bit.ly click throughs.

So hopefully, using this methodology, you can produce some content that has higher chances, better odds of going viral. I wish you luck. I hope to see lots of great stuff out there on the Web. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by jrcooper

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

Despite what most SEOs will tell you, it’s not easy to create outstanding content that people will want to link to. So many “SEOs” make it seem like there’s a key on your keyboard that magically turns what you just wrote into something link worthy. In reality, it’s never that simple.

I'm not one to keep throwing mud at the wall until it sticks. You can continuously tell someone to go create exceptional content, or you can actually show them an example. Because, being the sensible person I am, I'd rather choose the second option, here are 10 fantastic examples of link bait and what makes them so spectacular.

Note: PA stands for Page Authority, LRD stands for linking root domains, and TL stands for total links. Also, I didn't include .gov, .edu, or any other pieces of link bait from SEOmoz besides the first one below. The same goes for .edu and .gov sites.

1. SEOmoz’s Search Ranking Factors – PA: 91. LRD: 2,727. TL: 17,750.

What is it?

This is an article on the different search ranking factors by your very own SEOmoz. With yearly updates, 132 contributors, and roughly 20 pages of content on one URL, this gives information on what search engines are measuring in order to rank websites. If you call yourself an SEO and you haven't read this, then I suggest you quietly open this up, read it twice, and hope no one noticed.

Why was it so successful?

This link bait was highly successful because of the visualizations, depth of content, the trust of the contributors involved, and the website it was hosted on (SEOmoz is very influential in the SEO community). While the content is great, there's also a far greater reason for all of the links: SEOmoz didn’t do the promotion; the contributors did. In the future, this should be your go to example for creating a collaborative study.

2. Xkcd's Radiation Dose Chart – PA: 88. LRD: 988. TL: 5,863.

What is it?

This is a chart about the radiation a person absorbs from various sources. This is a great way to visualize how much radiation poisoning you can get from things like airplane flights, x-rays, and CT scans.

Why was it successful?

Being able to visualize something that's hard to grasp is one of your best friends when creating link bait. By using tiny blocks to put together just how many "siverts" are in these different sources of radiation, this chart makes this concept very easy to understand. The key takeaway here is that if you can get people to understand your content, and actually read it all, the likelihood of them sharing and linking to it increases dramatically.

3. Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch – PA: 86. LRD: 631. TL: 9,149.

What is it?

If you ever need a guide on what seafood to choose based on where you live or travel, this is your go to place. You can choose to download eight different regional guides, with two of them also available in Spanish.

Why was it so successful?

The main reason this was so successful was because of the outright awesome information these guides provide. They’re updated regularly (most recently July 2011) and they’re free for anyone that wants them. It also doesn’t hurt to have a top notch interactive map to help you choose the guide best for you.

4. SEOBook’s 101 Link Popularity Tips – PA: 84. LRD: 723. TL: 2,843.

What is it?

Created by Aaron Wall & Andy Hagans, this is a list of 101 different link building strategies, and even though it’s over five years old, it still provides some of the best link building tips on the Web. To add a little humor, the last 30 tips are bad ways to build links.

Why was it successful?

Everyone loves lists. It’s that simple. It got traction in the right community, it’s easy to read, and it’s on a subject that people want to know about.

5. Mark Nottingham’s RSS Tutorial – PA: 83. LRD: 540. TL: 7,033.

What is it?

Published in 2005, this was and still is the go to resource to find out more about why your blog should be utilizing an RSS feed. It gives detailed analysis and can be translated to Brazilian and Portuguese (see links at the bottom).

Why was it successful?

When this was published, the post gave in-depth information on a relatively unexplored subject that people wanted to know about. It also provides ready-to-go snippets of code, making the content very actionable. On another note, one reason for its success that you might have noticed is the design of the website. There's no clutter and it's very easy to read.

6. OKCupid's Politics Test – PA: 82. LRD: 456. TL: 1,274.

What is it?

OKCupid, a free online dating site, put together a test on what your political views are based on what your answers are to each question. This is one of many tests featured on OKCupid's site.

Why was it successful?

People like personalized content, such as tests and quizzes. In this case, people like to see how they scored, and they want to compare their score with their friends (thus, they link to it asking others to do it and share their results). There's also a bit of controversy involved with politics (just a bit?), which never hurts in terms of link juice.

7. Yoast's WordPress SEO Guide – PA: 81. LRD: 701. TL: 2,642.

What is it?

This is an extensive guide to implementing SEO on the WordPress CMS created by Joost de Valk.

Why was it successful?

It's the go-to resource because it has the best information on this subject all in one place. It's as simple as that. The information is instructional and easy to understand, and it's helpful in areas that people want to know about. With a resource like this, people will often cite information in it, and with each citation comes yet another link.

8. SEJ's Social Media Infographic – PA: 81. LRD: 282. TL: 876.

What is it?

This is an infographic by Search Engine Journal on the growth of social media. This is a great visualization on the progress social media has made and what lies in the future according to statistical data.

Why was it successful?

In a nutshell, it's visually appealing. Putting such a great amount of raw data into an easy, understandable visualization is something I'd go out of my way to share. It also helps when it's initially displayed to a large audience (SEJ is a fairly popular SEO site if you didn't already know).

I'd also like to point out that although it may not have the sheer number of links some of the other pieces of link bait have, it's the quality of the links that count. This link bait got links from the Huffington Post, Reuters, and The Next Web.

9. WUIW's Water Conservation Tips – PA: 77. LRD: 347. TL: 1,536.

What is it?

This is a list of 112 different ways to conserve water. The tips are very short and provide quick, actionable information.

Why was it successful?

The first reason is because of each item's brevity. This list is quite easy to read and scan because each tip isn't a paragraph, it's a sentence. Another cool thing they did was highlight one specific tip out of every 10 or so. They enlarged the number, added a picture, and bolded the text. This puts emphasis on the specific item highlighted, and it's a great way to segment the list into something readable. Also, the post is listed in the website's navigation bar, making it easy to locate.

10. Thomson's Evolution of Music – PA: 77. LRD: 80. TL: 955.

What is it?

This is a visualization of how music has traveled over the past 200 years. As you play the timeline, new genres pop up around the world and you can see how they've moved and connected throughout the world.

Why was it successful?

Hmm. How wasn't it? If you aren't blown away, I'm sorry, because if this won't impress you, nothing will. The two main reasons it was successful are the quality of the visualization and the social share buttons on the page. Making it easy to share gets the page in front of more eyes, and more eyes means more links.

Yes, the link metrics show that it's not as successful as some of the ones above, but this is only because of how new this piece of content is.

Conclusion

So, what can we conclude about link bait from these 10 examples?

1. Get influencers involved.
2. Make it easy to understand.
3. Give away free stuff.
4. People love lists.
5. Choose a highly desired topic.
6. People like personalized content.
7. Establish it as the go-to resource.
8. Make it visually appealing.
9. Segment large lists to make them readable.
10. Use social share buttons.

Thanks for reading! Make sure you give this post a thumbs up if you enjoyed it! If you want to find out more about me, check out my link building blog and make sure you follow me on twitter.

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Posted by randfish

It's 2012, and that means we get to revisit our expectations for 2011 and prognosticate for the year ahead. In keeping with tradition, I'm first going to evaluate my predictions from last December before determining if I've got the cred to make some for 2012. Here's the rules:

For each prediction, we'll grade using the following points system:

• Spot On (+2) - when a prediction hits the nail on the head and the primary criteria are fulfilled
• Partially Accurate (+1) - predictions that are in the area, but are somewhat different than reality
• Not Completely Wrong (-1) - those that landed near the truth, but couldn't be called "correct" in any real sense
• Off the Mark (-2) - guesses which didn't come close

The rule is – if the score is lower than +1, I'm not allowed to make predictions for the coming year. Cross your fingers for me!

Last year, I made 7 predictions:

1. Someone proves (or a search engine confirms) that clicks/visits influence rankings +2
   Both Google and Bing confirmed in 2011 that they use searcher behavior, including clicks, as ranking signals. This prediction was spot on (though, to be fair, some felt that prior statements had already insinuated this was the case).
2. Google local/maps adds filtering/sorting -1
   This one was almost completely wrong. I expected something more like what Yelp offers (and I thought Google's move to do this in recipe search was the beginning of something broader). Google has added more suggested searches as seen below, which is the only reason I'm giving myself a "not completely wrong."
   
   _
3. Social search will rise -1
   This guess was also quite nearly off the mark, but Google's move into social saved it, at least partially. Google+ has added a lot more depth of social elements and signals for the engine, and for anyone logged into their Google/Gmail/Google+ account, the prevalence of social results is quite remarkable.
4. Rank tracking will be possible through the query string -2
   Sadly, this one was dead wrong. We saw rank tracking in the query string first emerge in 2009 and I was sure that Google would roll this out more broadly, but instead we're still getting only 10-20% of search referral strings with rank data included, and the new (not provided) issue has made manual or machine-based rank tracking even more essential. Sad, because I think this was a big opportunity for Google to be more open.
5. Mobile will have a negligible effect on search/SEO +1
   While many pundits will surely claim that 2012 will (finally) be the year of mobile, I'd say 2011 has helped prove that the search world  is pretty device agnostic. Rather than changing SEO, mobile and tablet adoption has merely meant that there's more searches around local and location and that the web as a whole is a bigger part of people's lives than ever before.
6. Software will become an SEO standard +1
   This one's hard to quantify, but I think it's directionally accurate. Here's the Forrester Interactive Marketing report, which notes a large adoption of SEO software at the enterprise level, and with the death of Yahoo! Site Explorer, software and tools from third parties is more essential than ever. I'm not going to give a +2 as I'd say we're still missing conclusive proof that software is "standard," though our upcoming industry survey may help shed light on that.
7. We'll start to move away from the title "SEO" to something more all-inclusive +1
   It didn't happen in a big way, but the phrase "inbound marketing" and "inbound marketer" appears to be gaining traction. I like the wording, which suggests earning people's trust and interest rather than buying it and includes SEO, social media, content marketing, blogging and web analytics. In our recent survey of agencies, "inbound/organic" agency was how the largest group of respondents described their firms:
   
   We'll be releasing the full data tomorrow night on the blog – stay tuned!

When we tally up the numbers, it's +5 and -4, leaving me with +1, just barely enough credibility to make predictions for another year

This year, I'm making 8 predictions (rather than 7). The goal with each is not just to share an opinion, but hopefully to provide some action (implied or explicit) for marketers on at least a few. I'm also aiming to have each prediction be verifiable at year's end, so that I can, once again, check my work.

Prediction #1: Bing Will Have a Slight Increase in US Marketshare, but remain <20% to Google's 80%+

According to Comscore, Bing + Yahoo! have ~30% market share in the US to Google's ~65%. I personally think these numbers are relatively bogus and put much more faith in those generated by sources like Statcounter (which look at traffic sites receive rather than queries performed by a sample audience). Statcounter shows Google at ~82% and Bing+Yahoo! totally to ~16%. I'm guessing those numbers will be pretty similar come January 2013.

The biggest reason, IMO, isn't necessarily just brand loyalty and inertia for Google, but their continued superior performance on long tail queries (note: plenty of the comments in the linked-to Reddit thread are worth a read to get a sense of how "early majority" searchers feel).

Prediction #2: SEO Without Social Media Will Become a Relic of the Past

Already, we're seeing SEO and social media marketing become intrinsically intertwined, but in 2012, I believe we'll see SEO without social fade, just as SEO without link building did from 1999-2000. It's not just that social signals are making their way into the ranking algorithms (in both direct and indirect ways), but also that social is becoming the dominant method of both sharing and discovery for web users. The link graph will remain useful for years to come, but the social "sharegraph" is chipping away at its ability to illustrate what's new, interesting, useful, relevant and high quality.

This trend could well be part of what finally weakens the title of SEO (though I think the practice/tactic will remain strong) and forces those of us who've used that name to describe our profession for over a decade to migrate to something broader.

Prediction #3: Google Will Finally Take Stronger, Panda-Style Action Against Manipulative Link Spam

One of the major weaknesses of Google (and Bing, to be fair) is their continued over-reliance on links as an overwhelming ranking signal. Just recently, I took up a friend's offer to point some obviously shady links from sites Google should clearly be discounting at several webpages. We saw dramatic results within 24 hours – #1-5 rankings that have sustained for several weeks (more news on this experiment to come). This shouldn't be the case and Google's webspam and search quality teams know it.

In 2012, I believe Google's search quality folks will roll out algorithmic changes in how they value low quality links that help them regain pride in their work. The embarrassment and quality gap caused by linkspam is egregious and, if left to stand, gives competitors an opening while simultaneously weakening searchers' trust in Google's results. Just as "content farms" took their hits in 2011, I think link spam's up for some blows in 2012.

Prediction #4: Pinterest Will Break into the Mainstream

The last 4 years have seen Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare and Tumblr all break the 10+ million users mark. In 2012, I give Pinterest good odds for doing the same. Pinterest is also the first major social network where the gender balance heavily favors women (which is, IMO, a great thing).

(above, my sad attempt at a Pinterest board)

Because of this breakout, don't be surprised to see lots more posts like these showing marketers how to leverage Pinterest to help share their content and find potential customers.

Prediction #5: Overly Aggressive Search Ads Will Result in Mainstream Backlash Against Google

There are some pretty crazy things going on in the search advertising world right now. To wit:

On my laptop (which has fairly impressive resolution), I can only see a single organic result, and the paid search markup is incredible. Star ratings, seller reviews, prices and individual items, photos and featured brands are all dominating the page.

Google's own "comparison ads" in the credit/finance world push organic results down even further, as the Google product still allows for three additional full size ad slots above the organic listings.

Perhaps the most aggressive of all is Google's new ability to insert a logged-in users email address automatically into PPC ads, as pictured above. These are still rare, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them roll out in greater force.

My prediction is that in 2012, we'll see the start of "paid search blindness" being studied, reported and impacting the engines' bottom lines. Organic results still garner 80%+ of all clicks, but that percent has been dropping as Google gets more aggressive with paid search to continually meet earnings expectations. 

Prediction #6: Keyword (Not Provided) Will Rise to 25%+ of Web Searchers

Despite Google's statements that missing keyword data will stay below double digits, I'm predicting that by December of 2012, we'll be looking at a quarter of all searches coming from logged-in (and thus, keyword-anonymous) searchers. Google's working hard to get adoption of Android, Google+, Google Apps and Gmail, all of which will increase the percent of not provided searchers.

While I wish this program would roll back (as there's clearly no real privacy risk or they wouldn't provide the data to paid advertisers), Google's the 800-pound gorilla and the marketing field's counterpoints, while far more valid, likely won't play as well in the media. Google's got the politics sewn up on this one, so our only hope is that they decide to do less evil. Unfortunately, that's not the way they've been trending of late.

Prediction #7: We'll See the Rise of a Serious Certification Program

The search/inbound marketing industry is in sore need of a program that helps early talent in the field become mature professionals. Today, SEMPO, Market Motive, Inbound Marketing University (from Hubspot), Search Engine College and a variety of others provide this service, but none of them are yet at scale or universally respected by hiring managers and companies in the field.

It's hard to quantify what "the rise of…" means. Thus, I'll predict that by year's end, at least one industry certification has 5,000+ users on LinkedIn (currently, Market Motive leads the pack with ~1,700)

Prediction #8: Google Will Make it Very Hard to Do Great SEO Without Using Google+

Google's just started to add Google+ brand pages in search results, They're leveraging Google profiles for rel=author tags. They've made Google+ circles and +1s visible in SERPs. In 2012, I think this pattern becomes a concerted effort by Google to tie promotional efforts in organic results to the Google+ login/verification system. This will not only encourage/force usage of their social network, but give them a much greater ability to tie social, ranking and visibility signals together (and probably fight spam + manipulation, too).

The positive for marketers is that closer integration with the social platform will reward those who can successfully manage both SEO and social media marketing. It's also (hopefully) going to be a boon for white hat tactics that help build brand signals while reducing the effectiveness of exploits that manipulate (like exact match domains or anchor text link spam). The negative is that Google's probably going to get even more data about ALL of our online behaviors, making themselves an even more overreaching and powerful force on the web than they are today. We just have to hope they'll also become more benign, though more power rarely leads to less corruption.

I'm looking forward to hearing your predictions (and opinions on the above) in the comments. I think we've got an exciting year ahead.

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Posted by Corey Northcutt

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

For anyone that's experienced the joys of doing SEO on an exceedingly large site, you know that keeping your content in check isn't easy. Continued iterations of the Panda algorithm have made this fact brutally obvious for anyone that's responsible for more than a few hundred thousand pages.

As an SEO with a programming background and a few large sites to babysit, I was forced to fight the various Panda updates throughout this year through some creative server-side scripting. I'd like to share some with you now, and in case you're not well-versed in nerdspeak (data formats, programming, and Klingon), I'll start each item with a conceptual problem, the solution (so at least you can tell your developer what to do), and a few code examples for implementation (assumes that they didn't understand you when you told them what to do). My links to the actual code are in PHP/MySQL, but realize that these methods translate pretty simply into most any scenario.

OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER: Although I've been successful at implementing each of these tricks, be careful. Keep current backups, log everything you do so that you can roll-back, and if necessary, ask an adult for help.

1.) Fix Duplicate Content between Your Own Articles

The Problem

Sure, you know not to copy someone else's content. But what happens when over time, your users load your database full of duplicate articles (jerks)? You can write some code that checks if articles are an exact match, but no two are going to be completely identical. You need something that's smart enough to analyze similarity, and you need to be about as clever as Google is at it.

The Solution

There's a sophisticated measure of how similar two bodies of text are using something called Levenshtein distance analysis. It measures how many edits would be necessary to transform one string into another, and can be translated into a related percentage/ratio of how similar one string is to another. When running this maintenance script on 1 million+ articles that were 50-400 words, deleting only duplicate articles with a 90% similarity in Levenshtein ratio, the margin of error was 0 in each of my trials (and the list of deletions was a little scary, to say the least).

The Technical

Levenshtein comparison functions are available in basically every programming language and are pretty simple to use. Running comparisons on 10,000 individual articles against one another all at once is definitely going to make your web/database server angry, however, so it takes a bit of creativity to finish this process while we're all still alive to see your ugly database.

What follows may not be ideal practice, or something you want to experiment with heavily on a live server, but it gets this tough job done in my experience.

1. Create a new database table where you can store a single INT value (or if this is your own application and you're comfortable doing it, just add a row somewhere for now). Then create one row that has a default value of 0.
    
2. Have your script connect to the database, and get the value form the table above. That will represent the primary key of the last article we've checked (since there's no way you're getting through all articles in one run).
    
3. Select that article, and check it against all other articles by comparing Levenshtein distance. Doing this in the application layer will be far faster than running comparisons as a database stored procedure (I found the best results occurred when using levenshteinDistance2(), available in the comments section of levenshtein() on php.net). If your database size makes this run like poop through a funnel (checking just 1 article against all others at once), consider only comparing articles by the same author, of similar length, posted in a similar date range, or other factors that might help reduce your data set of likely duplicates.
    
4. Handle the duplicates as you see fit. In my case, I deleted the newer entry and stored a log in a new table with full text of both, so individual mistakes could later be reverted (there were none, however). If your database isn't so messy or you still fear mistakes after testing a bit, it may very well be good enough just to store a log and later review them by hand.
    
5. After you're done, store the primary key of the last article that you checked in the database entry from i.). You can loop through ii.) – iv.) a few more times on this run if this didn't take too long to execute. Run this script as many times as necessary on a one minute cronjob or with the Windows Task Scheduler until complete, and keep a close eye on your system load.

2.) Spell-Check Your Database

The Problem

Sure, it would be best if your users were all above a third grade reading level, but we know that's not the case. You could have a professional editor run through content before it went live on your site, but now it's too late. Your content is now a jumbled mess of broken English, and in dire need of a really mean English teacher to set it all straight.

The Solution

Since you don't have an English teacher, we'll need automation. In PHP, for example, we have fun built-in tools like soundex(), or even levenshtein(), but when analyzing individual words, these just don't cut it. You could grab a list of the most common misspelled English words, but that's going to be hugely incomplete. The best solution that I've found is an open source (free) spell checking tool called the Portable Spell Checker Interface Library (Pspell), which uses the Aspell library and works very well.

The Technical

Once you get it setup, working with Pspell is really simple. After you've installed it using the link above, include the libraries in your code, and this function to return an array of suggestions for each word, with the word at array key 0 being the closest match found. Consider the basic logic from 1.) if it looks like it's going to be too much to tackle at once, incrementing your place as you step through the database, logging all actions in a new table, and (carefully) choosing whether or not you like the results well enough to automate the fixes or if you'd prefer to chase them by hand.

3.) Implement rel="canonical" in Bulk

The Problem

link rel="canonical" is very useful tag for eliminating confusion when two URLs might potentially return the same content, such as when Googlebot makes its way to your site using an affiliate ID. In fact, the SEOmoz automated site analysis will yell at you on every page that doesn't have one. Unfortunately since this tag is page-specific, you can't just paste some HTML in the static header of your site.

The Solution

As this assumes that you have a custom application, let's say that you can't simply install ALL IN ONE SEO on your WordPress, or install a similar SEO plugin (because if you can, don't re-invent the wheel). Otherwise, we can tailor a function to serve your unique purposes.

The Technical

I've quickly crafted this PHP function with the intent of being as flexible as possible. Note that desired URL structures are different on different sites and scripts, so think about everything that's installed under a given umbrella. Use the flags that it mention in the description section so that it can best mesh with the needs of your site.

4.) Remove Microsoft Word's "Smart Quote" Characters

The Problem

In what could be Microsoft's greatest crime against humanity, MS Word was shipped with a genius feature that automatically "tilts" double and single quotes towards a word (called "smart quotes"), in a style that's sort of like handwriting. You can turn this off, but most don't, and unfortunately, these characters are not a part of the ASCII set. This means that various character sets used on the web and in databases that store them will often fail to present them, and instead, return unusable junk that users (and very likely, search engines) will hate.

The Solution

This one's easy: use find/replace on the database table that stores your articles.

The Technical

Here it is an example of how to fix this using MySQL database queries. Place a script on an occasional cron in Linux or using the Task Scheduler in Windows, and say goodbye to these ever appearing on your site again.

5.) Fix Failed Contractions

The Problem

Your contributors are probably going to make basic grammar mistakes like this all over the map, and Google definitely cares. While it's important never to make too many assumptions, I've generally found that fixing common contractions is very sensible.

The Solution

You can use find/replace here, but it's not as simple as the solution fixing smart quotes, so you need to be careful. For example "wed" might need to be "we'd", or it might not. Other contractions might make sense while standing on their own, but find/replace by itself will also return results that are pieces of other words. So, we need to account for this as well.

The Technical

Note that there are two versions of each word. This is because in my automated proofreading trials, I've found it's common not only for an apostrophe to be omitted., but also for a simple typo to occur that puts the apostrophe after the last letter when Word's automated fix for this isn't on-hand. Words have also been surrounded by a space to eliminate a margin of error (this is key- just look at how many other words include 'dont' on one of these sites that people use to cheat in word games). Here's an example of how this works. This list is a bit incomplete, and leaves probably the most room for improvement in the list. Feel free to generate your own using this list of English contractions.

That should about do it. I hope everyone enjoyed my first post here on SEOMoz, and hopefully this stirs some ideas on how to clean up some large sites!

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Posted by Ben@wistia

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

We’ve been hosting SEOmoz’s video for a little over a year now. During that time SEOmoz has published about 60 Whiteboard Fridays. One thing to know about Wistia (in addition to our penchant for ping pong and video SEO) is that we have an unhealthy obsession with video analytics. As sort of an "anniversary" gift for the Mozzers we decided to analyze their series and see what kind of juicy statistical nuggets we could pull out of the data.

Creating a web video series is an amazing way to engage with and build an audience, but it’s difficult to find metrics or benchmarks to define success. Given SEOmoz’s amazing transparency in everything they do, we thought it would be useful to create a resource that other companies could use to "see inside" a successful web video series.

Below, you’ll find the full infographic, but here are a few highlights:

• Over 132,000 unique people have watched at least one SEOmoz video…10x the number of SEOmoz customers!
• Loyal viewers (those that have watched more than one video) spend more than 6x the amount of time viewing SEOmoz videos than casual viewers (those that have watched only a single video).
• When someone watches a single SEOmoz video, they are twice as likely to watch another SEOmoz video than someone who hasn’t viewed any of their videos.

Improve Engagement Metrics with Video

One of the most surprising findings from the data was that users who watched more than one video, the average engagement time was 35 minutes. Even those visitors who only watched a single video were engaged an average of 6 minutes, well above the average time on site for the typical SEOmoz visitor.

Consider the effect this has for engagement metrics such as time on site, page views, and even conversions.

Some tips to help increase engagement with video:

1. Suggest Similar and/or related videos on the same page. How many times have you watched one video, and then instantly watched another when one was available? Give this option to your visitors and they will take advantage of it.
2. Inspire viewers to want to investigate further with a cliffhanger or a preview. Or use the video to highlight special sections of your site that they can visit on their own.
3. Provide a user-friendly landing page that contains a full list of all the videos on your site. This makes a great content hub.
4. Encourage visitors to sign up for email notifications when new videos in the series are released.

Without further adieu, "The Road to Moz"…

View this infographic full-size.

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Posted by Cyrus Shepard

External linking doesn’t sound like it’s that difficult of a situation but for many SEOs there’s an ongoing debate about how you should do external linking on your website. This week Cyrus, our web strategist, goes over two very different methods of handling external linking on your website. While there are benefits and problems with each strategy, we want to know what method you use and why! Feel free to leave you comments below and discuss what method you use.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. I am the web strategist here at SEOmoz. Today we’re going to talk about external linking, linking to other websites. A lot of people wonder if this helps or hurts your SEO, and it has been a debate that has been going on ever since SEO started. So today we want to look at the two different schools of thought and see what we can find out.

Strategy one, let’s pretend you have a site about red boots, and there is this great resource about amazing red boots. You have to decide if you should link to it or not on your page. Some of the arguments for not linking to it . . . oh, there we go. That’s a good marker. Whiteboard Friday fail there. So, you might want to just keep your link juice internal instead of linking to that page. Keep everything within your own site so that you are not passing any value to this page because you really want to rank high for red boots. You also don’t want visitors to leave your site. You went to a lot of work to get that visitor buying those red boots on your site. Why would you want to send them someplace else? Kind of makes sense. You also don’t want to help your competition. If you link to them, you could elevate them in the rankings for these amazing red boots, and then people are never going to find you. By the same token, it might hurt your rankings. If you are linking out to all these other great sources, you might be telling Google, hey, these are better resources than my page about red boots. So you might fall down in the SERPs.

This is a school of thought. We see it a lot. We see people mention your brand and you read the article and they don’t link to you at all. They don’t link out. Some people think it is very legitimate. There is one piece of information we have that casts a little bit of doubt of whether this is a legitimate exercise or not, and that is the correlation data between external links and higher rankings. The 2011 correlation data showed that there was a 0.04 correlation between the number of external links on a page and higher rankings. Now, it doesn’t seem like a lot, but taken in aggregate with all the other 200 ranking factors, it matters. It doesn’t prove that a lot of links on your page are really going to help your rankings. But one thing it does disprove is this one – that adding external links to your page is actually going to hurt your rankings, within reason. If you don’t take this to extreme, we can pretty much cross that one out. So, that is one theory of thought.

Now the other strategy, the strategy which I think is probably a little bit more friendly strategy, is you’re a page on red boots, you have all these great resources, and you chose to link out to them without fear that it’s going to hurt your rankings or that you’re going to be helping your competitors too much. The biggest benefit in my mind of this technique is its automatic outreach. We spend a lot of time as SEOs writing emails saying, "Hey, will you link to me? I wrote this great resource." Just by putting a link out to somebody, they see that in their analytics. They see that traffic. It is kind of like tweeting about somebody. They know that you linked to them.

So, if I write an article on, actual example, SEO copywriting, and I link out to Copy Blogger because they are a great resource, Copy Blogger actually saw that I linked to them. They not only tweeted about my article, but they linked back to me in their weekly roundup. So by linking out I actually got a link back. Probably not going to happen over here. Here you might get a ton of links. Every link that you put out is actually an opportunity for outreach, and it is as simple as putting that in your editor, and, of course, adds value to your content.

If you want to be an authority on a subject, it makes it sort of look like an authority when you are referencing other materials. If you read a book, an academic book without a bibliography or citing any references, you might kind of wonder where they got their information. So it kind of helps you to look better in that respect.

Now this is controversial. It might add contextual signals to your content. Google is reading your page, and the other search engines too, and they’re trying to figure out what your page is about. If you are linking to a page around the same topic, some people suspect that may tell Google, oh yes, this page is about red boots. You can sort of think of it in the spam context. If you have a page about red boots, but you are linking to Viagra, Google’s going to say, "No, this page is not about red boots." If you are linking to a page about shoes, tons of shoes, yeah, that might help. We don’t think it is a big signal, but some people think it is significant.

The final reason that this strategy may work, you see a lot of successful SEOs do it. It appears this might be a good strategy. The thing you have to be careful about with this strategy is your anchor text. If you are trying to rank for red boots and you link out using that red boots anchor text, that is probably not going to help you. You have to be a little creative with that. So, red boots, this is a great resource, tons of shoes, colorful footwear. Those are the sort of anchor text you want to use.

I am not sure which method is right. I know I prefer this one, but a lot of people actually prefer this one. What do you chose? Do you have any thoughts about which method is better? I’d like you to share your comments in the comments below and find out what everybody thinks about this.

That’s all we have today. Thanks everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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A banner ad is a rectangular graphic advertisement. Banner ads are one of the commonest forms of online advertising. Their sizes vary, but most measure 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. Clicking on a banner ad will direct you to the advertiser’s website or a designated Landing Page.

Also known as delisted or blacklisted, a banned site is a URL that has been removed from a search engine’s Index, typically for engaging in Black Hat SEO. Banned sites are ignored by search engines.

Also known as back link, backward link, or inbound links, backlinks are all of the links on other websites that direct the users who click on them to your site. Backlinks can significantly improve your site’s search rankings, particularly if they contain Anchor Text keywords relevant to your site and are located on sites with high Page Rank.

Also known as link text, anchor text is the visible, clickable text between the HTML anchor and tags. Clicking on anchor text activates a Hyperlink to another web site. Anchor text is very important in Search Engine Optimization because search engine algorithms consider the Hyperlink keywords as relevant to the Landing Page.