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Tips for Twitter That Will Help

On December 23, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

So this post has nothing really (directly anyway) to do with search engine optimization, but I thought it would make sense to spend a bit of time explaining some of the basic tips to help your business effectively use Twitter.
Yes, Twitter might not be right for every business but that doesn’t give the excuse [...]

So this post has nothing really (directly anyway) to do with search engine optimization, but I thought it would make sense to spend a bit of time explaining some of the basic tips to help your business effectively use Twitter.

Yes, Twitter might not be right for every business but that doesn’t give the excuse to not pulling up a chair to the dinner table and at least looking at what there is to offer. I don’t generate a huge amount of interaction on Twitter but you think I would when I look at the Google Analytics information. Just because people might not interact with your business on Twitter doesn’t mean they don’t make it over to your website through your profile.

Here are some things all businesses should be doing on Twitter every single day:

Follow: Every business out there must have some sort of competition. Whether immediate or loosely related it doesn’t matter. Sending follow requests to your competitors followers is very important. Some will see that you are following them and instantly follow you back so it is very important to find these people. They are about as targeted as you are ever going to get.

Post Links: I don’t recommend sitting there all day and just dropping links to your website but occasionally it is ok to post a link to a service page or a product page especially if you are running a special promotion or sale on something. Most people won’t mind if you do it tastefully. Don’t drop the link every hour all day long. This will get people turned off by your efforts. If you have a blog each blog post should always be posted into your Twitter account as well.

Retweet: If you see something particular to your industry someone posted I would recommend retweeting it. It will drive more eyeballs to your Twitter page and get that account that you just retweeted on your radar. Plus often times that person you just retweeted might return the favor down the road creating a win win situation all across the board.

Conversation: Reply to people’s posts you might think would be great for your business. Not everyone will respond to you but eventually you will start to build up some nice conversations and some could be the right type of conversations to get your business growing.

These are some efforts every Twitter account should be doing but over time you will find a patter or routine that works best for you. This is just the one that we chose to follow.

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Advanced Link Analysis Charts

On November 15, 2009, In SEO, by willcritchlow

Posted by willcritchlow

Bored of sorting massive lists of links in all kinds of different directions to understand the link profile of a new site?

Struggle to understand how to gather actual insights about link profiles from lists of thousands of links and persuade management of the actions needed?

Don’t panic. Help is at hand.

I’m going to share some data visualisation tips today that I reckon I could use to beat up on Rand in a presentation-off (umm, again). We have recently been doing some deep dives into clients’ and prospects’ link profiles which gave me an excuse to mash up some Linkscape API data in Excel. I’ve used Linkscape data, but you could use any link analysis tool you like as long as you can get some metric to sort the linking domain by (I have used domain mozTrust in most of the examples below). Equally, I’ve used Excel, but you can use any data analysis package you like. If you want to use Excel, you will need the Data Analysis Toolpak (for the histogram function).

I’ll get into how to make the charts in a minute, but first I’m going to just show you some pretty pictures:

Impress the boss

This one is of questionable use (I think there are better ways of actually visualising the data) but it’s pretty, and bosses like pretty (allegedly). This is a surface chart of number of linking domains by domain mozTrust shown across 4 data points – all links, links to the homepage and links to the next two strongest pages:

Impress your boss with surface charts

The bit of insight this does give us at a glance is that the vast majority of the site’s very low DmT links go to the homepage and that the most trusted domains linking to the site (DmT >= 8) don’t link to the homepage or the next two strongest pages.

The same chart just showing links to the homepage compared to all links which shows the top end a litle more clearly:

Smaller chart to impress your boss

Gathering insights

I think this data is actually easier to see as a line chart like this (locations A and B are the top two strongest pages on the site after the homepage):

More detail about links shown with a line graph

What we just about see here is some bumps up at the top end of the DmT scale in the light blue line which is the same bit of insight I mentioned above.

Drilling down

Diving into this data to show only the top end of the DmT scale, we get:

Drilling down into link data

And we see that although the homepage and these top two location pages are the most powerful pages on the site, they are not the ones with the links from the biggest / most trusted sites. This is an area for further examination that would be hard to discover by looking at endless lists of links.

This is just an example of the kind of insight you can gather. I’m showing off tools and techniques here rather than specific insights. I’ll leave you to do your own playing to discover interesting things about your clients and competitors. I didn’t know what I was going to find when I started diving into the data for this site. You likely won’t know either, but graphs are great discovery tools. Sometimes, of course you find nothing of interest:

Comparing top pages

Comparing just the top two pages doesn’t give us any very meaningful insights except that the big links out at 6.5-7 DmT to location A probably explain why it’s more powerful than B. It might be more insightful at a lower granularity.

Equally, I haven’t yet learnt to understand the meaning that I am sure is buried in charts like this one:

Individual links chart

This is the number of links to a whole site by the mR of the linking page. Like the mythical guys who can understand network traffic by watching LEDs blink on routers, I’d love to be able to look at this kind of chart and really understand things. The closest I’ve got so far is that I think these charts should look roughly smooth in the absence of manipulation. If we assume that the difficulty of acquiring a link is roughly correlated to its strength and that we get links at a rate inversely proportional to their difficulty, then I think this chart should look roughly like a Poisson distribution:

Poisson distribution

Which this one does, so I’m happy.

Persuading management / bosses

The next thing that some of these charts helps with is making the case to management when you know something is true, but they need more persuading. This next example takes two different sites (neither of them is the site above) that are in different industries but have remarkably similar link characteristics at the macro level (don’t ask me how I found these sites – I am just that sad). The spider chart shows how similar they are:

Spider comparison - almost identical sites

However, if we dig in a little further, we find quite a difference behind the scenes:

Site comparison side by side

The red site seems to have loads more decent links (mR 4, 5, 6) than the blue site. So how does the blue site end up with similar domain metrics?

It’s all about the relatively small number of very powerful links the blue site has. Zooming in on mR 6 & 7 links:

Powerful links comparison

If you were just to look at this chart, you might imagine that the red site was getting more juice passed via these links than the blue site is. However, you’d be being fooled by the logarithmic scale. In terms of total juice passed by just these mR 6 and 7 links, the actual story is:

Powerful links through logarithm scale

In other words, the blue site is competing almost purely on the basis of the big mR 7 links it has that the red site doesn’t. That’s kinda interesting in terms of strategy generation isn’t it?

How do you do this analysis?

Pretty much everything in this post was generated using the histogram function in Excel running over Linkscape API data. It’s pretty straightforward with the online help. The only gotchas I noticed that you might need to know about were:

  1. Align the ‘bins’ (which are the x-axis values on most of the charts above) either with mR / mT intervals (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, …) or go much more granular (e.g. 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, ….). Anything in between tends to generate artifacts
  2. The bin range has to be on the same sheet as the data – if you try to pull in a bin range from another sheet, it fails silently
  3. If you want to do the surface chart, you need to do some interpolation between your points. In the examples above, I just did a linear interpolation (i.e. drawing a straight line between the different page levels) – so if the homepage has 100 mR 2 links and the next page has 50 mR 2 links, I just created 10 imaginary pages with 55, 60, 65, 70… mR 2 links to spread the surface out far enough to see it. This may not be the best way of doing things. I’d love to hear from anyone who has a better method

Thanks to foliovision for the photo from the ProSEO seminar.

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Posted by willcritchlow

Bored of sorting massive lists of links in all kinds of different directions to understand the link profile of a new site?

Struggle to understand how to gather actual insights about link profiles from lists of thousands of links and persuade management of the actions needed?

Don’t panic. Help is at hand.

I’m going to share some data visualisation tips today that I reckon I could use to beat up on Rand in a presentation-off (umm, again). We have recently been doing some deep dives into clients’ and prospects’ link profiles which gave me an excuse to mash up some Linkscape API data in Excel. I’ve used Linkscape data, but you could use any link analysis tool you like as long as you can get some metric to sort the linking domain by (I have used domain mozTrust in most of the examples below). Equally, I’ve used Excel, but you can use any data analysis package you like. If you want to use Excel, you will need the Data Analysis Toolpak (for the histogram function).

I’ll get into how to make the charts in a minute, but first I’m going to just show you some pretty pictures:

Impress the boss

This one is of questionable use (I think there are better ways of actually visualising the data) but it’s pretty, and bosses like pretty (allegedly). This is a surface chart of number of linking domains by domain mozTrust shown across 4 data points – all links, links to the homepage and links to the next two strongest pages:

Impress your boss with surface charts

The bit of insight this does give us at a glance is that the vast majority of the site’s very low DmT links go to the homepage and that the most trusted domains linking to the site (DmT >= 8) don’t link to the homepage or the next two strongest pages.

The same chart just showing links to the homepage compared to all links which shows the top end a litle more clearly:

Smaller chart to impress your boss

Gathering insights

I think this data is actually easier to see as a line chart like this (locations A and B are the top two strongest pages on the site after the homepage):

More detail about links shown with a line graph

What we just about see here is some bumps up at the top end of the DmT scale in the light blue line which is the same bit of insight I mentioned above.

Drilling down

Diving into this data to show only the top end of the DmT scale, we get:

Drilling down into link data

And we see that although the homepage and these top two location pages are the most powerful pages on the site, they are not the ones with the links from the biggest / most trusted sites. This is an area for further examination that would be hard to discover by looking at endless lists of links.

This is just an example of the kind of insight you can gather. I’m showing off tools and techniques here rather than specific insights. I’ll leave you to do your own playing to discover interesting things about your clients and competitors. I didn’t know what I was going to find when I started diving into the data for this site. You likely won’t know either, but graphs are great discovery tools. Sometimes, of course you find nothing of interest:

Comparing top pages

Comparing just the top two pages doesn’t give us any very meaningful insights except that the big links out at 6.5-7 DmT to location A probably explain why it’s more powerful than B. It might be more insightful at a lower granularity.

Equally, I haven’t yet learnt to understand the meaning that I am sure is buried in charts like this one:

Individual links chart

This is the number of links to a whole site by the mR of the linking page. Like the mythical guys who can understand network traffic by watching LEDs blink on routers, I’d love to be able to look at this kind of chart and really understand things. The closest I’ve got so far is that I think these charts should look roughly smooth in the absence of manipulation. If we assume that the difficulty of acquiring a link is roughly correlated to its strength and that we get links at a rate inversely proportional to their difficulty, then I think this chart should look roughly like a Poisson distribution:

Poisson distribution

Which this one does, so I’m happy.

Persuading management / bosses

The next thing that some of these charts helps with is making the case to management when you know something is true, but they need more persuading. This next example takes two different sites (neither of them is the site above) that are in different industries but have remarkably similar link characteristics at the macro level (don’t ask me how I found these sites – I am just that sad). The spider chart shows how similar they are:

Spider comparison - almost identical sites

However, if we dig in a little further, we find quite a difference behind the scenes:

Site comparison side by side

The red site seems to have loads more decent links (mR 4, 5, 6) than the blue site. So how does the blue site end up with similar domain metrics?

It’s all about the relatively small number of very powerful links the blue site has. Zooming in on mR 6 & 7 links:

Powerful links comparison

If you were just to look at this chart, you might imagine that the red site was getting more juice passed via these links than the blue site is. However, you’d be being fooled by the logarithmic scale. In terms of total juice passed by just these mR 6 and 7 links, the actual story is:

Powerful links through logarithm scale

In other words, the blue site is competing almost purely on the basis of the big mR 7 links it has that the red site doesn’t. That’s kinda interesting in terms of strategy generation isn’t it?

How do you do this analysis?

Pretty much everything in this post was generated using the histogram function in Excel running over Linkscape API data. It’s pretty straightforward with the online help. The only gotchas I noticed that you might need to know about were:

  1. Align the ‘bins’ (which are the x-axis values on most of the charts above) either with mR / mT intervals (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, …) or go much more granular (e.g. 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, ….). Anything in between tends to generate artifacts
  2. The bin range has to be on the same sheet as the data – if you try to pull in a bin range from another sheet, it fails silently
  3. If you want to do the surface chart, you need to do some interpolation between your points. In the examples above, I just did a linear interpolation (i.e. drawing a straight line between the different page levels) – so if the homepage has 100 mR 2 links and the next page has 50 mR 2 links, I just created 10 imaginary pages with 55, 60, 65, 70… mR 2 links to spread the surface out far enough to see it. This may not be the best way of doing things. I’d love to hear from anyone who has a better method

Thanks to foliovision for the photo from the ProSEO seminar.

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Is Social Media ROI Unmeasurable?

On November 11, 2009, In SEO, by Dr. Pete

Posted by Dr. Pete

I’m reporting live from Pubcon Las Vegas this week, along with some of the SEOmoz team. To be honest, we’ve struggled a bit with how to cover the conference here on the blog. As someone who only hits a couple of conferences per year, I know how annoying it can be to have to hear how great an event is that you already regret not being able to go to. On top of that, sometimes information that seems brilliant in context just doesn’t translate into a quick blog blurb or Tweet. So, in the interest of providing value to those of you who aren’t here at Pubcon, we’re going to try to take some deeper dives into the content, hopefully providing some of that context you may be missing.

Is That An Elephant?

No, I’m not trying to distract you. These first two days of sessions, I couldn’t help but feel that there was an elephant in the room with us during the social media sessions. The enthusiasm for social media (and especially Twitter) has been stronger than ever, but we all seem reluctant to dampen that enthusiasm by talking about an uncomfortable fact – very few of us have really found a way to measure social media success. Sure, there are internal metrics for any given platform – Twitter followers, for example – but without something external to tie it to, those are little more than high scores in the social media video game.

The B-word

Of course, the default answer is always "branding". Unfortunately, much like "engagement", branding is too often just a distraction, an intangible excuse we use to avoid the fact that we have nothing to measure. Ironically, during a session that had nothing to do with social media, I heard something close to an answer during Q&A. No matter what you think branding is, find a way to measure it. Here are just a few possiblities:

  • Direct brand mentions
  • Links with brand-related anchor text
  • Branded search volume

Where’s there a number, there’s a path to calculating ROI.

Target a Response

At this morning’s keynote, we had a chance to hear from the marketing departments of various Vegas hotels. Like the rest of us, these marketers are learning as they go, trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook to drive real business value. Most of the hotel marketing departments see social media as a direct-response channel, and that’s certainly a start. Put out a special offer through social media channels, and you can measure the response. Where there’s a measurable response, there’s ROI.

MGM Grand’s marketing head hinted at another possibility – their employees monitor Twitter to spot dissatisfied hotel guests, dispatching staff to help solve the problem. What’s the natural next step? Measure this response. How many problems did they intercept? How many were they able to solve? What does solving one customer’s problem equal in real dollars? All of these questions can be answered, and from those answers comes tangible value.

Find a Comparison

Finally, during a session about how social media and search intersect, we heard a great example from Lee Odden about how to put a value on social media. Lee mentioned that his firm drives about 15-20 major media mentions per month from social media. He estimates that this equates to paying a PR firm $10,000/month. This may not sound like metrics in the traditional sense, but it’s an entirely valid approach. PR costs money to generate, and social media has replaced that value.

Just Measure It

When it comes to measuring social media ROI, what are we really afraid of? If I start measuring, will I have to admit that being a 307th-level Maniac on Facebook Mafia Wars isn’t providing solid business value? Stop making excuses, stop mumbling about branding, and find a way to quantify social media success in real dollars.
 

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Posted by Dr. Pete

I’m reporting live from Pubcon Las Vegas this week, along with some of the SEOmoz team. To be honest, we’ve struggled a bit with how to cover the conference here on the blog. As someone who only hits a couple of conferences per year, I know how annoying it can be to have to hear how great an event is that you already regret not being able to go to. On top of that, sometimes information that seems brilliant in context just doesn’t translate into a quick blog blurb or Tweet. So, in the interest of providing value to those of you who aren’t here at Pubcon, we’re going to try to take some deeper dives into the content, hopefully providing some of that context you may be missing.

Is That An Elephant?

No, I’m not trying to distract you. These first two days of sessions, I couldn’t help but feel that there was an elephant in the room with us during the social media sessions. The enthusiasm for social media (and especially Twitter) has been stronger than ever, but we all seem reluctant to dampen that enthusiasm by talking about an uncomfortable fact – very few of us have really found a way to measure social media success. Sure, there are internal metrics for any given platform – Twitter followers, for example – but without something external to tie it to, those are little more than high scores in the social media video game.

The B-word

Of course, the default answer is always "branding". Unfortunately, much like "engagement", branding is too often just a distraction, an intangible excuse we use to avoid the fact that we have nothing to measure. Ironically, during a session that had nothing to do with social media, I heard something close to an answer during Q&A. No matter what you think branding is, find a way to measure it. Here are just a few possiblities:

  • Direct brand mentions
  • Links with brand-related anchor text
  • Branded search volume

Where’s there a number, there’s a path to calculating ROI.

Target a Response

At this morning’s keynote, we had a chance to hear from the marketing departments of various Vegas hotels. Like the rest of us, these marketers are learning as they go, trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook to drive real business value. Most of the hotel marketing departments see social media as a direct-response channel, and that’s certainly a start. Put out a special offer through social media channels, and you can measure the response. Where there’s a measurable response, there’s ROI.

MGM Grand’s marketing head hinted at another possibility – their employees monitor Twitter to spot dissatisfied hotel guests, dispatching staff to help solve the problem. What’s the natural next step? Measure this response. How many problems did they intercept? How many were they able to solve? What does solving one customer’s problem equal in real dollars? All of these questions can be answered, and from those answers comes tangible value.

Find a Comparison

Finally, during a session about how social media and search intersect, we heard a great example from Lee Odden about how to put a value on social media. Lee mentioned that his firm drives about 15-20 major media mentions per month from social media. He estimates that this equates to paying a PR firm $10,000/month. This may not sound like metrics in the traditional sense, but it’s an entirely valid approach. PR costs money to generate, and social media has replaced that value.

Just Measure It

When it comes to measuring social media ROI, what are we really afraid of? If I start measuring, will I have to admit that being a 307th-level Maniac on Facebook Mafia Wars isn’t providing solid business value? Stop making excuses, stop mumbling about branding, and find a way to quantify social media success in real dollars.
 

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Free as in beer

On October 16, 2009, In SEO, by willcritchlow

Posted by willcritchlow

As many of you are now aware, the "across the bloody pond" edition of the Pro SEO training that we are hosting in London with the SEOmoz crew is now sold out. What you may not know is that we (Distilled and SEOmoz) are sponsoring a LondonSEO event on Tuesday evening after the end of the seminar. Here’s the official write-up from Jane.

Crown and Sceptre pub, London

 

What does this mean for you? Well, it means that whether you are coming to the seminar or not, if you can get to London you can head for the Crown & Sceptre pub on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Foley Street on Tuesday evening for free beer, scintillating SEO chat and a chance to hang out with all the cool kids of the London SEO scene (yes, I’ll be there as well).

We are paying for the beer, so if you can get into central London, you really don’t have an excuse.

This post is really just a short informational one. Here’s the lowdown:

  • when Tuesday 20th October, from 6pm
  • where Crown & Sceptre pub on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Foley Street
  • how much? FREE! (free entry and free beer)

I hope to see many of you there. If you can make it, do introduce yourself. Most of the Distilled guys will be there, as will (I believe) Rand, Ben and Danny from SEOmoz.

Short and sweet. I think that’ll do for a Friday evening post. Have a good weekend all!

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Posted by willcritchlow

As many of you are now aware, the "across the bloody pond" edition of the Pro SEO training that we are hosting in London with the SEOmoz crew is now sold out. What you may not know is that we (Distilled and SEOmoz) are sponsoring a LondonSEO event on Tuesday evening after the end of the seminar. Here’s the official write-up from Jane.

Crown and Sceptre pub, London

 

What does this mean for you? Well, it means that whether you are coming to the seminar or not, if you can get to London you can head for the Crown & Sceptre pub on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Foley Street on Tuesday evening for free beer, scintillating SEO chat and a chance to hang out with all the cool kids of the London SEO scene (yes, I’ll be there as well).

We are paying for the beer, so if you can get into central London, you really don’t have an excuse.

This post is really just a short informational one. Here’s the lowdown:

  • when Tuesday 20th October, from 6pm
  • where Crown & Sceptre pub on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Foley Street
  • how much? FREE! (free entry and free beer)

I hope to see many of you there. If you can make it, do introduce yourself. Most of the Distilled guys will be there, as will (I believe) Rand, Ben and Danny from SEOmoz.

Short and sweet. I think that’ll do for a Friday evening post. Have a good weekend all!

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Seth Godin: Sliced Bread

Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers

Anthony Parinello: Your Price is Too High