SEO Moz Advanced Training Seminar Notes Wrapup

A few weeks ago I attended the SEO Moz Advanced SEO Training Seminar in Seattle, Washington. Below are my notes from a few of the talks we had, covering a wide variety of SEO topics. If you’re interested, most of our seminar should be available on DVD.

Advanced Reputation Management: Pro-active & Reactive Strategies for Control of the SERPs – Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris

• What is reputation management?
• Kind of search results
  • Controlled
  • Positive
  • Negative
• Kinds of management
  • before
  • during – monitor, assess, decide, engage, review
  • after
• Tactics
  • Sub Domains – having many strong sub domains, helps to dominate search listings
  • New Domains
  • Affiliations
  • Hosted Content – Youtube – use universal search. Profile pages also important
  • Keyword research – full names, title, nicknames, online handles,
  • Long Tail
  • Ranking for issues – ipod scratched screen, niche terms etc
• Keep it Natural
  • Look for shared names – people with the same or similar names, same surname ranking, etc
  • SERP Replacement
  • Universal Search – youtube videos rank, is good
  • Rebrand – Change name, get married, middle initial
• Pitfalls
  • Google wants diversity – keep all links in order, now what links to where
  • Universal search not always a good thing – it can just jump in there above your  better search listing
  • Long Tail never goes away
  • Dodgy clients – less of a problem than expected
  • Wiki-Circularity – something untrue makes it onto wikipedia, reputable journalists uses wiki as a source without checking, powerful newspaper website now has untrue story on it, wiki uses newspaper as authoritative source – now you’re screwed
• Rapid Fire Round
  • Use own domain strength – no 301’s.
  • Don’t forget legal tactics – copyright infringement, Libel, DMCA
  • Greyer Tactics – buy links
  • Black tactics – Google URL removal tool – use if somebody’s server has down time

Opportunities & Pitfalls of Buying Links

• Ideal Structure for buying links
  • Critical mass of links
• Bad Reputation of paid links
  • historically, most paid links have been search spam
  • used to game the system
  • no consideration to users
  • manufactured authority – create a blog, outsource content, purchase links, create keyword specific affiliate sites, point links from main site to arbitrage sites
• Paid Links can be effective
  • when used correctly
  • most SEO/SEM has paid link strategy
  • Focusing Link authority – domino rally
• Evaluating Publishers
  • Verticles
  • Relevance
  • Metrics
• Where to point links
  • top pages f funnel that convert well
  • pick category pages
• Getting double listings in google
  • aiming links at sub pages – helps focus your existing domain authority and triggers double listing
• Baseline Metrics
  • SERP
  • Derivative SERPs
  • Replacements of more appropriate landing page
  • Traffic tied to rank
  • value per visitor
  • organic conversion rates

Enterprise Level Link Acquition Strategies

• Ineffective Strategies
  • directory and submission based link building
  • link requests – super bad
  • link spamming
• Focus on overall link popularity ROI, not individual rankings
  • long tail reminder
  • low hanging fruit before going after harder ones
• Inter-Network Linking
• Links from partners and clients
• Badges and Widgets
• Building Link-Target Content
• Licensing for Links

SEO Tactics for Vertical Search Inclusion and Rankings – Stephan Spencer

• Optimizing for image search
  • Images on site should: Include keywords in image filename, include keywords in alt attribute, have good descriptive text, be on a page all about the keyword, subject, be opted in to googles images lab
• Image SEO via Flickr
  • use high quality photos
  • unique title
  • Description for photo
  • Create thematic sets
  • add to flickr groups
  • Geotag photos
  • Post each pictures page over to delicious, using handy submission links
  • Add digg link
• Optimizing for Local
  • business name in title
  • similar business name in domain
  • local address in webpage
  • phone number on page
  • proximity to city center
  • Microformats
• Optimizing for Mobile Search
  • Google Mobile Spider – Separate from google bot, google indexing ranking separate from main.
• Optimizing for Google News
  • top 5 news site
  • submit site for submission
  • blog/news site must be group effort – no solo bloggers
  • needs original content
  • give proper attribution
• Optimizing for Google blog search
  • full text, not summaries – web bugs?
  • 20 or more items on blog page
  • multiple feeds
  • keyword rich item title
  • brand name in title
  • most important keyword in title of site
  • compelling site container
• Optimizing for Video Search

Global Search Landscape & International Targeting – Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris

• Global Search Landscape
• Internationalization versus Localization
• The Problem
  • Desire for relevancy vs poor indicators
  • Hard to specify where you want your search content to show up – where should it be targeted at?
• Local indicators
  • CCTLD
  • hosting location
  • address on page
  • registration with local
  • WMC flag
  • language
  • Currency
• Challenges
  • Content – rewriting for different locations
  • Content – remember conversions/culture
• Solutions
  • One powerful domain – Ikea.com

SEO MOZ Site Review Checklist – What SEO moz when they look at a website for a client…

• Search Engine Friendlyness
  • Canonicalization
  • Duplicate Content
  • URL Parameters and Dynamic URLs – Search engine and user friendly usls
  • Spiderable Content
  • Visibility in Search Engines – visible?
  • HTML Site Map
  • HTTP Response codes – 404, 301, 302, 500
  • Hosting/IP Issues
  • URLs – careful with subdomains, secure pages, TLD+geographic location
  • Title Tags
  • Meta Descriptions
  • In-Document Keyword Use
  • Content Quality and Use Issues
  • Avoiding Spam/Penalties
  • user Experience & First Time visitor Impressions
  • Site Structure
  • Home page specifics
  • User Centered Design Test
  • Web Credibility Guidelines
  • Form usability/software application accessibility
  • Navigation Consistency
  • Building Content

Advanced Solutions to Common Site Errors – Rand Fishkin

• Robots exclusion protocol
• Info:URL
• Linkdomain
• Crawl test
• Boost Chances of Indexation
  • Flow of page rank
• Moving to a new domain
  • prepare with webmaster tools – register new and old sites on one account before the move takes place
  • 301 redirects – pointing on an individual url level
  • Earn Press and links to the new domain
  • Check duplicate rankings in search engines
  • Using links to Canonicalize
  • Check for Cannibalization

Avoiding Being A False Positive – How Black Hat Impacts White Hat Sites – Nick Gerner

• Evidence
  • Web Spam Taxonomy
  • Prevalence of Spam – 2002 (%7) 2004 (18%) 2008 (40%)
  • Domain Name of IP Address – detection
• Theory
  • Standing out from the crowd – human and machine tuning
  • Implementations – Page Rank, Trust Rank, Anti Trust Rank
• Speculation
  • Lots
  • Dot Zero Effect – most things that end in “dot zero” are not valuable content

Search Marketing Action Items from the Legal World – Sarah Bird

• Protecting your Website
  • Terms of Use – if you have a website, you need a TOU
  • Use the DMCA and CDA – Register with US copyright office, in order to use DMCA ($80 fee)
• Working with Clients
  • Incorporation – make sure to be incorporated, for asset protection
  • Contract Concerns – need Disclaimer of Warranties, Opportunity to Cure, Limitations of Liability, Indemnifications.
  • Enforcing Agreements – Oral agreements are technically enforceable, but not a good idea. Email agreements are being upheld in courts recently.
• Working with Creative Content
  • Third-Party keyword triggered advertising
  • Danger of comparative advertising
• Tightening Advertising Laws
• Out of time

How to serve different content to search engines and users without violating the spirit of SE guidelines

• Search engine cloaking detection methods
  • Automated – don’t actually catch that much
  • Manual – very effective
  • Goals of cloaking detection – finds sites that have manipulative intent
• Methods of Detection
  • User Agent Detection
  • User Agent + Reverse DNS Lookup – recommended by google
  • Javascript/Flash execution – SWF Object
  • Cookie Detection
  • IP Address Tracking
  • Click Behavior
  • Requests robots.txt

Site Architecture for Enterprise, Content Heavy Domains – Rand Fishkin

• HTML Sitemaps – limiting to 50-100 links/page, no matter site size
• Directing Link Juice – Build egalitarian link structure, identify high and low page rank sections, create links from high juice pages to low, use nofollow to control flow – (Analytics – find pages with the best referring link traffic)
• Category & Article pagination issues – pagination creates tidal wave of duplicate content for engines. Best practices – use snippets, use nofollow, use 301 to canonical versions

Site Architecture for Microsites – Rand Fishkin

• For time sensitive materials for big brands – Example – GM Volt
• Guerilla marketing campaigns – 10 reasons to date a unicorn https://mingle2.com/dating/unicorn
• Domain name keyword targeting – good opportunity to target for keywords
• Small sites for maximum SEO – Flow link juice, keywords in products and services, linkbait worthy content

Site Architecture for E-Commerce Sites – Stephan Spencer

• Breadcrumb Navigation
• Linkjuice and Flow
  • URL Testing & Iterative Optimization
• Site Pagination
  • Excessive pagination can cause numerous pages of product listing to not be crawled.
  • Must optimize pagination structure – keep it all relevant
  • Attribute based navigation – sometimes slices of navigation are the same – must add value to user, make nav different – NoFollow price breakdown navigation because it’s useless to the user
  • Tagging – Great for deep internal linking, interlinking
• Site Archetecture for Blogs
  • SEO Title Page plugin for blogs
  • Related posts – working top 10 posts into homepage
  • URLs – rewrite urls to contain keywords, hyphens, but not underscores. Maintain legacy URLs
  • Feed URL – using mybrand.com to rebrand your feedburner site feed into your own
  • Anchor Text