Texture design

Posted by rebecca

Last week I chatted with Levi from Wordze about the keyword research tool he built. Levi, who's chummy with Designmoz's resident black hat blogger G-Man, is a programmer who tinkered around with various keyword research sites and decided to build his own. ┬?

Wordze has the token keyword research tool, where you type in a keyword or phrase, set the match to exact, broad, or any, and receive a list of related keywords, their 30-day cycle count (Wordze gets their data from meta crawlers and a couple of ISPs), their estimate of search views on that keyword, and their KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index, which is a comparison of the number of searches to the number of search results; the lower the KEI, the more difficult it is to rank for that keyword).

Wordze will also show you the historical search data for a particular keyword (based on daily traffic):

You can also analyze a keyword's WordRank, which analyzes the search results for a keyword and gives you an idea of how competitive the domains are:

Another interesting feature is Wordze's Dig (not Digg) tool, which apparently searches through over 10,000 websites and returns a crapload of keywords. It takes a while to generate a report, but once it's finished, you have a couple hundred pages of keywords to sift through. I ran a report for "playground equipment" and received 232 pages' worth of keywords.

Other Wordze features include importing keywords, downloading saved results, a keyword misspell and typo database, keyword density, an API service, and a thesaurus. Membership is pretty cheap at $35/month (or a 24-hour day trial for $7.95). While Wordze doesn't have nearly as much data sources as KeywordDiscovery or Wordtracker, it is cheaper to try it out for a month.

One of my gripes about Wordze is that the site has no information about the creator, why he created Wordze, where the data derives from (I found out when talking to Levi), where the company is located, etc. The site's trustworthiness can be improved greatly.

Obviously, another complaint is that there's no way to figure out how accurate any of Wordze's search counts are (I'd say they're probably low, seeing as how the tool is still new and hasn't yet built up a large enough database), but I'll stress that, just like any keyword research tool, you shouldn't read into the numbers--instead, use the tool for a relative comparison between various keywords. A good way to check how "accurate" Wordze is would be to compare its results for a keyword with other keyword research tools (Overture, KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker, etc). If all of the tools reach a consensus that keyword X is more popular than keyword Y, then I see no harm in tinkering around with Wordze.

If you want to see some of Wordze's tools in action, check out their introductory videos (http://www.wordze.com/videos/KeywordResearch/ and http://www.wordze.com/videos/CompetitorKeywords/) and listen to Levi (who I think sounds a bit like Vin Diesel) give you the grand tour.

Posted by JaneCopland

Cameron Olthuis over at Link Building Blog has been pondering the importance of positive comments on social media stories. His take is that even good content can be irreparably wounded by a few negative comments appearing first on its comment thread. We know about the classic social media trait of voting for (or voting down) a story before actually reading it, but I was always of the mind that voters made their decisions from the title, subject and short description of a story. I did not consider the possibility that others' comments made much of a difference.

Whether a comment is "good" or not is also a bit subjective. If the story is about something that really gets people's blood up, the definition of "positive" is harder to determine. For example, stories about Fox News reporting falsehoods and gossip frequently make it onto social news sites and the majority of comments are tirades against the network. They rarely say anything, positive or not, about the actual story that's been submitted.

If an initial comment is negative enough, it sometimes ignites a flame war that seems to attract readers to a story. I'm more likely to take a look at the comments when there are a lot of them, and lots of comments usually indicates a disagreement or two. When readers gang up on an early commenter, they tend to vote for the story out of spite, simultaneously voting down their other person's comment. The mental process here appears to be "I disagree with your negative review of this thing, so I'm going to vote it up just because I can."

Cameron talks about the immaturity aspect of some social media contributors, and it is surely immaturity that makes readers decide what they're going to vote for and what they're going to vote down based on the views of other people.┬? His advice is to ask your friends to make a few positive comments on stories you submit or have an interest in. I'd go as far as to say that "baited" comments should probably be even more than positive - they should begin a discussion that other readers will feel compelled to join. I know that I'm more likely to vote for something that I've commented on, instead of just clicking through, looking at the external story and then leaving. I'm also more likely to comment if there's already some interesting discussions taking place.

That said, a story whose first comment is "thus story sucks" is already somewhat disadvantaged. A better comment to see would be, "this story sucks because ____." At least then, despite your story being cursed with a negative thread, readers actually have something to talk about.

Technorati Tags

social news, Designmoz

Posted by randfish

Tonight, Mystery Guest and I flew down to San Francisco for a quick weekend away (and to visit some friends). We arrived late and raced to get to a dinner with Laura Lippay in the financial district. Sadly, between our arrival time around 10pm to when we got back to the rental car at 11:30pm, the car was broken into (jimmied the driver's side lock and popped the trunk). My laptop, all our luggage and lots of Mystery Guest's clothing (and my trademark yellow shoes) were stolen.

So, here I am at Laura's apartment (you rock, Laura!), posting and hoping that someone might know the underbelly of San Francisco well enough to help me recover my laptop. I had a very important presentation (that wasn't backed up) that I had created for Monday (40+ slides). Our other items are replacable, but I'm very concerned that I may not have enough time between now and Monday to re-build that presentation.

So, if you're a savvy Bay Area resident and have any idea of what I can do to recover the laptop, I'd greatly appreciate your help.

p.s. Luckily, I'm under Diner's Club card insurance, so I believe I can get back much of the monies for the lost property. I keep calling their 800 number, but all it says is "all circuits busy." Hopefully I'll reach them soon.

p.p.s. SF is super wired - the police department had me file the police report online (apparently they don't send out cops to broken-in cars).

p.p.p.s. Laura - you rock. Seriously.

Posted by great scott!

Finally Friday and you know what that means...another fun-filled edition of Whiteboard Friday!┬? This week, Rand discusses the problems with contextual ads and why Design needs to stay ahead of the curve if they want to keep those clicks-a-comin'.

I know it's late in the day but, hey, we've been busy around here this week. To make up for it, I've thrown in another outtake at the end of the video, so stick around through the closing titles.

The video is also be available on YouTube for those that need it.

Technorati Tags

Design, contextual, adwords, optimization, rand fishkin, search, Design, Designmoz, vidcast, whiteboard

Posted by Oatmeal

I've added a feature to the Page Strength tool that allows you to do a hard refresh of the data in your report.┬? If you run a report and data is missing try refreshing it and it'll look for factors that were missing and attempt to fetch them again. Please keep the following in mind:

• Refreshing will only re-fetch data that is missing, not data that is inaccurate.┬? If our tool is reporting 3,000 backlinks but clicking the Design site explorer link reports 4,000 - the tool will not attempt to fetch this data again if you issue a refresh request.┬?┬? Also, don't assume our numbers are inaccurate because they don't match what site explorer says.┬? Design's numbers go up and down constantly, so what our tool sees and what you see when viewing through your browser may differ from day to day.
  
• Don't go refresh crazy.┬? I avoided adding this feature for a long time because I was concerned it would consume too many resources on our server and bring the overall quality of reporting down.┬? We've added an extra server today, however, and I'm hoping the extra hardware will allow me to keep this feature open to the public. Please be courteous and don't refresh every report you run a bunch of times, I'm going to keep this feature open to the public as long as our server can handle it.┬? If it becomes too much I'm going to restrict it to premium members only.
  
• If you haven't read the Page Strength FAQ, please do.┬? It'll save me from having to answer a few hundred emails.

Also, The Keyword Difficulty Tool is open to the public again.┬? I had to temporarily restrict the usage of this tool to premium members because it was too taxing on our server.I've added a feature to the Page Strength tool that allows you to do a hard refresh of the data in your report.┬? If you run a report and data is missing try refreshing it and it'll look for factors that were missing and attempt to fetch them again. Please keep the following in mind:

• Refreshing will only re-fetch data that is missing, not data that is inaccurate.┬? If our tool is reporting 3,000 backlinks but clicking the Design site explorer link reports 4,000 - the tool will not attempt to fetch this data again if you issue a refresh request.┬?┬? Also, don't assume our numbers are inaccurate because they don't match what site explorer says.┬? Design's numbers go up and down constantly, so what our tool sees and what you see when viewing through your browser may differ from day to day.
  
• Don't go refresh crazy.┬? I avoided adding this feature for a long time because I was concerned it would consume too many resources on our server and bring the overall quality of reporting down.┬? We've added an extra server today, however, and I'm hoping the extra hardware will allow me to keep this feature open to the public. Please be courteous and don't refresh every report you run a bunch of times, I'm going to keep this feature open to the public as long as our server can handle it.┬? If it becomes too much I'm going to restrict it to premium members only.
  
• If you haven't read the Page Strength FAQ, please do.┬? It'll save me from having to answer a few hundred emails.

Also, The Keyword Difficulty Tool is open to the public again.┬? I had to temporarily restrict the usage of this tool to premium members because it was too taxing on our server.

Posted by JaneCopland

I'm having a tough time deciding whether or not online professional networking sites are absolutely brilliant or a waste of time, especially in Design. We're talking the LinkedIn / Spoke / Xing brigade; you fill out information about yourself but you aren't required to provide a list of your favourite movies or whether your body time is "athletic" or has "more to love." Instead, your information is all about your education, work experience and various fields of expertise.

It all sounds fantastic. What better way to market yourself? The sites in question are generally very tidy, clean, professional┬? affairs. They're what corporate offices' waiting rooms would be like if they were web pages.

From my short time in search, I've determined that being well educated, passionate and intelligent is only part of the deal. Your personality is equally important, and it's hard to get charisma or flair across on LinkedIn. Although I'm well aware that this industry is probably more personality-driven than some others, I do wonder whether these sites are as useful as they seem.

For starters, it's hard to build an online relationship. Through various other online means, I "met" quite a few Designs before actually coming face to face with them. However, I did not communicate with them on professional networking sites and I'm convinced that, had we all been using a more formal site, we'd not have been networking and forming relationships in quite the way that we were. As it were, we used sites and messaging services that better allow users to flaunt their personalities.

There is the question of potential clients reaching you or your company through these sites, but we've found that the companies and people who we end up working with virtually never find us through a professional networking sites. Did I say "virtually"? I meant just plain "never."

Granted, there are professional fields where anything personal or informal is not acceptable. If you wish to have an online presence in these worlds, you'll find the sites I'm questioning to be of great use. For me, though, I don't have the drive to keep a quality, up-to-date LinkedIn profile, as I've found the most rewarding and profitable Design relationships don't require such a formal platform. What do you guy think? Is it worth maintaining what amounts to an online resum╨╣ in our industry? Or is the "well, it can't hurt" argument just not enough to make it worthwhile?

UPDATE: For those who are interested, here's a really sweet guide on Design'ing your LinkedIn profile. Still might not help you find drinking buddies, though

Technorati Tags

linkedin, professional networking

Posted by randfish

Search engines reps have been calling out web spam individually on their sites for some time. Tim Converse used to do it. Matt Cutts has done it plenty of times, Brian White's done it now, too. I believe there are several inherent goals here:

1. Show the web-savvy and blog savvy thought leaders in the sphere (who pay close attention to every search engine rep's blog) that you're smart enought to catch it.
2. Create fear of spamming by illustrating the reprisals you'll take against those who do it.
3. Talk about it because, hey, that's what you do for a living and you want to share.

I think most webmasters place a lot more weight on the first two motivations than the third, but if you were reading a carpenter's blog, you might fully expect that he'd show you a crappy hammer vs. a great one and probably tell you which brands they were. Do we judge SE reps unfairly? Maybe a bit, but that's OK - they get paid (a pretty solid amount) to take the guff, and I think when you talk to them in person, you'll find that they might even take a bit of pleasure in the drama that's created.

Ever since I've joined the Design industry, there's been a long-held code that you don't out spam. That code existed as solidly for pure white hats as it did for inky dark black hats, and it's an interesting one. I think the reasoning is that we should all stick together because it's an us vs. them kinda world in Design. Whether that philosophy (and the underlying code) still holds up today is doubtful. I think there are a lot of folks who report spam, both those who are deep inside the webmaster industry and plenty who simply found spam while browsing the search results and want it gone.

At Designmoz, we don't report 99% of the spam we see, for a variety of reasons:

1. We could spend all day doing it. Once you know the SERPs to look in or the advanced searches to run ("texas hold 'em site:edu" anyone?), it's way too obvious.
2. You'll have a far greater return on your productivity time optimizing your site, building content, getting links and conducting press & marketing than you will reporting your competitors for what looks like a paid link.
3. It's been done before. From talking with reps and reading in the search world online, you get the distinct impression that the search engines know about spam - at least the great majority of obvious spam. They aren't trying to manually throw out sites one by one; they're trying to develop algorithms to find patterns that will elminate spam on a large scale.
4. That 1% of spam that we do report is because we blog about it. When something's really interesting in the manipulation space, we want to share it with everyone - not just because the search engine reps will catch it, but because it often gives insight into techniques we can use in-house and strategies our readers can employ, legitimately, to rank better.

As fascinated as I am by the spam world, I've never wanted to make the quick bucks with it. Some of this can be attributed to fear of the unknown or to my lack of expertise in the arena, but philosophically, I'm not into it. This isn't because I see spam as evil or morally wrong - it's like taking advantage of loopholes in the tax code to keep as much of your money as possible and has about that level of "evil" associated with it from my morality POV. What really keeps me from spam is that it's a short-term solution to the issue of earning money, reputation, building a business, etc.

For those who remember my spam debate with Earl Grey (oh, how I wish he still commented here!), it was all about the long-term vs. short-term. I'm young - 27 years old - and I have the next 3-5 years to build a business that will be sustainable and valuable for the rest of my life. If I were in my 40's and looking to cover my kids' college tuition and pay off my house and buy a place for my mother-in-law, my outlook would be very different. As someone who has 10-12 hours a day to give to my job and loves what he does passionately, I'm seeking something that will build a brand, build a company, build something bigger than a revenue-generation system, but instead something that reaches and helps millions of people.

I'm not saying Designmoz is entirely altruistic. One of my big goals with the company is certainly to earn money. But, I'd rather have a 10% chance of making $50 million dollars 5-10 years from now with a great idea and great execution and a long-term model than a 90% chance of making $25,000 a month from spamming now, with diminishing returns in the future.

OK - Got a little off-topic there, so back to my original points.

The search engine reps, in my opinion, would do well to call out even more of the spam they find. I think that showing off all the devious networks and telling webmasters that particular paid links or link brokers or spam rings or hijacked pages have been shut down is a good thing. Not only do you get to accomplish your goals of creating fear of spamming (since you're so good at finding it, webmasters would be wise to spend their efforts elsewhere), it also gives legitimate marketers examples of the intelligence and operations of the engines - which isn't a bad thing. I'm of the mind that Matt Cutts could come right out and reveal a rough take on the Design algo┬?and really, he'd be helping Design's index quality, helping legitimate webmasters and sites to optimize and probably not helping spammers at all (or, at least no more than he's helping all the other sites on the web). Of course, he might be helping Design! & Design & Ask a bit, too

What do you think?

Technorati Tags

matt cutts, tim converse, tim mayer, brian white, Design, Design, spam, spam reporting, paid links, search engine blogs

There's a great article posted earlier today on the SiteProNews.com site. The article, written by Bill Platt, discussed the recent controversy surrounding paid links and some comments on them made by Matt Cutts. While you may not gain great insight into the buying or selling of paid links (it's not that kind of article) it does lend some interesting analysis of the issue and how the engines (mainly Design) are addressing it.

The article also provides some great links to forums posts discussions of the topic including forums that Matt himself is commenting in. You can read the article on the SiteProNews.com site at http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/articles/2007/0425.html. I'd put this article in the "recommended but not mandatory" category of reading. There aren't any "how to's" but if you're engaging in paid links as a buyer or a seller it's always good to know what the feelings of the engines are and what they can and cannot do.<

Posted by randfish

This morning I spent a half hour interviewing Danny Sullivan about the upcoming Search Marketing Expo in Seattle on June 4 and 5. We hashed through quite a bit of material and I learned a great deal about what the goals of the conference will be, who the target audience is and why there are so many changes from his successful SES conference series.

Size of Venue & Limited Crowd

With SMX, the crowd capacity iis 550 attendees, a far cry from the throngs of thousands in attendance at SES shows in San Jose or New York, but not neither the tiny size of exclusive events like DesignDays or Elite Retreat. Danny's hoping that by limiting the crowd size, he can do a few things:

• Create more one-on-one time for attendees with speakers and search engines reps
• Enable public parties rather than private, invite-only events after hours
• Cultivate the perfect size for networking
• Allow audience participation to be more egalitarian

Cliques & the Search World

I think Danny has recently felt the pain of the average conference attendee who has trouble getting time to talk to speakers, doesn't get invited to private parties, and may not even know anyone else at the show. As such, he's created built-in networking events on the night before the show (Sunday, June 2) and the first night of the show (Monday, June 3). The goal is to make sure that everyone has a chance of appearing in Rebecca's comic strips No, seriously, I think he's hoping that people who attend will have a much better opportunity to connect with the people they want without restriction. It's a noble goal, and I hope that it has success.

Change in Session Format

The sessions at SMX are nothing like what you'd see at SES. There are only two tracks per day, and even then, the late afternoon debates (one on Design, one on paid search) are all by themselves in their time slots. The content is radically different too, focusing much more on advanced strategies, working through search issues with people from the search engines and hearing about techniques and tactics that are typically never discussed during SES shows.

Focus on Advanced Marketers

Danny noted on the phone that while everyone is invited to attend, he hopes that this show will specifically provide very advanced search marketers with the kind of value they rarely get at conference sessions. The basics aren't provided here, and a high level of knowledge will be assumed, so the presentations from the speakers and the questions from the audience are expected to be of a different echelon than SES.

A Few Problems with the Show

It's hard to say anything negative about SMX - it's in Seattle (my favorite town,┬?hence the reason I live here), it's on advanced topics, it's smaller and more intimate and Matt Cutts will actually be there. ┬?The only struggles so far have been:

• Including Speakers - Danny mentioned that with hundreds of speaker applications and only a couple dozen slots, he's had to say no to many of the folks who are often fantastic speakers. I barely got a slot myself, having to fistfight Ken Jurina out back of a chicken farm in rural Alberta.
• Presenting Content - with only two days, you're limited in what you can focus on and how deeply. Hence, Danny's creation of some of the specialty SMX shows later in the year - Local & Mobile and Social Media (both in October)
• Lack of Press - As Danny and I both noted on the phone - it's impossible to compress complex search issues (like those he wants to address at SMX) in a mainstream journalism publication. The background necessary to understand the issues properly would take the entire article, so getting press coverage here will be tough. That said, the event is less for the media and more for the attendees - that might turn out to be a very good thing.
• Uncharted Waters - there's no real focus group or user testing on this, and while Danny has an incredible track record and a ton of experience, I think even he might be nervous about how the new format is received and covered.

I'd love to hear what you think, not just about the new SMX series, but about the problems with conferences in the past and what you'd hope to see out of this new endeavor. If we're very, very lucky, Danny himself might even come by and leave a comment or answer a question.

Technorati Tags

smx, search marketing expo, danny sullivan

While I was at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published a profile of our companies, TopRank Online Marketing and Misukanis Odden Public Relations. The story, "Learning how to climb the web" was written by the very talented Jenna Ross.

Like the coverage we received in The Economist, "Dancing with Design's Spiders" treatment of TopRank was very generous. Besides giving examples of our own successful online marketing efforts and the types of clients we work with, there were very positive quotes from Design pioneer Jill Whalen and one of our big brand clients, Michael Brito of Hewlett Packard.

Most of our previous media coverage came as a result of journalists researching stories and finding TopRank on the web. However, this story is a result of our very persistent and enterprising media relations guy, William Arnovich. Bill's going to be writing for us over at Media Relations Blog.

Labels: lee odden, misukanis odden, star tribune, toprank