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This week I had the opportunity to attend Distilled’s Pro SEO conference in Boston, and I took away a plane full of insights along with learning never to try flying from foggy Ithaca, N.Y., to Boston (don’t ask). (more…)
For the past two weeks you’ve been voting like crazy for who you think was the very best SEO Celebrity Look-Alike pairing. Thanks to all who participated, tweeted, commented, Facebook’d, and voted. While it was a close race, our readers decided on….drum roll please….
With 23% of the vote, Rand from SEOMoz.org is our official winner. I contacted him last night to share the good news, and along with his thanks he gave me his charity of choice to donate to: The Seattle Children’s Hospital, a world class child health care facility. For more than 100 years they’ve provided top-quality care to children in the Seattle area, providing inpatient, outpatient, diagnostic, surgical, rehabilitative, behavioral, emergency and outreach services. Such a great organization, who can greatly use donations. Learn how you can help the Seattle Children’s Hospital by donating online or via mail.
The final tallies are as follows:
*Note….none of the Vertical Measures crew voted for Arnie (just in case you thought we padded the voting). 
This week, to launch the May thru July Link Building Tools Series of the SEO & Link Building Best Practices Blog I’ve had the extreme pleasure of speaking with a link builder that, in my opinion, really needs no introduction but just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, I’ll clue you in. Rand Fishkin the CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz is a leader in the field of search engine optimization tools, resources & community. Last year, he co-authored the Art of SEO from O’Reilly Media and was named among the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30 by BusinessWeek. He’s particularly passionate about the SEOmoz blog, read by tens of thousands of search professionals each day.
Elise Redlin-Cook: Well, I think I will dig right in. In the past, and it could be years ago or even just yesterday, what link are you most proud of acquiring for your site or a clients site?
Rand Fishkin: I have a bad memory, so I’ll have to pull something recent. Earlier this year I visited YCombinator and spoke about SEO for Startups. The blog post Paul Graham wrote after that event really excited me.
Elise: That IS something to be proud of. What specific tools are in your link building arsenal to help you acquire links for a client who is just getting started?
Rand: I’m an unabashed fan of two tools at the moment – Keyword Difficulty, which can help show how hard it will be to rank for a keyword, who’s currently in the top 10 and what their strengths are – and Open Site Explorer, which gives a great interface to link analysis, both self and competitive.
Elise: Do you employ competitive analysis in your link building strategy for clients?
Rand: Absolutely! 
Until you’ve analyzed the competitive landscape, you can’t do a truly comprehensive job of SEO.
Elise: What are your views on no-follow vs. do-follow links?
Rand: It depends on the perspective you’re asking from. We no longer recommend using nofollow links internally to control the flow of PageRank (though it appears to work sometimes, anyway), but we certainly advise placing nofollow on external links that users can submit/edit (to help protect a site from spam).
Elise: Has your link building techniques changed over the years as the search industry has evolved?
Rand: Absolutely. When I first started link building in 2002, I would try getting a link anywhere on the web I could find. I’d buy links, submit to open directories, leave comments on UGC portals, etc. Over time, I became more sophisticated and used content as a leverage point to attract links, ran with viral content and used badges/widgets to distribute linking activities. Lately, I’ve been a big fan of incentivized link magnets such as embedded content and content/technology/API licensing deals.
Elise: Have you made any big updates to your tools or released any new products that you’d like to talk about?
Rand: The mozbar has seen some serious upgrades of late – you can do 80% of site/page analysis just using the data from the toolbar and the analyze page feature (and can even surf as Googlebot, turn on/off javascript/images, etc). I’d have a hard time doing SEO without it these days.
started the site as a place to vent frustrations and get feedback from other folks in the search community. Eventually, it turned into a very exciting business.Elise: So, I’m curious…what exciting projects are you involved in right now that you’d like to discuss?
Rand: Last summer I posted some notebook pages about a product we’d been considering at SEOmoz for a long while. That product should be arriving this summer and I can barely wait
Elise: I’ve heard that you popped the question to your wife in a very public way. Would you like to tell us about why and how you did it that way?
Rand: I’d rather just point you to the videos and the Seattle PI article; they explain it far better than I could.
Elise: Lastly, I’d love to know if you are driven by any great passions outside of the business arena?
Rand: I’ve been thinking a bit about what I might do after SEOmoz. Chuck Feeney is a personal hero of mine, and I’d love to one day accomplish 1/100th of what he’s done post-entrepreneurship.
What fun it was to get my questions answered by Rand. What do you think about these tools, and techniques?
A well known name in the search industry is that of Rand Fishkin, our "Rand Finale" Internet expert in our 2010 predictions video series. Rand is the CEO & founder of SEOMoz, a leader in search engine optimization tools, resources & community. He is particularly passionate about the SEOMoz blog, where he discusses a range of topics about industry related news, tips, and information. Rand has spoken at conferences and keynotes around the world, and is a true expert in the field.
He was in town for the recent AZIMA event "Strategies for SEO Success in 2010", and we had the opportunity to ask him about his predictions for the search industry in 2010. While SEOMoz is not located in Phoenix (they call Seattle, WA their home), we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to include him in our Phoenix based interview series. Rand gives some insight into the recently publicized news Google mentioned at CES (Near Me Now), as well as what he thinks should be your SEO focus in 2010.
Don’t forget to check out our main post "2010 Predictions With 10 Internet Experts", which details each of our interviews throughout the series, 10 in total, with links to each and every video in the series.
In the video below Arnie asks Rand:
Follow both Arnie 
and Rand 
on Twitter for their helpful advice both in SEO and link building.
Are you focusing on conversion rate optimization? What are your plans to do so in the coming year?
Today in Pubcon’s social media sessions broader topics were discussed. Day 1 at Pubcon seemed to focus on Twitter, and today each of the sessions broadened the scope to help the attendees see the use of a variety of social media sites as the real way to address your social media marketing plan. Below you’ll find a summary of the information received at the sessions I attended. Don’t forget to check out my tweets during the session for more real time information. Follow me: @cliquekaila on Twitter.
How Do Social Media and Search Intersect? with Lee Oden, Bill Hartzer, Tony Adam, and David Wallace.
This session focused on the true benefit social media provides in regards to search, and how the two overlap in many different ways. Lee Oden, from TopSearchBlog.com, started off the session discussing how small business can really benefit from social media, and Twitter in general. "60% of marketers plan to take money away from traditional marketing and spend it on interactive ads instead". He stresses that marketers realize there is a need for social media because, SEO=increased conversions. He suggests optimizing social media for search. Grow your social network via search, help people find your network using search, and advises combining your search and social objectives.
Bill Hartzer, a presenter in a few of the social media sessions at Pubcon, discussed his opinions of how search and social intersect. Starting off he discusses the old style SEO and the new style SEO, which involves content creation, on-page optimization, and utilization of social media to get noticed. He makes a direct correlation between social and search stating that "success in social media = getting noticed in search". How?
Tony Adam was up next, and explained the ‘visibility factor’. You should stand out from the crowd, create content people want to share, and don’t use social media as a replacement for search but rather as a visibility option.
David Wallace, from SearchRank.com, wraps up this session. He states that there is an obvious reluctance to embrace social media, and many excuses: 1) blogging: don’t know where to start…which isn’t a valid excuse, there are a multitude of things to discuss. 2) Gossip: leary of what people might say, but guess what? They are already saying it! You might as well get in on the convo. 3) Oversight: businesses don’t want to manage social media, but Wallace states: they just have to get over that, its apart of business and marketing these days.
Understanding the Complex Social Media Marketing Playing Field with Jennifer Laycock, Dan Zarrella, and Rand Fishkin (presenting due to the absence by Ben Huh from Pet Holdings, Inc.)
This session, about the complex web equation: brand management, discusses how traditional media, blogs, forums, groups and even chat can leave you vulnerable. Jennifer Evans Lavcock is up first and gives a great way to think about your social media strategy in order to address the vulnerability: as a dating relationship. 1) listen to your partner/public, 2) learn how to be ‘romantic’ to coax and encourage your demographic, 3) Don’t expect ‘sex’ on the 1st date: you aren’t going to get the full ‘value’ out of your social media marketing plan if you try to make it ‘happen’ on the first try, 4) don’t pretend to be someone else, just like in dating embrace who you are, 5) make yourself available and open, find a way to interact with your customers, 6) Seek out the right match, and find the right person to connect with by understanding how to be objective, 7) value the long term relationship, its far cheaper to keep a customer than it is to find a new one!
Dan Zarrella, from Hubspot, follows Jennifer with "Twitter by the Numbers: The Complex Playing Field of Microblogging". A few key points here:
Finally Rand Fishkin fills in for missing session panelist Ben Huh. Gotta give Rand props, he pulled this session out of thin air with little time to spare! The session focuses on user generated content. He advises the following:
Going For the Gold: Optimizing for the Social Media Payday with David Snyder, Jay Berkowitz, Rebecca Kelley and Reem Aeidoh
Rebecca Kelley started off with "How to Make Money with Social Media Marketing". She stresses a few key points: traffic, links, and a relevant consumer base are key to being successful online. Proving ROI is a bit hard but with sites like: reddit, digg, delicious, stumbleupon, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin provide you as variety of items: links, traffic, mindshare, subscribers, a sense of community, brand loyalty, and great for promotions.
Reem Abedoah, up next, addresses how best to approach social media. A brand can’t dominate the conversation but rather encourage the conversation to occur. Have a larger share of voice by having a holistic approach.
Put social before money suggests Dave Snyder. Customer service (retention) links (SEO rankings) and traffic = conversions. Building a sites equity is important and often involves building a home for a community for your site visitors. Make them feel at home, turn a friend into a customer, create incentives which encourage conversions AND evangelism, and finally collect data and revise your social media plan. Don’t just start spamming but rather focus on communication and engagement.
Finally Jay Berkowitz discusses Going for Gold. This can be acheived by: 1) Crowd sourcing, 2) Getting more friends 3) Utilizing linkedin and Youtube, surprisingly many people use search functions on these sites, and 4) Take all the video and audio you do and throw it up on your site via a transcription.
Lastly I attended a site review session, which focused on volunteers requesting advice for their sites in regards to their social media interactions. A bankruptcy site, education site, and social media advocate site were evaluated. The panelists suggested the following:
Today’s sessions at Pubcon provided quite a bit of information about social media.
What did you find interesting in our Pubcon Las Vegas Day 2 summary?
