We’ve been hearing from many of our premium members that while they love the information provided in the guides, Q+A knowledge base, discount store, tools, link directory, and tips, they’re not 100% sure how to utilize it all to help them get more traffic. And, even though we’re just a few weeks away from launching some exceptional new services (and a new interface for the premium content), I figured I’d walk through some of the ways you can leverage all the goodies in premium to help your sites or those of your clients.
NOTE: Apologies in advance to our non-premium readers, I’ll be back on globally valuable free advice tomorrow.
The main tasks that premium content is designed to help with are the following:
- Link Building – How Can I Get More High Quality Links for Better Rankings?
- Keyword Research – How Can I Find Valuable Keywords to Use on My Site?
- On-Page Optimization – How Can I Build the Best Sites and Pages Possible for High Rankings?
- Competitive Analysis – What Are My Competitors Doing That I can Learn From?
- Measuring Success – How Can I Track and Compare My Progress and Efforts to Improve Over Time?
- Branding & Viral/Social Media Marketing – How Can I Leverage Social Sites & the Blogosphere to Reach Influencers On and Offline?
- SEO Consulting – I Have Specific Questions About the SEO Process that Need Answers
I’ll walk through each of these tasks one by one and break down the content and tools inside premium that can help you do a better job with each.
How Can I Get More High Quality Links for Better Rankings?
(#1) The Professional’s Guide to Link Building
At 40+ pages, and with dozens of specific techniques, examples, and direct links (plus lots of nice screenshots), the Professional’s Link Building Guide is a good intro to link building practices as well as a solid refresher for even experienced link builders. I’m embarrassed to say that I actually went through it recently and caught a couple strategies I’d somehow forgotten.
(#2) The Juicy Link Finder Tool
One of my favorite tools, and exceptionally easy to use. You start by plugging in the keywords or phrases you’re trying to optimize for (variations help, too) and the Juicy Link Finder will start its retrieval process:
The tool takes between 2-10 minutes to search depending on the time of day (our server load) and how many results you request (it goes up to 200 at a time).
The results can be sorted by PageRank of the domain, age, or their rank in Google’s results. The link on the right – “find links on this domain” – then takes you directly to a Google query to help find potential acquisition targets:
Manual link building is definitely a pain, but this tool makes the process considerably less taxing and often helps to ID links that are simply too time consuming for even the most dedicated link ninjas to dig up on their own. A future upgrade (coming soon) will also list the number of results for the link searches on each domain to save even more time.
(#3) Link Building Tips
There are tons of good tips on link building that I’ve accumulated over the last 9 months – in fact, there are loads and loads of awesome tidbits in there.
(#4) Link Building in the Q+A Knowledge Base
To date, members have asked 145 questions specifically on the topic of link building. Some really good ones include – Link Building for a Highly Regulated Site, Press Releases for Link Building, and Linking Between Multiple Domains Owned by the Same Person.
(#5) Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool
The Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool is great for competitive as well as self-analysis, and digging through your competition’s links can yield some terrific results.
Once you’ve entered a URL or domain, give the tool a few minutes to run and you’ll get back a report like this (I’ve truncated pages and pages of data down to a short screenshot):
The tool will scan up to 1000 unique links, so you can get very robust reporting, and digging through the link sources (sorted by domain by default) is a terrific ability. For example, using the above information, I can see that one of SEOAdministrator’s tactics is to get links from sites employing their software back to their domain, a nice potential tactic for SEOmoz. Maybe we should offer discounts on premium in exchange for links 🙂 (obviously, I’m kidding).
(#6) The Premium Link Directory
Back when I was link building all day for some of our earliest clients (years 2003-2006), I would have given my right arm for a directory of high quality, juice-passing directories. Well, OK, actually, I just started building my own, but now I get to share it!
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We’re adding about 3-5 links a week, and expect to ramp that up in 2008 as we add more manpower to the team.
(#7) The Discount Store
The discount store features a good number of link building services, paid directories, and link advertising sources at discounted rates. We only list providers we’ve found valuable, so you can be relatively sure they’ll be, at the least, providing solid ROI.
How Can I Find Valuable Keywords to Use on My Site?
(#8) The Professional’s Guide to Keyword Research
At 75+ pages, Keyword Research is our beefiest guide. Rebecca has painstakingly gone through every major keyword research source, pulled out screenshots, given examples, and generally illustrated the process of keyword research from start to finish.
(#9) The Popular Searches Tool
The Popular Searches Tool is considerably more valuable now than when it launched, due to the 100+ days of archived data. For example, I can not only see what’s hot now:
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But also what was driving traffic back in August:
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(#10) The Term Extractor Tool
If you want to know what keywords your competition is employing on their pages, Term Extractor is an excellent tool to get the job done. For example, I’ve run a term extraction on AllRecipes.com to see what’s going on with their homepage:
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The data here is decent, showing us that things like “holiday menu” and “cooking tips” might be worth investigating as potential keyword data, but the tool can be even stronger on content-based pages that rank well, like B2Evolution’s high ranking page for Web Hosting:
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(#11) The Keyword Difficulty Tool
There is, probably, no better tool that SEOmoz provides. The Keyword Difficulty Tool gives the kind of information that’s critical to every SEO – helping you decide which terms and phrases are worth pursing and which may be out of reach. If you’re seeking to pick low hanging fruit, this is a gold mine of data. For example, if I estimated that the search volume and conversion rate for “christmas gift ideas” and “homemade christmas gifts” were fairly similar, but wanted to know which I’d be better able to rank for, I could just run two reports and get not only comparative scores but serious competitive intelligence about the current players for each.
(#12) The Discount Store
Several great keyword research providers have solid discount offers in the store, including a pair that we at SEOmoz employ.
How Can I Build the Best Sites and Pages Possible for High Rankings?
(#13) The Illustrated Guide to Building a Search-Friendly Website
The Guide to Search Friendliness is an easy-to-follow guide and probably the best thing you can distribute to a webdev team, designer, developer, or manager planning to launch or rebuild a site. It walks through nearly every part of the essential process of information architecture, page construction, and markup in solid detail.
(#14) The Crawl Test Tool
Crawl Test is designed to give a solid picture of a site’s success with indexing at the major engines, potential problems with title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and duplicate content. I ran a test on Whole Foods’ website:
In addition to noting that MSN seems to be having indexing trouble (actually, it looks like that’s just our tool having trouble querying Live.com), you can see the duplicate title tags, pages lacking meta descriptions, pages with duplicate meta descriptions, and even a list of the most common terms. The report also shows off its results in a page by page format:
Crawl test reports are great for identifying obvious problems, as well as helping you discover what the link structure of your sites and pages are showing the search engines (and crawlers like Googlebot, which SEOmoz’s own bot mimics in behavior).
(#15) The Geo-Targeting Detection Tool
Sometimes, building the best site requires targeting vertical searches and the Geo-Targeting Tool is perfect for helping with local search results. Here’s a sample query run on one of my favorite local restaurants, Volterra:
Not only does the tool show me great data about the site’s targeting to local search (including the fact that it might be a wise idea to put the address information somewhere on the page), it also shows results for searches at the major engines, so I can see whether Volterra has been included in the local results at Google, Yahoo! & MSN/Live Local. There’s also handy links to the submission forms for each of the engines so you can get your business included if it hasn’t already been.
(#16) The Term Target Tool
If you’re not sure how your on-page SEO is performing for a given term, or you want to do some analysis on a competitor’s keyword usage, Term Target is a great tool. Here I’m looking at how LogoWorks has done targeting the phrase “logo design”:
Interestingly, while they don’t have the phrase in the first 100 words on the page or in the header tags, they do use it extensively in their internal anchor text – making “logo design” the phrase of the link back to the homepage.
(#17) The Q+A Knowledge Base
Knowledge base has 93 completed threads in the technical issues section and another 85 in On-Page SEO Issues, making it a robust compendium for frequently frustrating optimization and targeting questions.
What Are My Competitors Doing That I Can Learn From?
(#18) The Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool
As we discussed above, the Backlink Anchor Text Tool can give you insight into not only which links your competition has, but the anchor text of those links and, with a little effort, the link building strategies they’ve employed to receive the links.
(#19) The Page Strength Tool
This is probably SEOmoz’s most popular tool, and it’s still a very solid effort (though it’s about to undergo an overhaul). Page Strength is designed to provide a quick overview of a page’s potential ability to rank well and its global importance on the web. Using snippets of 3rd party data and an internal algorithm to score the data, we’re able to provide reports like this one for local Seattle startup, PayScale:
Comparing this data over time is incredibly valuable, so we’ve also enabled that feature for premium members with a historical chart of page strength reports:
(#20) The Keyword Difficulty Tool
Since the Keyword Difficulty Tool provides data on the top 10 ranking websites, using it for competitive intelligence is a must. The comparative opportunity for seeing Page Strength metrics side by side also makes this a perfect foil to competitive web metrics tracking.
How Can I Track and Compare My Progress and Efforts to Improve Over Time?
(#21) The Rank Checker Tool
Rank tracking is a pain, but the Rank Checker Tool makes it easy, particularly if you use it as a browser button (in which case it’s a quick two-clicks to track any page forever. Below, I’ve run a report on SEOmoz’s SEO Services Marketplace and displayed a few of my historical ranks in the archival system:
(#22) The Page Strength Tool
Since the archived data sticks around for as long as you have your account, you can continue to refer back to your historical Page Strength stats and use the tool to monitor your progress. I’ve talked to plenty of in-house SEOs who bring their Page Strength reports printed out with them to every yearly review 🙂
(#23) The SEO Toolbox
The SEO Toolbox has a ton of great simple tools for monitoring your sites and pages, and for investigating competitors. Premium members have the added ability to store the data from their old reports, so monitoring progress is made easy:
(#24) Premium Tips on Site Tracking
Since measuring success is a huge part of every SEO’s job and reporting progress is essential to staying employed, I’ve put together a nice big bunch of site tracking related tips.
(#25) The Discount Store
We’ve recently added a few new partnerships here that let our members get access to some very cool tracking data at discounted prices. And, actually, we’re just about to add a very, very cool new partnership that will actually provide some SEOmoz-branded versions of a great analytics package to the offering (including some specialized reports just for SEOs). I’ll probably be announcing that in early January, depending on the dev time.
How Can I Leverage Social Sites & the Blogosphere to Reach Influencers On and Offline?
(#26) Social Media Optimization Strategies Guide
Jane’s Social Media Optimization Strategies Guide, which she just updated again last week, is a social media marketer’s dream come true. Along with a list of goals, she’s put together illustrated walkthroughs of how to acquire links, build profiles, and get value from the 9 major social media portals.
(#27) Premium Guide to Viral Marketing & Linkbait on the Web
Another brilliant contribution from Jane, the Viral Marketing & Linkbait Guide, is 50+ pages of viral how-tos, examples of successful projects, and specific strategies that we’ve employed to get on top of sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and others to draw traffic and links to our sites and those of our clients.
(#28) Knowledge Base Q+A on Social Media
Q+A has dozens of threads on social media and blogosphere best practices, and it’s one of the subjects in which we’ve seen accelerating interest and questions over the past few months.
I Have Specific Questions About the SEO Process That Need Answers
(#29) Go to Premium Q+A and Ask us a Question
It’s easy as pie – just create a question, choose a title, select a category and submit. We answer most questions within 2 business days, and if we can’t find the answer, we’ll recruit someone who can. Since SEOmoz’s staff now includes developers, designers, SEO experts, Social Media marketers, and even an in-house, practicing attorney, there’s virtually no question we can’t tackle. I’d have to say that of all the offerings, this one is probably the most valuable – there’s nothing like getting a second opinion from folks who know their stuff for less than the cost of a new pair of shoes.
Whew… That was a lot of work just covering our own stuff. Hopefully it proves valuable to all of the premium members who are searching for the answer of what to do with access to the behind-the-scenes content.
