Sometimes I don’t understand things – including the inner workings of marketing professionals. Yet I’ve tried to tackle this challenge and have been building and selling marketing applications for marketing folk for decades. I know that working complex web analytics products can be daunting. Marketing automation even more so. How does one create and allocate lead scoring and attribution? What is the LTV of a customer?

But linking?  Gosh, don’t we all know the value of inbound links? Don’t we know how search engines work, for God’s sake? Well, apparently no. This knowledge is not as universal as one would think (Hope! Assume!).

A few months ago we released Linker which, in short, is a dating site for sharing and creating links. A Match.com for SEO link building. The good news? We’ve had thousands of people start to take advantage of the service. The bad news? Only five percent of them have ANY links on their site! This data floored me.

So we took matters into our own hands and today released our findings as well as made our link building tool FREE . We understand that linking takes time, which could explain the incredible low rate, but with our Linker product it should be much easier. At least that’s our hope. So, world, let’s get found. Let’s use the product and link away. I would be happy to hear from any of you!

Last week at SES San Francisco / Connected Marketing Week, I had the pleasure of introducing Bruce Clay for the SEO 101 session.  I’ve known Bruce for many years now, and since people often ask me “how long has Bruce Clay really been involved in search,” I thought I’d turn that question into some audience participation with a poll: Who’s been in Search Longer?  Forty-two (42) people in the room responded!  Once again, Al Gore just missed the win;

Who’s been in Search Longer?

36.73%      Bruce Clay

34.69%      Al Gore (He invented search too!)

20.41%      Bono (He still hasn’t found what he’s looking for)

8.16%       Marco Polo

Thanks for all who participated, I hope you enjoyed the session!

I’m at SES San Francisco, part of Connected Marketing Week. This morning, I have the pleasure of introducing Bruce Clay for the session “Search 101.” It thought I would have a little fun with Bruce, and ask the audience:

If you have any comments, ping me during the session – @rzwicky

Continuing on yesterday’s PPC Experts results list, I’m continuing to use the opportunity that Connected Marketing Week presents to post some of the results to the lists I created around top experts in the various online marketing disciplines.

I’ll probably repeat myself in all the poll results, but the lists have been a pleasure to publish, as people are constantly asking for recommendations around who to turn to for advice within different areas of online marketing. This format allowed me to share my recommendations, in a format that allows everyone else to weigh in and share their insights too. Over 3000 individuals participated in this series of polls. Thank-you to all!

Today, I’m publishing the list of top experts you turn to most for link-building advice. As you can see from the original list, this was a really strong group. Every single one of them is incredibly knowledgeable, and worth being on anyone’s reading list.

Your top 5 favorites were:

1) Eric Ward
2) Wiep
3) Debra Mastaler
4) Dave Davies

and a tie for fifth;

5) Rand Fishkin
5) Ralph Tegtmeier – Fantomaster / “Fantomeister”

The graphic, for all of you to see the distribution:

I thought it would be interesting to use Connected Marketing Week to post some of the results to the lists I created around top experts in the various online marketing disciplines.

As I’ve written before, the lists have been a pleasure to publish, as people are constantly asking for recommendations around who to turn to for advice within different areas of online marketing. This format allowed me to share my recommendations, in a format that allows everyone else to weigh in and share their insights too. Over 3000 individuals participated in this series of polls. Thank-you to all!

The first set of results I thought I would share was from the list of PPC Experts. The PPC Expert you feel most comfortable turning to for PPC advice is David Szetela, who received 14.6% support!

1) David Szetela
2) Andrew Goodman
3) Joanna Lord
4) Brad Geddes
5) Marc Poirier

In fact, the top 5 vote getters received 50% of the total support, as shown in this graph:

Congratulations to all! If you missed the list – view it here.

Thanks to everyone for participating – @rzwicky Richard Zwicky

Are SEO’s and PPC experts more effective at driving referral traffic to a web site from Twitter than SMM specialists? That could be the conclusion based on data I’ve collected from a series of polls, so far.

A few weeks ago I started running some lists on this blog. My goal was to thank so many great contributors for posting relevant and useful information which would be useful to anyone engaged in online marketing. Some people are established, and well known. There were five lists SEO, PPC, SMM, Links, and Cross-Channel (meaning they fit in 2+ categories).

I’ve known many of these people for years, since before I started Eightfold Logic. I used a vote driven format, because I know polls always draw attention, but also because I thought their might be some interesting data to report. After a couple of system crashes, I’ve finally completed compiling the data and expect to begin publishing the results next week.

While I’ll publish the detailed lists later, I wanted to share out some interesting summary data in the meantime, and get your thoughts and input on a surprising result. Perhaps most interestingly to me: why is it that tweets by SMM specialists in support of the list of Social Marketers generated the lowest click through rates?

This first chart shows how many unique individuals posted, or reposted, a link on Twitter promoting each channel’s list. As you can see, the greatest volume of unique activity was for the Cross Channel and SEO lists. This total is not the number of tweets, but rather the number of unique individual who tweeted about the lists, and used Bit.ly for url shortening purposes. I selected just the bit.ly tweets as it’s simple to track.

This is where it gets interesting. Despite the unique activity levels for the SMM and PPC lists, the Social Marketer’s self-promotions drew the lowest average number of referrals per tweet. Could it be that SEO’s and PPC’s are the most effective Tweeters?

I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts as to why this is.

As for the raw numbers for these graphs:

Details of each list’s results next week.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Richard – @rzwicky

Search marketers are familiar with signals. One of the truisms is the logic: if no one links to your site, it can’t be considered important, therefore why should it appear in the search results? The more quality links referencing your website or web pages, the better.

A lot of signals or factors behind links can affect the quality, relevance, and value of these citations. Perhaps there’s another signal to consider: Author.

If you’re interested in learning more, earlier today Search Engine Watch published an article I submitted on the topic of Author Authority. The idea came to me while reading a recent patent which was issued and assigned to Google. I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback!

Thanks!

Richard / @rzwicky

As you may be aware, we collect a lot of data at Eightfold Logic, and have been doing so for a few years. Last week, I was looking at the lists of online marketers, and the voting numbers, and began to think about them in the context of traffic delivered, and its value. I had a broad sampling run from a swathe of web sites across industries and geographies to ascertain which channels deliver the most raw referral traffic. Later, in another post, I’ll dive into quality.

Sample size: 1 week of data, 36,164,959 unique referrals. (original sessions, excluding bots etc)

It’s amazing how much marketing attention is focused on social considering the volume of referrals it drives to businesses, relative to other customer acquisition channels. However, it’s understood that used effectively, social is more about the pre-site-visit experience, and market awareness. That said, very few organizations are using social media marketing effectively. Effectively harnessing this inbound marketing channel opportunity will be of paramount importance going forward for companies to survive and succeed.

Richard Zwicky – @rzwicky

It’s been quite interesting watching the response to the lists about online marketers that I started published two weeks ago. . There have been over 3,000 voter submissions in the last week. That’s a lot more than I ever expected. Additionally, I’ve received many text messages, voicemails, DM’s, blog comments, and emails with suggestions of who else could be included on the lists; I appreciate all these notes.

Some people also chose to send me their own names for inclusion. One person appears to have submitted their name for inclusion ~50 times! Fortunately for you, I’m not publishing your name, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are. You’re claiming to be an Internet Marketer of some skill: Do you honestly not know that it’s easy to determine if traffic repeatedly originates from the same places or computers?

Other than the notes from a couple of manic individuals repeatedly suggesting themselves, lots of people sent me some great suggestions. I’ve been trying to follow-up on them by reading things by and about these contributors. There are some valuable resources I’m discovering, or re-discovering. Thank-you! Some of the useful suggestions are found in the blog comments of the appropriate posts.

The suggestions I’ve received go to the point of the series. It’s not been about who gets the most votes, but, that said, I will publish lists thereof. The attention seeking has been for all these valuable contributors whom I wanted to recognize via this forum. Some of the people on the lists are already well known, and justifiably so. Others are not well known yet, but they provide great information about different facets of online marketing, and should be a resource that anyone with any level of interest in the space can turn to for insights.

I do appreciate all the attention that these lists have generated, and hope that people will share the results widely – that only goes to accomplish the goal of providing these people recognition.

As for the voting; it’s been really interesting to see whose inputs are heavily valued, despite their not being common industry names. It’s also been extremely interesting to observe which channels have been driving the most traffic via social media, and other sources, as well as observing which channel’s traffic has the best user behavior once they visit the site. I’ll likely have a few posts coming out reporting on user behavior trends. Quite interesting really! For instance, as it stands right now, the day of the social media experts tweets drove the lowest RT and clickthrough activity per post or mention. Perhaps that’ll change before the lists close…

Finally, there have been two individuals who received no votes. (Bet you want to know who, eh?) I was shocked at who they were, and presume it’s because their communities did not overlap as heavily with the search or social marketplace community represented here. Hopefully they’ll learn about these lists before I close them.

In the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the lists of great contributors (or voted), please do so now at:

Search Engine Optimization Professionals
Pay-Per-Click Marketing Experts
Social Media Marketing Specialists
Link Building Masters
Amazing Cross-Channel Online Marketing Contributors

I’ll hopefully start publishing results next week.

Richard / @rzwicky

Is Google Planning to Kill SEO?
Bravo to Econsultancy for winning link-baiter of the week with this story.  Econsultancy claims that “If a recent patent comes to fruition, it seems the big G may have plans to undo all your hard work in favour of their own know-how.”  Back in 2004, Google filed a patent, which was recently granted, for something called ‘Enhanced Document Browser with Auto-generated Linkage.’  It seemed to me a rather broad description with multiple applications so I followed the link to the USPTO website to read the abstract.

The abstract states:  “Additional documents are automatically located that are relevant to an original document, such as a document being read by a user, and also potentially relevant to personal information of the user. The additional documents may be located based on descriptive information that includes personal information of the user and content information of the document being read. The additional documents, or links to the additional documents, may be incorporated into the document being read. In some implementations, the additional documents may be presented in-line with the document being read, such as through an in-link link or text snippet. The user can thus be efficiently presented with additional information that is relevant to the original document being read.”

Huh?  Kill SEO?  My less histrionic interpretation would bet on Google implementing this in a way that would show users an overlay of related personalized content and information similar to what Google Maps does with local business information today.   Or Google Adsense… Then again, that’s one possibility and only one personal interpretation.  Remember, just because the patent was recently granted doesn’t mean Google hasn’t already implemented the technology described therein.

Near the end of the article the writer says:  “On the other hand, it {could be} a dynamically generated, personalized link builder that works based on personal user preference, surely the Holy Grail of SEO.”  Ahhh, so the shoe drops.  Maybe SEO will live to see another day…

So what have we learned?  This is a great example of how link-baiting can quickly build a large number of inbound links to your site (although I’m unsure of the success of this particular story).  Just take care not to take too much liberty with the plot line.

Google Dynamic Linking
David Harry from SEO Dojo offers a more reasoned analysis of the newly awarded patent to Google on dynamically generated links.

Phase One Link Building Strategies
Greg Shuey writes an encouraging article for budding link builders on where to find that low-hanging fruit.  He outlines five easy steps that range from internal linking of resources to directories and link reclamation (404 pages).

4 Ways Link Builders Should Use Twitter
Interesting article on using Twitter as an alternative to traditional link building activities.  Not only can social media sites like Twitter help you find link building opportunities but also help identify hot trends and what’s going on in your particular niche in the online world.  With a large enough following and the potential of retweets, site owners can garner significant traffic from links on Twitter even though they are nofollow.