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Posted by Jane Copland

SEOmoz is pretty lucky when it comes to blog comments in that we receive a lot of them. By most blog’s standards, our regular count of between twenty and sixty comments is quite enviable, trounced by the likes of Techcrunch but highly competitive in this industry. We also keep a relatively good record of the comments our members make and how well received those comments are via Mozpoints and the record of recent comments we keep on everyone’s profile.

Two things we often fail to address is what our - or any website’s - comments say about the state of our community and what the best comment protocol is for encouraging a productive commenting environment.

Whether they mean to or not, bloggers often write to the people they believe are reading their work. We know that we have "lurkers", as much as I dislike that term, who read blog posts but never comment, but since we know the names, faces, styles and opinions of those from whom we receive feedback, we sometimes focus on them. Thus, the makeup of a blog’s commenters makes at least a small difference to its content.

Many websites can make guesses at how their community has changed, but here, we can record it with precise scientific accuracy. Or through a made-up system of points that appeals to geeks. When SEOmoz first calculated Mozpoints in February 2007, the scores were arrived at through participation alone: obviously, no one had ever voted on anyone else’s contributions at that stage. This is what our contribution hierarchy looked like on February 10, 2007.

In contrast, here is our ranked users page now. It looks a little bit different. How, as a blogger, should you analyse these changes? Why did users such as simmal_tree (whose user name is now kulpreet_singh) taper off their commenting? Did he - and other previously active users, of which there are many - lose interest in our site? Did they become too busy to participate in online communities? Did they move away from the search industry?

Our community hasn’t changed drastically enough for us to really need to take a look at who we’ve lost or who is less active, but I believe that a system like ours is worthwhile for sites that maintain a large readership. Measuring both contribution and recognition (through votes) allows a website’s owners to monitor both changes in a site’s demographic, but in contributors’ values.

I ask you this: if you’ve been reading and participating in SEOmoz discussions since, say, early 2007 or before, what do you think has changed here? Do you remember V2 with its brown and orange tones? Do you remember a time before floating comment boxes and user generated content? How is your interaction with SEOmoz different now than it was then?

A secondary concern I have with comments is how best to implement a commenting system. This seems to be less important in the quest to keep readers, but significant nonetheless. I think ours is very good, only we do hear the occasional complaint about our login requirement.

I like a system which has users log in and maintain a profile for the following reasons:

1. It promotes slightly more responsibility. A person’s comments are archived more accurately and a profile acts as a small portfolio. Users’ profiles often rank well in search engines and should give people more reason to be considerate about what they write than if all they’re required to do is leave a name and email address. Of course, this often doesn’t stop people from making ridiculous comments, but it helps filter out trolls who can’t be bothered creating accounts in order to be negative. Sadly, it keeps out positive commenters too.
2. It slows down spam. Whilst hardly stopping it, login requirements add one more obstacle for the Furberry and Fauxlex merchants.
3.  It creates a sense of belonging that makes people return at a higher rate.

I also recognise that it has its flaws: Non-members are less likely to comment, even if they have something valuable to say, because our attention spans online are short and the couple of minutes it takes to create most accounts is too long. Darren Rowse at Problogger presents the view of someone who does not like logging in:

There is one situation where I rarely leave a comment - even if the post deserves it - blogs that require me to login before making a comment. Maybe I’m lazy (actually there’s no maybe about it) or maybe there’s something inside me that worries about giving out my personal details - but when I see a comments section that requires registration I almost always (95% or more of the time) leave the blog without leaving the comment that I want to make.

The three types of comment systems I see most regularly are those which make someone enter their information every time, those that remember returning visitors, and those which maintain accounts:

Quick ‘n dirty commenting: users don’t even have to leave a website if they don’t want to. This is the easiest and most common system, but is also easily morphed into a certain degree of membership:

I don’t have an account at the above site, but it remembers my information from the last time I visited. A small sense of belonging is achieved without making users create accounts or log in. This achieves a balance between membership and ease and should appeal to people like Darren who aren’t keen on logging in, as well as people like me, who like to feel… remembered.

If you are logged in here on a regular basis, you’ll recognise the final form of commenting. Acknowledging that SEOmoz built its blog from the ground up and didn’t use a CMS like Wordpress, it still seems to me that allowing profiles and at least having a membership option, if not requirement, promotes repeat visitors and heightened participation.

Acknowledging that I’ve covered two different facets of commenting here, I believe that both comment protocol and long term comment activity act as both measurements of a website’s success, as well as helping to determine what level of engagement users have with a site’s content and with each other.

In addition to wanting to hear from those of you who’ve been around for a long period about how this site and community has changed, I’d also like to know the opinions of those of you who rarely comment about why you read blog content but don’t add your own thoughts. If you have been reading our site for a long time and rarely comment, all the better!

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Posted by RichPage

Pause your SEM spending money immediately. Why? Because there are two things you can do to get your website visitors even cheaper, and then start your spending again. Do these two fairly simple things:

1: Optimize Your Site First

Chance are, as you read this, people are visiting your website and leaving, never to come back. You are wasting your SEM efforts. Why? Because your website probably is not optimized for the visitors’ needs. So what can you do to learn what they really want? You can use website analytics tools like Google Analytics to find out where they are going, but in order to find out ‘why’ they are doing what they are doing, you need to gain customer insight. And how do you do this? There are two main ways.

Firstly, you should survey your website visitors. You should be asking a few important questions, in particular, "What was the reason you came to our site?", "Did you achieve what you came to do?", and "If not, why not?" Gaining this information from your website visitors will arm with you with tremendous ideas for optimizing your website. There are some very cheap tools for surveying- 4Q is Avinash Kaushik’s new free survey tool, and SurveyMonkey offers a pretty cheap tool that should meet your needs. This way you can learn exactly what your website visitors are looking for, and gain ideas for improving your website.

Secondly, now you have some ideas to test from your survey, you should begin testing them on your website so you can begin finding out what different things work best on your site. Google Website Optimizer is a great free tool that will help you optimize your website (there are many good posts about how to make best use of this tool).

In a nutshell, if you optimize your website, you will generate more REPEAT visits, because people will have a better experience that matches their needs, and want to come back (bookmarks/direct types). And the best news is that these repeat visits don’t cost you a PENNY. What would you rather spend for getting a visitor to come to your site? 30 cents or higher per click, or zero? I know which one I would prefer…

2: Analyze Bounce Rate of Your Keywords

I’m still shocked at the amount of people who just simply set up PPC campaigns blindly and leave them running. Fair enough, they may optimize click through percentage, but they are missing the even bigger picture… what happens when the visitor get to your website after they click on the ad! You may have the best PPC campaign in the world, but if they leave immediately after getting to your website, then you have wasted your PPC money. So what can you do? Look for the bounce rate (the percent of people who leave your site upon entry) of all your keywords.

Then, get rid of the ones that are bouncing the most, and increase spending on the ones that are bouncing the least. Bounce rate is a standard metric in Google Analytics, and it’s easy to calculate this in other tools (entry visits/single access visits) This will really help you to optimize your spending on SEM!

So there you have it. Try doing these relatively simple things, and watch how much less money you have to spend in order to attract the same amount of visitors you had before. Then you can spend this saved money on other marketing ideas, or a site redesign (or treat yourself!).

By the way, these are only some of the things you can do to help stop wasting money on PPC and marketing and drive cheaper, better traffic. I am in the process of writing a free e-book all about this, and I will be giving it away on my analytics blog (www.rich-page.com). This should be done within the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!

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Address by sam.d
URL design? Is there any design involved at all in deciding how your Internet address and directory structure will look like? Yes, there is, or at least there should be! Nonetheless I see the same mistakes daily all over the place as if URLs wouldn’t matter at all.
A bad URL means your […]
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Quality traffic is your goal, but to get there you need to study "Do Follow Psychology."

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Posted by randfish

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged about design & usability topics, but I think we’re overdue for a revisit. Luckily, in my recent web browsing, I stumbled across some remarkably innovative, uncommon design elements that made me take notice.

#1 - News via the Logo

Sites like Google, Yahoo! & Reddit are famous for using their logos to promote holidays or commemorate important dates, but several creative designers have been featuring news about their companies or their industry right in (or near) the logo:

#2 - Narrative Top-Level Navigation

This concept certainly won’t work for every site, but I was impressed with how well it flowed and actually made me click on all the links to explore the site. The concept is to create a 1-2 sentence narrative as the top menu, and have the relevant navigation pieces as anchor text. I think that with solid design, micro-site architecture and a singular purpose, this could become a trend:

#3 - The Auto-Scrolling Multihero

This one’s not exactly new - I wrote about it back in ‘06. However, the multihero (so named because there are multiple "hero" graphics and headlines) is getting better over time. Several of my favorites have worked out the exact temporal spacing, hover-based slowdown, and back/forward operations. I particularly like how it gets a number of "featured" pieces of content to the audience of the heavily trafficked homepage without clogging up too much space:

Just remember that if you’re doing SEO with these, you’ll need to use CSS (not flash) if you want the content and links properly indexed and followed.

#4 - Dual Tabs for Filtering

A basic principle of good web design is to limit yourself to no more than one set of top-level navigation items, which is why the dual tab system is so interesting to me. It breaks the rules, yet functions remarkably well and actually helps the user to better filter information:

#5 - The Product IS the homepage

A clear fault with so many business websites is their weakness in conveying the company’s purpose in those first few critical seconds. I’ve been impressed by a few designs from the folks at Logistetica, who boiled down complex engineering and technology products in less time than it takes to be amazed by the pretty graphics:

#6 - Screenshot/Image Overlays

One of my least favorite navigation features occurs when I click on an easily-embeddable image and am taken to a completely different page (especially when it’s just to the picture file URL). Designers have been solving this for some time with the pop-up overlay, and though technically it’s the same number of clicks to return to the page (either click the "x" to close the overlay or "back" from the image URL), it feels so much cleaner and smoother to have the transition take place seamlessly over the background page:

#7 - Conversion-Funnel Based Navigation

One of the more creative navigation systems I saw came from Carbon Made. It featured a sidebar nav that offered links based on the user’s location in the conversion process - ready to sign up, in need of a demo, or already a member:

I have to wonder if it’s the beginning of a potentially successful way to bring visitors into the fold, or whether it’s merely an outlier that caught my fancy. Might be worth a try?

#8 - The "You’re a Winner" Beta Invite

As the concept of private betas have propagated from Silicon Valley VC-backed startups to Mom & Pop web apps in Skokie, IL basements, the promotion level of beta invites has grown from "waiting list" to "golden ticket." I can only hope the products live up to the hype, but I will say this - it’s always smart to make your users feel special, even those who haven’t gotten to use anything yet.:

If you’ve got any design/UI elements that have struck a chord, please do share

UPDATE: If you’re a designer in the Seattle area (or a designer who wants to move to the Seattle area), we’re hiring right now! Please check out our job post - Do You Use Your Design Powers for Good?… Or for Awesome? If you’re not a designer, please pass it on to all your designer friends!

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Close enough may get you points in horseshoes, but it doesn’t cut it in search. More than 90 percent of all search referrals are from results on the first page. If your website doesn’t rank for relevant terms on page one, you might as well be invisible.
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

I’ve just noticed this morning that Yahoo! Site Explorer now allows you to filter indexed pages and inbound links by subdomain. Screenshots below.
Show Inlinks expect from this subdomain:

Show pages from: All Subdomains:

This looks like a useful report for websites which use multiple subdomains, enabling the option to remove internal subdomain links while still counting all […]
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

So a Firefox plugin developer was contacted by Google who asked him to stop distributing his plugin because "google couldn’t scale".

I’ll reach for my heavy duty roll of tin foil and start working on my hat, but I’ll bet they also didn’t want him

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.