Posted by randfish

It's been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.

If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry; it's perfectly normal. We're the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let's walk through it together, shall we?

Big Improvements to PRO Membership

It's a good day to be PRO; we've just released:

• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that's designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it's part of PRO, you'll find it in the Dashboard.

• The web app has made some big improvements and we're now announcing a full public beta - campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There's also some cool new functionality I'll cover below.

• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.

• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.

If you've been curious about what's in PRO membership, there's a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also - the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now - after Friday, the price change goes into effect.

Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website

Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We've done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:

• A new home to Learn SEO. I've recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we've made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)

• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We've re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we've kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we're planning to do even more with it in the future.

• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)

There's lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.

The Web App is Now in Public Beta

Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.

We've also added a brand new feature - one of our most requested - exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.

As always, we welcome feedback - your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we're feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.

Still Ironing Out Some Kinks

There's a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner's Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you've already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we've also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post - that should be back soon.

I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we're expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we're hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.

We Love Your Feedback

If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we'd love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.

Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well.... let's just say you ain't seen nothing yet :-)

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A question arose today about .Net Framework - 3.5 and 3.5 Client, as well as 4.0 and 4.0 Client.  In Visual Studio 2010 you are able to select your Framework target.  This is not new, but which one to select! So what is the difference between the Framework and the Framework Client?

The differences are the components that are installed. The "Client" profiles are intended to be slimmed down releases that include only what is needed by client/desktop applications. For example, it doesn't include the ASP.NET (web) assemblies, etc. The "Full" (or non-Client) profiles include everything.

Normally, the "Redistributable" packages are the distribution of the Framework itself and each profile should have its own installer package. For example:

.NET Framework 4 [Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (Standalone Installer)]

.NET Framework 4 Client Profile [Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile (Standalone Installer)]

Whilst this will rarely play a part with DotNetNuke I thought I would just give the heads up! 

Happy coding!

I wrote earlier about data privacy issues and how customers are willing sometimes to share data with marketers in return for specific benefits. What about data which gets picked up without you even knowing about it? Scary right!!

Nick Gonzalez has this interesting comment about this fascinating company:

Path Intelligence is a U.K. based company that monitors foot traffic in a rather ingenious way, through customers’ cell phones. Periodically our cell phones ping the nearby cell towers basically saying “Here I am”. Path Intelligence has built receivers that detect these signals and triangulate the owner’s location with accuracy of up to a meter.

Path Intelligence can then map these signals and track anonymous customers as they move around and answer questions about the store’s layout through online reports. Where are the bottle necks? Where do customer’s spend the most time. How many customers browse and go?

Here is my take:

1. This would be a fascinating way to analyse footfall within a store. It might lead to a better way of staffing different departments within a store. Or even locating another cashier till!
2. Imagine how this can be used effectively to understand which part of an exhibition or conference was visited more. Check this out: http://www.slideshare.net/brady/where-20-path-intelligence
3. Look at the rich analytics that you can do by marrying the footfall data with conversions within the store(cash memos per footfall)

In this new series of posts I’d like to present some great free enhancements to improve usability of your DotNetNuke Community Edition - starting with Advanved Control Panel.

Posted by Dana Lookadoo

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled - beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races.

Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that's why they call Todd, "Oilman."

When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn't realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway.

Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it's produced so you can see under the hood for yourself.

From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between

1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP."

The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained:

• You have to be seen as a brand.
• You have to have lots of links pointing to those pages with the brand name.
• You need to have a high volume set of people searching for those terms, so off-site advertising and media buys can influence the SERPs.

Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface.

• Image results don’t always match image SERP's order, i.e. images for the artist "manet."
• Understand, and be prepared. You will not always get the same position in the blended results, leading to frustration.
• Image SEO value is reduced by the new overlay.

The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image

Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image."

Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we'll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size:

Image Pixel Size - If you go smaller than 400x300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased.

So you don't have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text.

Video SERPs

It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking:

Step #1: Embed Video Content on Your Pages
Step #2: Create Thumbnail Images for Videos
Step #3: Build a Video XML Sitemap & Submit
Step #4: PROFIT $$

See Google Webmaster Tools for Video to learn more.

Rand's foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor:

"If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO."

2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained:

Straight from Google’s mouth:
Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010)

And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it's not 100%, it's close.)

Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now:

• Craigslist
• Twitter
• FaceBook
• Citysearch
• Google Products
• Mobile devices
• Garmin GPS
• Wikipedia
• Virtual Augmented Reality

Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary:

• Traditional SEO is about optimizing websites.
• Local SEO is about optimizing locations.

Takeaway:

"It is essential to have a holistic local search marketing strategy."

"Even if all your boss cares about is that friggin' 7-pack!"

Resources to claim your listings:

• Google Places
• Bing Local Listing Center
• Yahoo! Local Business Center

"The Big Three" major data providers:

• infoUSA
• Localeze
• Acxiom

Citations - David recommended a new citation finder tool by Darren Shaw & Garrett French: Whitespark.ca Citation Finder

Find local SEO resources on GetListed.org.

3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter ... many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.

Dan's takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three:

Takeaway: Don’t talk about  yourself so much.

Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself!

Takeaway: Try to stay positive.

If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful.

Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower.

Don't "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate.

Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words:

Timing for retweets:

Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate.

Tip:  Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR?

1. Put a bit.ly link in the browser.
2. Type a plus sign after it;
3. Hit enter to see how many times it’s been clicked through.
4. Retweeting is an elegant viral mechanism.

Alright ... one more Twitter insight before we close ...

He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan's numbers confirm it.)

Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan's presentation alone. But I'm concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable.

Check out Dan's set of social media tools.

4th up and last race of the morning was the "Presentation Off" between Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin.

I'll expand on that race in a follow-up post. Do you want to guess who won this year? Will went into the race with a 2-year winning streak.

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Posted by Suzzicks

So here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically.

All One Index Soon?

Why does this happen?

Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.

Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?

Hmmmm…..It seems that Google might be moving away from having multiple indexes that must be queried for different types of content - like mobile, local, images, news, etc. to a 'one index' solution that has different types of ‘indexing attributes’ instead. That would actually do lots of things that Caffeine has done, like speed up searches (only need to query one index), and allow them to algorithmically prioritize things by freshness more effectively….

Different Indexes for Smart Phones and Feature Phones

But I have gone astray – We were talking about 'mobile'. We can’t know for sure if there are different mobile indexes. There definitely was a separate mobile index in the beginning of Google's ‘mobile’ search– you could always tell because the results were SO bad! Even in the past two years, I have seen mobile search results that were way off base – For example, the top result for a search on ‘subway sandwiches’ was a Gawker article for a long time; then Subway.com, and then m.subway.com. I just checked, and they have somewhat sorted that one out on smart phone searches, but it you still get weird results for feature phone search (shown below)! About 18 months ago Google changed the location of their mobile engine from m.Google.com to Google.com/m, and it did seem that the ‘/m’ feature phone search results were a bit better than they had been, but who knows!

As I have mentioned, there are different mobile search engine crawlers that are evaluating your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone. These mobile bots actually have both generic and specific user agent strings that will spoof actual phone handset models in order to understand how the website would render and function on the different phones. While they don’t do a great job, Google actually does try to only provide you with mobile search results that will actually work well on your particular handset – What that means is that there are slight variations on search results from phone to phone.

There are some simple ways to check what I am now describing as ‘mobile indexing attributes.’ I always start mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from my traditional computer. We know more about the traditional algorithm, so that sets my baseline for comparison. From there, I will do the same search from Google.com/m to see the differences. In most cases, the websites that are included in the traditional search results will be included in the SmartPhone search results – but sometimes in a slightly different order.

You don’t have to have tons of different phones to get a sense for what is going on in mobile search. There are a couple quick tips and tricks to help you do this all from the web. The first thing to know, is that you can do searches from your computer directly from Google.com/m. The results you get will be generic ‘SmartPhone’ search results. From that page, you can move on to see the results for the same query on feature phones by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page and changing the drop-down that says ‘web’ to say ‘mobile,’ and hit ‘search.’ The next set of results will be the generic FeaturePhone results. Search operators like 'site:' and 'link:' work in these versions of Google, and will return different results than they would in traditional search - a good indication to me that they are still using separate indexes.

Mobile-Friendly Signals for the Search Engines

The best way to indicate to the search engines that your page is mobile-ready, (beyond including the ‘no-transform’ tag, which will be discussed more in another post called What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? which should be live next week), is to provide the search engines pages that will work well on mobile phones. Handheld stylesheets can be included on any page on your site. If you don’t have mobile-specific pages, you can use these stylesheets to tell mobile browsers how you would like your existing pages to look when they are displayed on a mobile phone. These are especially good if you would like to change the order that your content appear in when it is displayed on a mobile phone. They should also be used to prevent the need for left-to right scrolling when your site is displayed on a mobile phone.

If you have mobile specific pages, you should set up user-agent detection on your site to ensure that, regardless of which pages rank (mobile or traditional) that users are presented with the appropriate version of the page, based on the device that they are using to access the page. If they are on a mobile phone, they should automatically be sent to the mobile version of a page – even if it is the traditional page that actually ranked in search engines. Conversely, if they are on a traditional computer,  and happen to click on a mobile version of a page, they should be automatically be sent to the version of the page that is meant for traditional-computer viewing.

Last, include a page-to-page link in the upper left hand corner of each page that allows people to move between the mobile and traditional versions of the pages, if they can’t find what they are looking for, or need to over-ride the user-agent detection and redirection. The upper left-hand corner is the ideal location for this link, because it is always the first thing that people will be able to see, even if there is a mobile rendering problem with the site. If something is wrong with the way the page looks on someone’s phone, you don’t want to make them search all over for the button to fix it!

You should still crate the handheld stylesheet for your mobile-specific pages and traditional pages as well, just in case something goes wrong. They are a good signal to the search engines that the pages should be ranked in mobile search results.

Mobile Usability Options:

1. Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages Only: One set of pages that has two or more style sheets – One for traditional web rendering, usually called ‘screen,’ and one (or more) for mobile web rendering, usually called ‘handheld.’ An important note is that the iPhone will automatically pull the ‘screen’ stylesheet, unless you give other instructions. Since looking at a traditional website on an iPhone is really not a great user experience, I recommend creating a specific stylesheet that can be pulled by the iPhone. You can get very granular with this, and create separate style sheets for all different kinds of phones. You would then simply have them called in based on the screen size of the device that they target.
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2. Traditional Pages for Computer and Mobile Pages for all Phones: Two sets of pages – one to be shown on traditional computers and one to be shown on mobile phones. The file structure of the mobile pages should be an exact replica of the traditional pages, with the addition of the ‘.m' or '/m'. User-agent detection and redirection should deliver feature phone users and smart phone users to the mobile pages automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page.
   
   Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone.
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3. Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages for Traditional and SmartPhone, Mobile Specific Pages for Feature Phones: Two sets of pages; one set of pages that are the mobile/traditional hybrid pages that use separate external stylesheets to be rendered on traditional computer screens and smart phones. The second set of pages are mobile specific pages, hosted on an ‘m.’ or a ‘/m’. The file structure should be an exact replica of the traditional file structure, with the addition of the ‘m’ or ‘/m’. User-agent detection and redirection delivers feature phone users here automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page while they are on a feature phone.
   
   Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone.
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4. Traditional Pages for Computers, Graphical Mobile Pages for Smart Phones, Text Mobile Pages for Feature Phones: Three sets of pages. Traditional pages for traditional computers, touch-optimized pages for smart phones with touch screens, and mobile-optimized pages for feature phones and smart phones without touch screens. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users with touch screens to the touch-screen pages if they click on a link while they are on a touch-screen phone. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users on feature phones and smart phones that don’t have a touch-screen to the mobile-optimized pages if they click on a link while they are on one of those types of phones. In this scenario, you will need two mobile-specific subdomains or subdirectories. I recommend using ‘touch.’ or /’touch’ for the touch-screen pages, and ‘m.’ or /m’ for the mobile-optimized pages.
   
   Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. All sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone. User-agent detection and redirection should also be in-place to automatically deliver people on traditional computers who click on either version of the mobile pages to the traditional version of the page instead. It can also be used to send FeaturePhone or SmartPhone users to the version of the site that is best suited for their phone.

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I just posted a new DotNetNuke Silverlight 4 View Model (MVVM) module. This module allows you to easily gather, and process Expense Reports, from users in your DotNetNuke portal.

Advantages of Using Silverlight

• It is faster - When viewing the Expense Reports for a single user, there are no post-backs. The application moves considerably faster than a normal web application.
• It will not time-out - Normal web applications require you to input something every 20 minutes, or you will be timed-out, and will lose any un-saved information.
• Large file uploads - Users can upload scans of any size.
• It can be re-designed with no code - This application was created using View Model / MVVM. This allows a designer, to completely redesign this application using Microsoft Expression Blend, with no code changes. Simply open the source up and make changes. When you compile the changes, it will create a "ExpenseReports.xap" file. Simply replace the file in the "DesktopModules\ExpenseReports\ClientBin" directory and you're done!