Rand Fishkin's presentation at OMS Seattle, June 2011 on creative ways (beyond merely links) to move your SEO forward.

1. Creative Thinking & Effective Linking This deck is available online at http://bit.ly/omsmozlinking Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz CEO, June 2011

2. Remember Back in 2004…

4. Today, It Looks More Like…

10. SEO Used to Be Just a Few Key Items…

11. High Quality, Anchor-Rich, External Links Proper Keyword Usage Useful, Relevant Page Accessible to Crawlers Solid Internal Link Structure The Basics of SEO: Accessibility, Content Quality, KW Usage and Link Signals

12. But Today, It’s All That, Plus…

13. Quality Raters Topic Modeling High Quality, Anchor-Rich, External Links Proper Keyword Usage Useful, Relevant Page Rich Snippets Facebook Vertical Results Twitter Suggest/Instant Google +1 Accessible to Crawlers Solid Internal Link Structure Snippet Optimization Brand Metrics Usage Data When everyone’s getting the basics right, you need to go above and beyond to compete.

14. 10 “New” Strategies Every SEO Should Be Considering in 2011

15. #1: Expanding Our Social Circles

16. Results from Google’s “My Social Circle.” To see results like this, just add “&tbs=frim:1” to the end of any Google query. http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

17. The social connections appear to influence rank ordering. http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html These annotations undoubtedly increase CTR, particularly if the source is trusted.

18. Hang on a tic... How did they know I’m connected to Kalena on Facebook?! I haven’t yet added Facebook to my Google account! http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.google.com/search?q=mba+program+reviews

19. Google crawls deeply to get social data and connections once you add a profile. http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/social-annotations-in-search-now-your-social-network-rankings and see your socially connected data via http://www.google.com/s2/search/social?hl=en#socialcontent

20. #2: Improving Our Site’s Social “Share-Ability”

21. Via one of the web’s most brilliant data porn blogs: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/

22. Overwhelmed by sharing!! Every post on http://mashable.com has 23 unique links to share across 7 channels

23. Google’s Now Showing +1 to Logged Out Users, Too: http://searchengineland.com/confirmed-google-showing-1-counts-to-logged-out-users-82800

24. #3: Optimizing Our Own Sharing Activities

25. By using http://bit.ly for link sharing, I can see stats on the things that I share that earn clicks/retweets/facebook shares, etc. From that tracking, I can learn + optimize.

26. Check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/calculating-and-improving-your-twitter-clickthroughrate for more on analyzing/improving your social sharing

27. I use http://trunk.ly to keep track of everything I share across networks and make it searchable for future retrieval.

28. #4: Influencing the Influencers

29. Finding influencers via http://www.followerwonk.com is awesomely easy.

30. Google Profile search also rocks: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dont-ask-sites-for-links-find-people-and-connect. Just use &tbs=prfl:e to the end of any Google query to see them.

31. #5: Video Content

32. Video “snippets” and video results are a powerful way to get high CTR and great branding. More - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080

33. Video XML Sitemaps protocol enables you to host any video on your site, send it to Google, and get included in their video results + snippets. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472

34. We control the link for the embed video feature, including the target and anchor text! At Moz, we use and like http://www.wistia.com for video hosting; particularly the stats, ability to embed and earn the link back to our site rather than someone else’s!

35. #6: User Experience Optimization

36. Panda features metrics and a machine-learning model that biases toward “better” UX sites: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/

37. #7: Site Speed

38. Site speed alone may only be a small factor, but if you’re not loading fast enough, you’re likely losing out on everything else, too… http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-speed-are-you-fast-does-it-matter

39. #8: Beauty of Design + Layout

40. If your site is as pretty as http://www.cakesweetcake.co.uk/, your credibility, perceived trust, brand value and other post-Panda SEO metrics are going to be much easier to get right.

41. Drawar.com/gallery is one of my favorites for finding awesome designs Finding a designer whose work you love isn’t terribly hard, and it will likely be some of the best money you spend. http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/16-best-web-design-galleries-for-inspiration/ has a good list of sites to check out.

42. #9: Community Participation

43. Moleskine does an awesome job of getting their designer/re-seller community contributing on their site: http://artistmarketplace.moleskine.com/en

45. Informed Opinions

46. News/Trend Analysis

47. Multimedia Content

48. Authentic Expert Contributors

49. Quality Discussion/InteractionMentioned in news publications Forum discussions link to its pages People email links to each other Links are Tweeted Liked/Shared on Facebook Cited at conferences + events Sometimes, a single piece of content or just a few, can yield these results but, more often, it takes dozens to hundreds of attempts to become a resource hub. http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

50. #10: We Need to Kill the“Good, Unique Content” Meme

51. “Good, unique content” isn’t good enough. That’s what everyone’s making. If you’re not raising the bar, just buy traffic. Inbound marketing + SEO probably aren’t for you.

52. To produce truly awesome, share-worthy stuff, you’re going to need to invest serious effort. Using content factories and automated solutions is unlikely to work for much longer.

53. STOP Getting Links

54. START Earning Links

55. Take Time Invested in These: Directory Link Building Keyword-Variant Abuse Reciprocal Link Pages Paid Links w/ Manipulative Anchor Text Sitewide, Footer Links Navigation for Engines, Not Humans Low Cost/Quality, Outsourced Content Generic Design and Layout Anchor-Text Rich Internal Links Anonymous Contact Forms Keyword Stuffed Titles + Pages Ad Blocks Dominating the Page Honestly, how long can these tactics keep working? And, more importantly, do they really add value to your business or just expose you to risk when the engines get smarter?

56. Do This Stuff Instead; It Really Works News/Media/PR SEO Email Research/White Papers Blogs + Blogging Infographics Comment Marketing Social Networks Online Video INBOUND MARKETING!(Find Your Audience Organically on the Web) Webinars Forums Document Sharing Social Bookmarking Word of Mouth Podcasting Direct/Referring Links Type-In Traffic Q+A Sites

58. Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog

59. Email: rand@seomoz.org