WebProNews recently posted this super interesting article about an experiment done by SEOMoz that looked at different Google ranking factors, and how many Search Engine Optimization experts view their importance.

http://www.webpronews.com/google-ranking-factors-2-2011-06

A few things that stuck out for me:

• Page-level backlink metrics are the top algorithmic factor (compared to domain-level, link authority, social metrics, etc.)
• Diversity of backlinks is greater than raw quantity
• Nofollow backlinks do indeed help with rankings (further evidence to support this post)
• Pages with more content rank better
• Long titles and URLs are bad for SEO
• Using keywords earlier in tags and content seems “wise”
• Facebook may be more influential than Twitter for ranking, but Matt Cutts says Google can’t see Facebook shares so this doesn’t make sense to me
• Google Buzz may be used for indexing (more info here)
• Matt Cutts says in general the more content on the home page, the better, but you can also have too much

If you’re a nerd like me, hopefully you find this data useful too!

I just saw a very interesting video post on SEOmoz:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/correlation-data-for-seo-and-social-media-analysis-part-2-whiteboard-friday

One of the things we did when we saw no-follow links having a really high correlation was we went, well that’s just weird. Maybe what’s going on here is that no-follow links and followed links have a high correlation with each other, and in fact, they do. If you have lots of no-follow links, you tend to also have lots of followed links. So, that makes sense. All right maybe that’s all that’s causing it. But then there’s this one weird, weird data point – well, there’s several weird ones – but there’s this one weird data point around the percentage of followed links having a negative correlation, kind of a strong negative correlation with rankings, which sounds weird, but it suggests that websites and web pages that don’t have any no-follow links aren’t performing as well as those who have at least some or some reasonable percentage of them.

This paragraph caught my attention enormously, mostly because I’ve always been of the opinion that natural backlinking from a variety of sources is the best way to do off-page SEO.  I’ve always thought that a healthy mixture of noFollow and doFollow links were important, otherwise it’s pretty frickin’ easy for search engines to notice that you’re trying to “game” your rankings.  This is also why my automated social media service, SocialAdr uses a mixture of noFollow and doFollow social media sites.

Aaron @ SEOmoz sums it up well when he adds:

What I think that’s happening is that people who do natural things, normal websites, this is not normal. It is not normal to have a website that only has followed links. It’s almost like, man, you must be doing something funny because normal websites earn links from no-follows. They get linked to on Wikipedia, which is no-follow. They have blog comments that people leave and point to them. Those are no-follow. They have social media profiles. Almost all of those are no-follow. People tweet about them. Those are no-follow. There are all of these no-follow links that exist from sort of good places on the Web where you would naturally be mentioned if you’re a good website.

Thoughts?

A recent link building service I’ve tried and wholeheartedly recommend is One Hour Backlinks.  The dude who created Linklicious launched this creative site that makes it super simple and super quick to blast your sites with backlinks.  I’m a big fan not only of the ease-of-use of the site but its pleasing design.  It’s rare to find an internet marketing / SEO site that doesn’t look like it was designed using Geocities in 1997

Here’s what the order form looks like:

Like I said, super simple.

1. Use the top slider to select how many backlinks you’d like (the more you want, the cheaper they get per link).
2. Optionally choose radio buttons for “indexed links only”, “dofollow only”, or “PR1+”, keeping in mind that each option costs extra
3. Enter your keywords
4. Enter your URLs

Done!

Once you’ve placed an order and its been completed (mine took about 20 minutes), you can view the data on your “Complete Projects” page:

As you can see even though I paid for 2000 links I received 2420 of ‘em and the Indexation rate was 45%.

The “download links” hyperlink lets you download a CSV file that contains, for each link:

• URL
• PR
• Indexed (yes, no)
• DoFollow (yes, no)
• Keyword
• Target URL

This spreadsheet is super handy for loading into other link building systems to further boost the SEO-juice of your new One Hour Backlinks.

WINNING.

There are many email marketing companies to choose from, so it can be a bit overwhelming trying to decide which one is the best for you.  Luckily I’ve done plenty of research, as over the years I’ve had to change email marketing services several times for various reasons.

Below is a table which outlines the common features and functionality of each of the popular email marketing solutions.  Hopefully this is plenty of information to help you make the right choice.

Company	Cost per Month (10k Subscribers)	Free Trial	Delivery Rate	Client Retention	Analytics	Split Testing	Custom Segments	Conversion Tracking	Social Media Integration	Surveys
AWeber	$50		>90%	89%
Benchmark Email	$60		>90%	81%
Constant Contact	$75		>85%	83%
GetResponse	$65		>95%	82%
iContact	$74		>90%	85%
MailChimp	$75		>95%	90%
Stream Send	$40		>95%	86%
VerticalResponse	$120		>95%	76%
Imnica Mail	$17	$1	>80%	80%
Mad Mimi	$36		>80%	83%

Some additional info on these companies

MailChimp

• Has a Free account for under 2,000 subscribers!

AWeber

• Won’t allow you to import a list from a spreadsheet, requires all subscribers to confirm AGAIN. This is a huge pain for people moving from one email marketing company to another.

Why use an email marketing company?

If you’re just getting your online business going and are unaware of why an email marketing company would be useful for you, here’s a list of potential reasons:

• Deliverability guarantees – Email marketing services have agreements with popular email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail so there’s less of a chance that your emails will be flagged as “spam”
• System performance – You won’t need to worry about making sure your server can handle sending 10,000 emails at once.  Believe it or not but this can be a big problem; I’ve had to deal with it myself.
• Analytics – Easily track metrics like # of messages delivered, # of messages marked as spam, and even how many of the links were clicked
• Split Testing – Get the best results from your email campaigns by testing it first! Typically the email marketing service will allow you to create multiple versions of messages (subject and body) and then will test each version for you by sending each to a subset of your list. The version with the best “open rate” and “link-click rate” will be selected for the remaining subscribers. This process takes only minutes and can save you a lot of money!
• Custom Segments – Quickly and easily group your subscribers based on metrics like email activity, geography, and profile data collected from surveys and web forms. Choose the perfect mix of criteria to create and send the right messages to the right people at the right time. This will allow you to increase customer engagement, retention, and campaign ROI more efficiently than ever.

If you know of a good tool that failed to make my list, or if any of the data in the above table is incorrect, please let me know!

Occasionally I come across an SEO tool that I feel is worthy of blogging about, and oddly enough today I have two of ‘em.

Linklicious

Instead of wasting hours building RSS feeds and pinging the feeds hoping for crawls, Linklicious eliminates all of the guesswork by providing a guaranteed 100% crawl rate.   It comes with a WordPress plugin so every post is added to an RSS feed, auto-shortened, pinged, and tracked so you can see exactly when your links were spidered.

Linklicious is quite affordable too:  they have a free account and the most feature-packed paid account is only $54/mo.

Here’s a chart that shows the improved crawl late with and without using Linklicious:

Link Pushing

I was looking for a completely automated, hands-off service that combined multiple backlinking techniques.   So I headed over to the Warrior Forum and a quick search brought me to this WSO.

Here’s what the “Link Pushing” service offers:

1. User enters their information; a 2 minute process.
2. System grabs an article from a random article directory.
3. System spins the article using The Best Spinner.
4. System submits the articles to Web 2.0 Properties and Auto-Approve Article directories backlinking to the money site.
5. System then submits to various Doc share sites splitting the backlinks randomly to the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve articles.
6. System then submits to microblog sites with links randomly split between the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve Article sites.
7. System then submits spun articles to non-auto approval article sites with backlinks to the Web 2.0s and the auto approved article sites.

I had a couple questions before signing up and was super impressed with how quickly and professionally Greg (one of the owners) responded to me.  Although this service is in its infancy, so far I really like how easy it is to use and it seems like these dudes have some great features planned in the next release.  I don’t have enough data on its effectiveness to improve SERPs yet but I’ll post an update when I do.