Image above: I’m only ranking at #113 for [seo] in “people and pages” but some of my best friends are around me

While everybody was writing posts what the new Google personal search aka “Google Search Plus Your World” means for SEO I almost started to write one about what Google Search Plus means for SEO 2.0

Then I decided to be more conservative and just summarized a few common sense hands on SEO techniques for Google Search Plus and personal search results.

Neither personal search or social search is new to Google. It’s just a huge leap forward this time after it has been a bit neglected in recent years.

Google+ and +1 are part of the main motivation behind this new move. Also, the so called link economy where many webmasters are buying links to game Google is the target.

Google wants to know who you are and what you like in order to ensure that low quality web sites do not get the attention they sometimes mistakenly still get on Google search.

We have to understand first that Google Search Plus has a two tiered approach. You get still in a way organic results where personal/social search results are mixed in prominently and you can click on the “personal results” link below the search box to see solely your own search results nobody else sees in that way:

Everybody who is logged in into one of the manifold Google services will see the the new personal search results sooner or later. Logged out users will get some very broad suggestions too. They mainly see suggested profiles on the right of search results:

To really use this feature you at least need a Google Profile and a Google+ membership

if you ask me. Then you need to have some people connect to you via Google+ or other services you are using with the notable exception of Facebook it seems. These services have to be linked on your Google Profile to count.

What more can you do?

Google Profile

• Connect other sites – Link all your other profiles and sites even less obvious ones like Friendfeed or WordPress.com
• Describe yourself – Your short “Occupation” description on your profile matters a lot it seems. Also your latest “Employment” seems to have a big impact. Mention your keyword here.
• Claim authorship – Use the new authorship markup by Google and link back to your Google Profile from your blog posts or respective bio below.

Images

• Use images on your blog – Images on my blog that are properly tagged show up in image results. Michael Gray‘s images do perform even better, they come in second even when I’m logged in
• Share images on Google+ – Images shared on Google+ rank as well quite obviously
• Upload images to your profile using Picasa – Your profile image but also other images uploaded to Picasa perform very well
• Practice image SEO – Consider common sense image SEO best practices like understandable file names instead of numbers.

Google+

• Use on topic circles – Create topical circles on Google+ – I write mainly about SEO, blogging and social media thus I created these three circles for examples (and a few more).
• Use Google+ actively and frequently – Activity counts, even feeding in Twitter updates automatically, pages and profiles by active people show up much higher
• Encourage feedback – Feedback like comments and shares is very important, some profiles with more controversial posts with lots of comments show on top
• Make many people add you to circles – The number of circles you are in counts, Danny Sullivan is in 300k circles so ends up being the suggested user for SEO despite listing at as only one topics he deals with
• Make sure you’re in the right circles – The names of the circles you are in counts as well so when you are selling SEO use the term to describe yourself not many others
• Let people link to you on profiles – The number of people who connect their profile to your site is  a factor thus make your employees link, this is one of the reasons the guys from Dejan SEO ranks so well.
• Participate in social networking – Socialize with relevant people who are on your level. I don’t expect Danny Sullivan or Rand Fishkin to +1 my posts, I will +1 theirs from time, but I focus on people who are into SEO etc. and have enough time to read my posts as well.
• Share circles – You can create and share circles with other people. They can add all of the people at once.

Blogging

• Use buttons – Add a +1 button to your blog postings. I use the WordPress extension by Pleer SEO.
• Write about Google+ – Blog about Google+ your profile, your page and what’s going on there.
• Use a badge – Add a Google+ badge to add you to “your circles” in the sidebar for example.
• Call to action – Ask people to +1 your postings with a little call to action in the last sentence and display the button below.
• Check shares – Monitor who shares your postings on Google+ using Topsy and add these people to your circles.

Google +1

• +1 quality and popular sites – Clicking +1 is a double edged sword. Your authority influences the things you vote up but also the sites you +1 are influencing your reputation. Vote up crap nobody else likes and you get less influential on Google as a whole not just Google+ They call it Agent Rank. I’m afraid by quality sites they mean mostly popular sites so you have to +1 main stream sources not only high quality niche sites.
• +1 sites you often use – To see the sites you really like on top you simply have to +1 them. The more you +1 them the more likely they are to appear on top.
• +1 your own sites – I don’t like this as I prefer other people to vote for me but it seems you have to vote for own sites and articles. It seems Google doesn’t dislike self-promotion unless of course your won sites are the only ones you push.
• +1 what’s on top – To get more exposure on other people’s results it seems you have to +1 what’s already on top in organic search. A woman I follow on Twitter linked to the Wikipedia definition of SEO on her private blog and now I see her on top of my search results. I had to look up who she is, she doesn’t even follow me back.

Google+ Page

• Add keyword to name – Use your keyword in the Google+ page description. Point Blank SEO ranks better than just Point Blank of course when it comes to [seo]. The Point Blank SEO team does not only rank because of the keyword, they have a hugely popular Google+ baiting post but it surely helps.
• Update frequently – It’s crucial to update your page regularly. You know Google loves content, it’s their business model that you provide free content for them so they reward those who do provide it. Also people like me do not follow empty pages unless they trust the source already.
• Socialize using your page – Companies can follow people on Google+ and +1 updates it seems. They can comment and share like any other user.

Other techniques

• Use keywords in titles – It seems post titles with the keyword mentioned more than once rank better in personal results.
• Use common words – You can optimize for common words again. When I search for car, house or even love I see personal results but most of them are not relevant, they keywords may match but in most cases the whole update may be completely irrelevant to me. So it’s good to provide a few updates using these simple terms if you care for them.
• Share off-topic – Do not only share work related content. Google+ is not like Facebook, you don’t have to share baby and per photos all the time but some occasional beauty and humor is great to make people happy and encourage engagement I’ve noticed. It’s better than just talking about SEO.

Thanks Niall Mackenzie for screenshots he provided for this post

These are just common sense SEO techniques for Google+, the SEO 2.0 part of it starts when engaging with people. This is a bit tougher and can’t fit in short list items easily. I think I will elaborate on it in the near future. I’m still testing and trying to find out myself what’s it all about.

I’m looking forward to it. I’m glad that SEO 2.0 has become main stream finally. You can’t ignore it anymore. Social media participation and outreach from now directly affects search results. It’s about time. I’ve got used to it in 2008 already when I added StumbleUpon to my search results. Google+ integration is even better.

You can’t be a bot anymore.

Get personal now. +1 this post if you like it and join me on Google+!

Also please share more techniques on how to optimize for the new Google Search Plus Your World in the comments.

Related posts:

1. 10 New Google Personal Search Blogging, Social Media & SEO Tactics
2. 12 Effects Google Personal Search Will Have on SEO, Blogging, Social Media and the Web as Whole
3. Image SEO for Photographers and Other Visual Artists

1. 10 New Google Personal Search Blogging, Social Media & SEO Tactics
2. 12 Effects Google Personal Search Will Have on SEO, Blogging, Social Media and the Web as Whole
3. Image SEO for Photographers and Other Visual Artists

Lately many influential bloggers have written about the end of the golden age of tech blogging. They say “tech” but in a way they mean blogging in general it seems. Some people were furious and asked whether “over” is the new dead. I didn’t really care.

Then over the recent weeks as I considered my own blogging “career” I realized that indeed an era is over. It’s the stone age of blogging that is over now. Also I recognized partially what replaced the Neanderthals of blogging and what’s next.

I want to summarize what really happened in the first decade of blogging.

Who am I to look back at a decade of blog history? I was quite late to blogging. I think I tried Blogger when it came out in 2001 but I was only reading blogs for two years when I finally started my first real blog in 2003. It was a private blog about art, design and activism. I had written it in German. I remember that at some point in 2004 I was even among the top 100 German blogs in two separate Technorati-like lists.

I tried to convince my very first SEO client in 2004 to establish a blog and even started one for him. In 2005 I finally started to blog professionally aka for money and clients. One of the clients back then was the largest union of the world. I created a whole blogging portal with dozens of blogs for the youth organization of the union. Ironically I worked up to 80h a week for the union or the “agency” that actually paid me. This union is known for the “35h work week” demand.

In 2006 I created my first full fledged blog for a personal client of mine. In 2007 I started this blog – SEO 2.0 and the rest is history.

I’m still one of the most well known bloggers in the SEO industry, mostly due to my contribution over at SEOptimise. From 2008 to 2011 I have written hundreds of flagship blog articles for them and made them the best SEO blog in the UK, both by the number one ranking in Google.co.uk and by winning the UK Search Awards. Sadly I wasn’t even notified or invited to the ceremony. The SEOptimise team has received the price instead of mine. I only got an email a few weeks later that they don’t need me anymore in 2012.

Meanwhile I have established and written for two flagship blogs for German clients. One of them is profitable for more than 2.5 years now. The other is the top ranking cycling blog in Germany despite me not really having the time to take care of it a lot. Additionally I have started a blog about science fiction in 2011. Last but not least I update a private Tumblr blog for two years now.

Internationally I have written for all kinds of SEO blogs and beyond like the Hubspot inbound marketing blog, Google Blogoscoped when it was in the top 30 of the most successful blogs worldwide. There many many more I can’t even remember. So indeed I know something about blogging despite being a late adopter.

So what has actually changed in the last decade, the time I consider the stone age of blogging?

The definition of a blog has changed itself

When you look at the Technorati Top 100 blogs these days and compare it to those from just a few years ago you will wonder why there are almost no blogs on the list or in other words how a blog is defined now.  A blog seems to be a popular corporate news site with a team of writers who publish items almost every hour. Real blogs like BoingBoing or Kottke are the exception. Even they have transformed or lost in popularity.

Blogging is a multimillion business not personal anymore

In the early days blogs were not much more than personal diaries. Over time they become more and more like corporate media until corporate media swallowed them or outmatched them on their own turf. The CNN Political Ticker is the #11 most popular blog these days. Some blogs were bought and sold for many millions of dollars. Others earn millions of dollars or venture capital by the millions. I rarely see personal diary-like blogs of importance now anymore. People still care for opinion but not for the person behind it.

Blogs are about topics and teams not bloggers

I was really astounded when AOL bough the seemingly anti-corporate activist site Huffington Post. When they sacked Michael Arrington, the original founder of TechCrunch I was still somehow shocked but when it happened to myself on SEOptimise I wasn’t even surprised anymore. Blog readers today don’t care anymore who writes the stuff they read on their favorite “blog”. It’s just a site or news source like any other. The unthinkable, removing the main blogger from a blog, is not an issue by now. Bloggers get hired and fired. People read blogs not bloggers. The teams are interchangeable as long as the topic stays the same.

Everybody blogs today but people do not consider it blogging

What do people on Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter? They blog. When I started blogging a blog posts was the size of the typical status update of today. A short sentence with a link was a perfect usual blog posting for years. The flagship blog post aka huge well written article is a relatively new phenomenon. So in a way most people have embraced blogging but without the attitude attached to it. Today companies like Facebook or Google own your updates and they can remove them any day. They even decide what you are allowed to write about or what “profile” picture you use.

WordPress is a full fledged advanced CMS

When I first used WordPress I was late again. I think I switched to WP when it was in version 1.2. It was clumsy and ugly back then but still it was the most advanced, user friendly and popular blogging tool at the time. I didn’t like the backend code of it but I was glad that I didn’t have to code everything myself. Yes, I have coded my websites by myself! Today WordPress is a full fledged CMS you rather use for your whole site where the blog is just part of it. Many people do not use the blog “module” at all. WordPress is really advanced when it comes to features, extensibility and customization.

WordPress themes are high quality web design today

In the early years I hated all WordPress themes. I’d take a theme and styled it completely new until it looked a bit better. As I’m not a designer I just stripped most styles. Over the years the themes got better and better but most of them still looked like diaries for teenage girls and poor poets. I’ve recently been looking around again for a great clean and minimalist theme and I was overwhelmed be the sheer number of highest quality themes that look a design for a few thousands of dollars. Many of the best are premium themes but you also get outstanding free themes.

Blog writing is almost of journalistic length and depth

As noted above blogging in the early days was often like tweeting or writing Facebook updates today. Short sentences with a link were quite common. Adding images or even videos did not happen a lot at first. I remember that I rarely added images in the first months of my blog in 2003. Blogging and journalism were like two opposite sides of the same coin, they never touched each other.

Over the years not only journalists have embraced blogging but blogging itself has become more journalistic and in-depth. Some blog posts over at Search Engine Land are so long I rarely have the time to read them in their entirety. Also journalism itself has degenerated. Today most journalistic articles are just republished agency news reports from AP, Reuters or DPA. Blogs posts are often much better than actual newspaper articles.

Blogs are interfaces and hubs in a social Web environment

Without a blog a site is like a dead end. There is nothing really you can offer to make people used to social media engage with your  site unless you have at least a blog. Forums or communities are of course even better but a blog is the easiest one of them to set up and maintain. In a social Web environment people are not keen on reading your sales copy or pseudo-objective press releases and news articles. They want to know who you are and how you think. Blogs are interfaces between companies and customers. Journalists and readers. A site that doesn’t have such an interface is effectively dead. The blog is also a hub for all your media related endeavors. You cover or announce it on a blog. You get popular via your blog, the rest of the website is just the structure.

There is no such thing as a blogosphere anymore

I seldom hear the term blogosphere anymore. Do you know what it is? It was something I felt in the early days of blogging in Germany. The blogosphere was like a virtual family. Whenever you wrote a post you knew everybody else in that huge family will in some way relate to it, even by not reading or noticing it. When a post didn’t get linked by other bloggers, when it did not become part of the blogosphere everybody knew that it wasn’t really on point. When I started blogging in English around 2007 I didn’t feel really as a part of it but I felt that it was still there. Today I feel nothing. There are people who write for blogs they work for. There are many blogosphere if there are at all.

Every niche and industry has its own blogosphere and rules

Every niche, industry or topic seems to have a blogosphere of its own these days. When I started this blog I wanted to cover many topics at once, blogging, social media, SEO but also “make money online” topics or web design. Later I added usability, freelancing, self improvement. Today there is a whole sphere of blogs for each of these topics, some of them already imploded, for instance there are just a few good and active freelancing blogs left.

On the other hand I can’t “compete” with all social media all the time blogs anymore. Web design blogs are filled to the brim with resources lists I can’t match either. Every topic requires a different kind of writing, strategy and even design it seems. Self improvement blogs are clean and sell ebooks. Architecture blogs show off building by architects all the time instead of writing about architecture. Web design blogs do now describe the practice of web design either but they list tools and resources on how to design for the Web yourself. Every niches has its own rules of blogging.

Consolidation, a few blogs dominate each niche or topic

Every blogging topic has one or a few blogs that dominate it. Search Engine Land dominates search blogging, SEOmoz does it for SEO, Mashable for social media and Social Media Examiner for social media marketing. TechCrunch still dominates tech blogging even though the founder is gone. Nobody needs him, his new blog is nowhere as popular as his old one. There are few other blogs who still try to compete but unless you have a team of dedicated bloggers you can’t really compete for attention with them.

I follow people on social media who share SEOmoz articles every day it seems. I’ve followed those who did it with Mashable. I prefer to use an RSS reader for that purpose. I don’t need people to shove the most popular blog down my throat each day. Most other people seem to like it and use Twitter instead of RSS. So even a renowned figure like Arrington can’t compete with the giants anymore.

Commercial blogs that use blog software and are full of ads abound

There are not only the huge corporate blogs you have to compete with for attention these days. There also myriads of blogs that are technically blogs, as they use WordPress or Blogger but they are just a collection of keyword driven commercial content mixed with undisclosed affiliate links to lure  search engine users and make them click. Finding a real blog with a real human behind it gets more and more difficult. Either the authors are not really associated with that particular blog or you don’t even know who the “Admin” is.

Blogging is the new normal, nothing to talk about

What I have noticed about blogging in recent years that you don’t have to talk and write about it that much anymore. In the early years blogging was new, amazing and still unfolding. Right now blogs are the most common form of regularly updated publication on the Web. Corporations websites add blogs because people are used to read like that. Almost everything about blogging has been already said and written numerous times. That was one of the reasons why I didn’t even care for the “golden age of blogging” meme.

Blogging is about personal branding not writing anonymously

My first blog was anonymous in a way. I just didn’t mention my real name on it. It was like Tumblr today. Nobody cared for my name. Also I didn’t want people to expect certain kind of content and opinion beacuse I was a pole. Today blogging is personal branding. You are somebody if you blog. Or at least you should try to be somebody when you blog. Otherwise blogging will become frustrating quickly.

People won’t trust you as much as they trust bloggers with real names. Even Google won’t rank you as high as an author who discloses who s/he is. These seems to contradict same of my former points when I wrote that people do not care about the bloggers abnymore. They indeed don’t unless you make them. You have to highlight the fact that you write and not “Admin”.

These are the changes that came to my mind right now. I could write on for hours. What I want to stress is that as you see above some of the changes are rather positive, others can be viewed as negative, some are ambiguous. Overall they show that blogging  has evolved beyond the stone age.

We do not live in cages anymore. Indeed a new WordPress with a modern theme is like a condo compared to a cage of WP from a few years ago. I welcome this change.

On the other hand I do not consider AOL or CNN to be bloggers thus I don’t have to identify or even compete with them. It’s a bit sad that the categorization of weblog is a bit meaningless these days. It can mean anything and everything.

• So what’s next?
• Will only corporations blog?
• Will we just “blog” for corporations like Facebook or Google?

Remember that some things haven’t changed. What I have learned over the years is that bloggers care for other bloggers. Not all of them some will actually attack you just to position themselves in a better light but overall blogging connects.

I may not be a particularly gifted writer but people who like me, other bloggers, tell their friends and followers and thus my blog posts get shared. It’s as simple as that. I read and share postings by other whenever I can.

Half a year ago I wrote about what I called then “smart mob SEO“. The smart mobs of the early blogging era are still there. They might occupy public places but they also can form and support bloggers. Often when other bloggers link to me or I link to them we outrank huge corporate sites. So it’s possible. Real people are always better than mindless corporate drones or just employees who happen to blog.

I don’t want to return to my cage but I still like sitting occasionally around the virtual fireplace

and convene with other bloggers to change the world. Facebook and Google are not replacements for blogs, they just parrot them without the inherent meaning. For real bloggers Facebook and Google are only tools to promote their own blogs.

You can still or now more than ever create your audience. You won’t get as much traffic as the AOL blogs but you don’t need that much. You want a small but dedicated audience. The 1000 true fans who can feed you are not a myth.

* CC image by Roger Smith.

Related posts:

1. 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Me
2. SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design
3. Top 10 Most Awesomely Amazing Creative & Funny Reasons Why Blogging for Social Media Sucks

1. 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Me
2. SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design
3. Top 10 Most Awesomely Amazing Creative & Funny Reasons Why Blogging for Social Media Sucks

• I +1 it
• share it
• link to it.

It’s not just something I have written about in my 101 ways to succeed at blogging flagship post. It’s not just a tactic or technique.

In late 2010 I was a bit disappointed. Many people considered this blog just another “dofollow link”. So I moderated comments even more strictly this year to separate the wheat from the chaff. Now I can reap the rewards it seems.

There are so many great bloggers reading SEO 2.0 and even commenting here or pinging me that I have to share their awesome resources.

I’m really impressed. These are bloggers nobody has ever heard of and who have probably just a few readers each but they deserve lots of them. I hope this article helps to grow their audience.

These 12 awesome posts are about SEO and adjacent Internet marketing topics, I haven’t even included my offtopic readers. I’m proud of you people, you are really getting it. You are doing it right. I see a bright future for all of the below mentioned or rather linked bloggers:

1. Measuring SEO Success
2. SEO You Should Know: Why We Blog.
3. How Does Google Panda Change the SEO Landscape?
4. How to Calculate the ROI on a Small Business Website
5. Where to Find Links That Build Trust and Improve Search Engine Ranking
6. How to Pitch SEO – #BrightonSEO 2011
7. Identifying “Low-Hanging Fruit” Keywords: The First Step
8. 4 Common SEO Errors to Avoid
9. SEO most effective for lead generation
10. Conversion optimisation testing – how does it work?
11. Copywriting myths: the 12 most persuasive words in the English Language
12. Social Media and Assumed Consent | LinkedIn Steps in it

I think I got used too much to reading the same sources over and over. After a while you just visit the same few sites. You lose out on the myriad of great bloggers who haven’t yet been discovered by everybody else but who nonetheless contribute really valuable resources for the SEO industry and beyond. I will be more open minded in future again.

Related posts:

1. Words that Damage Trust in Your Blog
2. How to Use LinkedIn for Marketing & SEO: 20 Resources
3. How to Overcome the Established Blogger’s Apathy

1. Words that Damage Trust in Your Blog
2. How to Use LinkedIn for Marketing & SEO: 20 Resources
3. How to Overcome the Established Blogger’s Apathy

For years I’ve been a proponent of using SEO for more than just making money. Even on the Web it’s “people before profits”. You can’t just do business as usual when the planet and humanity with it goes down the drain. Still it’s a rare occasion that you see SEO being used for activism.

Not every non-profit organization is automatically working for the greater good. There is one though that is beyond doubt in this case: Greenpeace. Also Greenpeace has used SEO for its Detox campaign in a way that inspired me to write this post.

One of the reasons I write about it is the lofty definition of SEO Greenpeace offers:

This is SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”, and it’s one of the few fantastic activist tactics that are native to the web. It’s not the online version of something which people were doing already before the internet.

The SEO here is just a call to action to webmasters and bloggers to link back to the campaign site. This is of course the easiest and best way to do it. Also it’s quite inclusive. Not everybody can donate money or take part in actual protests on the streets. Also many people might feel that just giving money is not really activism.

Last bot not least many actions are just too far away for most people. On the Web there is no distance and attention is the currency. Links provide and channel attention. Of course I’d invite readers to share the campaign URL on social media sites as well. On the Web the people have the power to change things and to direct attention where it belongs.

The detox campaign is surely worth your attention:

Greenpeace is campaigning to stop industry poisoning waterways around the world with hazardous, persistent and hormone-disrupting chemicals. Launched in July 2011, the Detox campaign has exposed links between textile manufacturing facilities causing toxic water pollution in China, and many of the world’s top clothing brands.

I think I’m using products by at least one of the brands targeted in it:

• H&M
• Adidas
• Nike
• Puma

These are just those brands that have already reacted. Greenpeace has already forced Apple to become more environmentally friendly so I’m quite optimistic that they will be able to stop the water pollution by these and other global brands. We know they they don’t produce or even design most of their garments themselves. They are all made in

• China
• Bangladesh
• Philippines

The people in the countries suffer at least twofold, by ridiculously low wages and by environmental destruction.

These global brands do not have factories themselves. They even outsource the creative process. They only thing they have is their brand image. So in case they pollute the environment we can pollute their images with news about it. It’s that simple.

What can you learn from it?

You don’t need an expensive SEO agency to use SEO for activism.

Just ask and inspire people to link to you and spread the word on social media. Of course some advice from SEO experts is also sometimes crucial. In this case Gareth aka SEO Doctor has pointed pout that the campaign URL Greenpeace requested readers to link to has been redirected by a temporary redirect aka 302 which does not work for Google. So all the links using the short URL would have been wasted.

Does it work? Yes, Greenpeace is already at #11 for the quite competitive term [detox]. Ad some more links to your sites to push it up to the top 10.

Of course SEO is more than rankings. Personally I also doubt that people who are searching for detox are actually the right audience for this kind of topic. It would be better to optimize for the brand names of the companies that are responsible for the pollution. Once potential customers find out about the toxic pollutants their brands produce they may reconsider their purchase. This way the pressure grows.

Related posts:

1. How to Fight Big Business in Google and Beyond with Smart Mob SEO
2. 20 Ways to Get Legit Paid Links Without Getting Penalized by Google
3. Where to Buy Links? Turkey!

1. How to Fight Big Business in Google and Beyond with Smart Mob SEO
2. 20 Ways to Get Legit Paid Links Without Getting Penalized by Google
3. Where to Buy Links? Turkey!

That’s why I was stunned and immediately infatuated with cognitiveSEO tools. As you might have read already, I’m blogging for cognitiveSEO tools for several weeks now. That’s one of the reasons it’s so quiet here:

The cognitiveSEO tools suite is still in private beta and thus free of charge. So you can apply for an invitation code and test them for free. I strongly advise you to test them as long as they aren’t ready. They might cost quite a bit later on. Why? Let me explain:

cognitiveSEO might be one of the most advanced link building tools already.

The early version that is online right now has only two modules that focus on two very common tasks: link management and inbound link analysis

Today I’d like to focus on the backlink checker feature because it’s probably the most feature rich such tool I have ever seen. It’s indeed a full fledged inbound links analysis solution, not just your average backlink check. The post will exemplify how to analyze your link profile with cognitiveSEO tools.

First you add a project or rather campaign to cognitiveSEO tools where you enter your website URL and then a few of your main competitors:

Then you can “apply” the backlink checker to any of the listed URLs. Along the obvious metrics like anchor text and whether the link is valid aka “active”

you have numerous filters at your disposal to find out just about everything about your incoming links. You can sort them depending on their MozRank, whether they are follow/nofollow, where on the site they are (header/body/sidebar/footer) and based on many other factors.

There are manifold filter to choose from. For example you can diplay just those links containing a given term in the anchor text:

That’s still just the beginning. When starting a new project you probably want to find out quickly why you rank below your competition or in other words why your competitors outrank you. For this purpose cognitiveSEO has a special feature called “Competitor Comparison“.

In the example below I have decided to compare links that are non-nofollow, non-xxx and where the website has at least PageRank 1 to sort out low quality links:

I had to cut off the menu screenshot as it was too long for my blog. This is the longest menu item called “Metrics” as it shows a sub-menu containing several of them.

In the image above “Alexa Rank (URL)”, “Inbound Links SeoMoz” and “OutBound” Links are missing. Below this menu you see the results as charts and a table comparing the five websites I have added to this campaign.

My site, the SEO 2.0 blog is first and you quickly see that I compare quite well to the competition for the [seo blog] query. Surprisingly I have more PageRank 4 links than all the others except SEOMoz:

You might wonder why there are so few links.  In the beta version there is a limit of 1000 checked links per site so the commercial paid version will show more. Initially Yahoo Site Explorer was meant to serve as one of the data sources but it was discontinued earlier this year. To be honest I never liked the quality of the Yahoo data. The data sources have to be paid as far as I know so that they will be probably better than Yahoo Site Explorer data.

One of the most outstanding features of the inbound links analysis feature is that you get a screenshot of every page you have a backlink from. It’s even highlighted. Just look at this example from a blog post about search bloggers by Komarketing Associates:

So do you like what you see? In case you want to test the cognitiveSEO tools for free you have a few weeks left. I didn’t even show the link management part of it. This is just a quick introduction of one single module. The post was meant to show how to analyze your link profile. Many more modules are coming up.

Related posts:

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2. Yahoo Search Results Total Crap Now
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1. Google Indexes Twitter Links
2. Yahoo Search Results Total Crap Now
3. Software for SEO: Tools, Why & How to Track Rankings in a Personalized Search World

It’s not a secret that I’m not as active on SEO 2.0 as in the early days anymore. I’ve turned out an “occasional blogger” over the years while publishing SEO related articles mostly over at the SEOptimise blog. I have been hugely successful with SEOptimise. It’s by now the number one and most popular UK SEO blog according to Google at least but it also has an impressive following and

some of my posts get shared by hundreds of people.

The SEO 2.0 blog is still modestly well known but not as widely acclaimed as it was once was. I get still some substantial Google traffic and even StumbleUpon sends me hundreds of casual visitors daily again. So everything is alright isn’t it then? Well, it bores me a little. Thus I joined a completely new SEO blog over at cognitiveSEO, a promising SEO software startup from Europe. Their blog was almost completely empty when I started to write for it.

While blogging here and on SEOptimise has become routine, both in a positive and negative sense on cognitiveSEO I have to rediscover the art of blogging in a way. I have to

experiment and find a new unique writing style once again.

As this is actually my third flagship SEO blog I develop it’s not as easy to become someone else for it. On the other hand I can’t just copy the blogging style I use on SEO 2.0 and SEOptimise. I don’t want to use the same types of posts, the same headline formulas. I don’t even like to repeat myself all the time.

In a way who else could start a new successful blog? After all I’m the guy who explained how to achieve it in 2007 and has proven ever since that it works. Still, it’s also a bit ridiculous. It’s the same person writing, the same topics (SEO and social media) and even the same Internet. My readers vary though. Surprisingly very different people seem to read SEO 2.0, SEOptimise and cognitiveSEO. At least they appear to be different as other people share the posts on social media for instance.

You could think that the audience follows the author, like with books.

On the Web the publishing house, here the blog, seems to be much more important though. People know a particular source to be trustworthy and they return to it again and again. A new source has to prove it’s worth it, even if the writer is already known from elsewhere.

Before starting to blog over at cognitiveSEO I considered writing again for Hubspot. I did a few times in 2007 but then lost touch with them. Now I did it again but it felt a bit weird. I didn’t really know what to write about. That was strange because Hubspot’s inbound marketing is largely the same as my SEO 2.0 philosophy. That lack of inspiration doesn’t really happen at the new blog. I think I know why:

A new blog is like a new love. It’s full of insecurities but it’s also exciting.

It’s exciting because not everything is routine and popular. You have to find out, you have to find your voice and audience. I love it. Call me a serial blogger. I love it despite the hard work it takes to get just a few shares on social media. That’s the joy and pain of starting a new blog.

* Image by Elliot in Wonderland

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Wow. Awesome! After just a dozen of tries I could sign up for Google+! Sadly it happened on late Friday so that I ended up trying it out on the weekend. You know I hate working on the weekend but after a while I had the impression that this is what I do on Google+.

You may already know that after a few years of social media enthusiasm I grew more and more critical of the whole hype.

Why do I have to work for free to make Mark Zuckerberg the youngest billionaire? This is one of the questions I asked myself when joining Facebook in 2008 (shortly after they entered the German market). I asked it myself again when I finally decided to actually use Facebook in 2010.

I test a lot of new tools but these days I don’t do it just for the sake of it anymore.

Just because a tool is free as in beer doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost me money to use. I could spend the time working on my won Web real estate so there must be a compelling reason to use a tool. Otherwise it’s a waste of time and money.

I still use plenty of social media sites, services and tools. I use

1. Delicious
2. Twitter
3. Tumblr

every day. I even use this forgotten social browsing tool called Browzmi almost daily because there is a rational reason to do so. Facebook and LinkedIn also have a role in my overall social media strategy but I use them only occasionally when I have a concrete task to accomplish (LinkedIn) or some time left (Facebook).

I use Tumblr and Browzmi only privately in the sense that I don’t earn money using them but it still makes some sense for inspiration or organizational purposes.

So here comes Google+ and requires a significant time investment on my side.

I schedule just 30 minutes a day for social media use, the same amount I schedule for sorting and answering emails that are not part of my projects. The only tool I used throughout the day until now was Delicious, I was bookmarking everything I’ve found of some interest in the SEO, social media and blogging sphere. Occasional off topic saves included. Later I use them for my blog posts.

When Google launched the +1 button I started adding +1 votes to all kinds of sites I appreciate. I +1 a lot, even more than I use Delicious, Twitter, Facebook together. I just vote for everything I appreciate no matter the language or topic.

Google+ doesn’t automatically display these +1 votes like Facebook does with likes.

So my Google+ stream is a different one than the +1 stream. That’s good because I don’t flood my SEO followers with off topic stuff from all over the Web but when I’d like to share something on G+ as well I don’t have an option to do so.

Instead I noticed that Google+ works a lot like Google Buzz, it encourages discussions. That’s great if you want to start one but I rarely do and when I do people don’t contribute. People like to discuss about stuff that doesn’t matter much. They like to discuss opinions.

I’m interested in opinions but not in discussing them.

Every opinion, even the “wrong” one has some value as it shows that some people think in a certain manner. You can adapt then once you know. You can’t argue with people’s opinion much though. It costs lots of effort to even make a point that contradicts someone elses’ opinion. You could argue all day and starve in the meantime.

So how does Google+ add to my social media strategy? It adds a place where I can discuss stuff, whether Google+ is this or that and whether it should add this or that feature, or whether Facebook is better or not. That’s great for Google+ engineers, they can learn a lot from these discussions. To me it’s just working for free for Google.

Why should I? To push my own properties there? Maybe. I will still have to find out. Maybe next weekend. Until them I consider switching of these notifications that follow me when logged in into Google. There is Greasemonkey script for that. I’ll have to find the link.

Also it took lots of work to organize just a few dozens of people into circles. I will have to plan this time investment. As I socialize mostly with the same people I am connected with on Twitter, Facebook and the likes I have to find more reasons to do so beyond just discussing opinions. I may create circles for all of my different blogs so that I can serve all my audiences, but that’s also additional workload.

How does Google+ add to your social media strategy? Does it only add more work to your todo list? What are your actual use cases? What does the “plus” actually stand for?

* Image by Akane Yamada.

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Over the years I’ve been outranking big businesses, well known brands and major news media. I’ve been successfully competing with whole SEO teams. I’ve even managed to surpass spammers and black hat SEOs in some cases.

Your competition on the Web is more overwhelming than ever these days.

Some SEO pundits already advise you to give up and try to offer something different than the big guys. I don’t. There are still ways to fight big business in Google and beyond.

Corporations have some vulnerabilities you can use against them.

IMHO the only true free market business is small business. Big business is often just about monopolies and market dominance. Just think Google, Microsoft or Apple. They always try to own a certain market and kill off competition using proprietary technology, law enforcement and media hype. Of course once they own the market they can dictate the prices.

In SEO we deal with a similar situation these days as you can’t spend the same amount of time and money on SEO a corporation or mews media outlet can. Even though many brands fail at SEO from the technical point of view Google favors large brands over no name small businesses so that your site can be technically better equipped, have better content and be more dedicated to customers and you will still lose against the behemoths.

What weaknesses do corporations have?

Corporations commit corporate crime on a seemingly daily basis but the people have no choice but to stay with them. Google might breach your privacy, Apple might make their workers commit suicide and Microsoft might abuse their monopoly but most people will still buy and use their products and services. The same is true with major media, they copy stories, can spread lies and propaganda and get away with it.

Corporations are too big to move quickly. I’ve worked for corporations myself. You can’t do anything by yourself. You have to ask several bosses above you, you might not even know who they are so you can’t ask them at all. In other cases you might have to wrestle with several departments, every one o them throwing their guidelines on you. Until you move several days, weeks or months might go by without any significant change.

Corporations do not care about anything or anybody, they are just looking at their bottom line. Even though sensible individuals work fort hem they are not allowed to follow their human instincts. They have to maximize profits and stick to corporate rules. In many cases they are not even allowed to mention their competitors or link out to them. At the same time each corporation has at least several websites if not dozens or hundreds of them so they are heavily interlinked.

Rebel with a cause

When there is a righteous cause like attacking a corporate criminal people can get angry and act together. The era of smart mobs has finally arrived with the Anonymous phenomenon. A “group” of people from all over the world congregating virtually to perform an action on behalf of a common goal. Their most apparent action was to the long term support of Wikileaks. Their most feared tactic is the hacking of websites by entities the group perceives as the target of their wrath.

Even before Anonymous people on the Web have used similar techniques to exert pressure on the powerful. In the SEO industry the most well known of these tactics was Google bombing. While Google has tried to limit the success of this technique you can still band together to push a website in the search results.

Sometimes it just takes a few dedicated bloggers and social media users to push a certain topic or post to the top of search results. The more abusive an entity the easier it is to make people contribute to such a campaign. I did that a few years back for a very spammy medical term after I got spammed too often by spammers selling it. So I put up a post that warned consumers of the side effects for it and many bloggers joined in after I asked them. I ranked at #1/top 10 for years.

Be faster

When Samsung introduced its first iPhone competitor to the German market I happened to be the first person to report about it. Google then ranked me on #1 as the original source for months. I even outranked Samsung itself who were awfully slow to put up a webpage about the particular smartphone. They learned their SEO lessons ever since but still this SEO episode shows how a fast blogger can take advantage of the corporate dinosaurs.

Be generous

Have you ever seen CNN link out the BBC or to Al Jazeera? They rarely do. Big media either try not to link out at all or they limit themselves to sources. Sometimes they just “forget” to mention the source or the mention it without a link. Here comes the blogger who does not have to abide by corporate no link policies. When you provide a resource with links to several news media outlets you will rank highly in Google as a hub. This works for a site like Drudge Report which ranks #3 for [news] in the US but also on an article level.

Currently I rank at #4 to #6 for [motorola xoom test] in Germany. Did I test it? No. I just provided links to articles from big media outlets who do. I am the only resource where readers can get a quick overview most test results right now. Of course the major media outlets do not link out to other test results. I got just one authority link for that post so it wasn’t really difficult. I outrank some of the biggest publishing German publishing houses.

I could have linked out to other bloggers to get pingbacks an in that case I would gain even more ground.

So you see you don’t have to give up yet. You need a blog though obviously and you have to band together with like minded individuals. it might not be activism but it’s certainly a just cause to survive in the face of competition by huge corporate conglomerates.

* Anonymous kid vs. Troy Collins, US national middleweight sumo champion. Image by John Watson.

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Usually when people refer to their competitors they name a few businesses from the same industry who sell the same products or services as them. This might be true for the offline world but

on the Web there are much bigger competitors. Who are they?

This is for many search engine results the most common list:

1. Google
2. Wikipedia
3. Mainstream media
4. Amazon
5. Ebay
6. Content farms
7. Shopping search engines
8. A-list bloggers
9. Spammers
10. Your actual competitors

Your actual competitors who sell the same stuff you offer do not have to be at the end of this list, it depends on the niche, keywords and how competitive they are. Nonetheless they are by far not your most important competition. Besides, your industry peers are not necessarily just rivals. You can work together for the benefit of all parties involved. I’ll explain below.

That’s one of the main differences between SEO and SEO 2.0: In old school SEO people believed that they have to hoard PageRank and never link out at all, not to mention to competing sites. When blogs and social media finally arrived in business circles most sane people have abandoned this approach.

These days the SEO industry has a whole blogosphere of its own which is highly interlinked both by hyperlinks and real life links between humans.

Also most SEO specialists are heavy users of social media and sharing links by their peers all of the time. Twitter, LinkedIn , Facebook, Quora and all kinds of other social media outlets have been embraced by the SEO practitioner early on.

Your most dangerous competition are the big guys, as you see in the list above at least nine of these mentioned above are big guys.

Google is the elephant in the room you directly compete with. It’s not just search, it’s the attention economy. As Aaron Wall correctly points out Google is grabbing more and more real estate in the SERPs.

Many users won’t even notice your organic search results before they click a Google ad or one of the myriad of their other properties and services. You can’t compete with Google, you can try to buy your way into Google ads but when Google chooses to display their other services on top of yours you lost. You have to focus on a keyword Google hasn’t usurped completely then.

A huge competitor is also Wikipedia, the greatest content farm of all that successfully poses as a non-profit while earning money ”by donations” and not paying their contributors. Wikipedia will outrank your site in most cases even when it’s ridiculous. Search for [film] or even [films] and Google will serve you a Wikipedia entry which explains what a film is on top.

Another even more disturbing competitor is mainstream media. They do not only cover news anymore these days, they are frantically searching for SEO opportunities as well so that they will rank on top for queries like [iPad].

Amazon and Ebay are also almost everywhere and either you join them or you risk obscurity for many keywords and phrases.

Many people have written about content farms and the Google quality update aimed at curbing their prominence in Google results. Even though Demand Media’s eHow and About.com by the NYT have lost a bit after the second part of the update called ”Panda” hit them they still thrive. Demand Media, owner of eHow, has stunned experts with its recent numbers.

Shopping search engines have been hit hard by the latest update but they are still competition you have to watch closely. Price comparison sites are often at the forefront of modern SEO. You need to know what they are doing to be able to cope with changes.

A-list bloggers and industrial strength spammers seem like an unlikely couple to mention together but they are both more important than you. Try to rank in the technology sector and a-list bloggers will make you humble. You can’t compete with giants Engadget, Gizmodo out of nowhere. They have whole teams of writers frantically covering the latest gadgets.

Try the same thing in the pharmacy business online and you’ll face a huge onslaught of spam infested sites and hacked pages redirecting you do the spammer’s shops. Spammers are faster than the search engines and they’ll always find a loophole. So while they might disappear on one day they will reappear on the next with another site or hijacked blog.

Now, how can you compete with all of them? There are two ways to do so. The most common one is:

If you can’t beat them, join them: Pay for Google ads, contribute to Wikipedia, send out press releases to journalists, set up an Ebay and Amazon shop, add articles to article directories or other content farms, guest blog on a-list blogs and buy links.

There is also a new way, the SEO 2.0 way: Joining forces with other bloggers or peers, sometimes your actual competitors. You can outrank the big guys by working together with other bloggers. I have done that in the past by joining a group of bloggers determined to help each other but I always preferred the intuitive SEO 2.0 way of cooperation. It’s been called mutual aid prior to the Internet.

I link out to my peers or “competitors” and they link back to me.

Not all of them do, but some of them do and some even give back more than they get because once you give and get a few times you stop counting. You just share resources as in real life with friends and family.

Cooperation not competition is the only way bloggers and small businesses can compete with their real competitors from big business and big media, big Google included.

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A business blog is not only a blog it’s also obviously a business. A business has to have some core values to be able to succeed in the long term. The market is volatile so that you need some stability.

A business blog often does not sell products and services or at least not directly, it provides first and foremost value.

What kind of value do you offer? To provide value you have to know what your core values are in the first place.

Today I considered my core values on this blog. As my regular readers know I write for several business blogs by now. They differ significantly, by topic, by language and by business model.

On the other hand the core values I represent on all of them are very similar and only the focus changes a bit. So ultimately it’s not just about your blog but the question also is: what do you stand for as a blogger and a person?

Empowerment

The most important core value of this blog is to empower people. I want my readers to learn how they can make their websites earn more money, make the people happy and save the world. Thus it attracts not only readers from the SEO industry but also self improvement experts or green activists. I even considered to redefine the SEO acronym as Social Empowerment Online.

Progress

Also I’m a firm believer in progress. I don’t accept everything that is new, especially in technology, as progress but I know that humanity can move forward in the right direction. Sometimes it’s back to the roots, when it comes to environment, sometimes it’s up to the stars when it comes to science. On a personal level I want that someone who has never been on my blog before can improve his website and search + social strategy in the long term in such a way that s/he can see the progress.

Ethics

I’m grounded in ethics as in its truest sense. I don’t mean white hat SEO as in “not cheating search engines”. Ethics in business and beyond is much more than that. I use renewable energy sources, buy organic food, even dink Fair Trade tea. I have a bank account with a small ethical bank that focuses on investment in sustainable projects instead of weapons manufacturing and nuclear energy like most other banks do.

Cooperation

Altruism is the best egoism. Even Darwin meant that the only the strongest (species) survive. By that he meant those that cooperate in the most effective way. He gets misquote all the time by egotists who who want to explain their selfishness. On the Web it’s so much easier to cooperate. It only takes a few clicks in many cases. the more you share the more you get. It’s like Jesus feeding thousands of people with two leafs of bread.

Freedom

I grew up in a dictatorship as a kid and then I had to flee my country of birth at ten. Thus freedom is one of the most important things to this day for me. Many people in the US or the other old democracies take freedom for granted but  I don’t. I know that you have to vigilant all the time and sometimes fight back those who want to limit your freedom. It’s one of the reasons why I’m not a Google fan boy.

Honesty

Honesty is very important to me, it’s already part of the ethics mentioned above. Still I want to point it out separately as bloggers must be even more honest than other people. You can’t be honest beyond a certain line though. It hurts people. Thus honest is not the first thing I care for while at the same time it’s crucial. Also you have to protect yourself and your privacy on the Web. You can’t give away too much.

Respect

Respect is the reason why you have to limit your honesty. Over the years I have attacked quite a few people personally on this blog. When Jaamit died I had to rethink this. I decided to add one more core value to my list, it’s respect. Sometimes respect requires you to limit your honesty. You don’t have to lie. You can refrain from saying something that might hurt a person. Always remember, this person could die the next day and then the last thing you said and s/he remembers is the vicious attack you launched.

What are your core values? I didn’t consicioulsy know until I considered writing this post here. You have to slow down a bit and listen to your heart to find out but then the words apear by itself in your head. Don’t forget: it’s not just business and blogging, it’s about you. What do you stand for?

* Image: Stand your Ground by Akshay Moon.

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