TJ22 – SEO: Inside Inbound and The Factors Affecting Search Marketing In 2013 With Rand Fishkin

Hello listener! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, this is episode#22 and I am your host James Reynolds. Of course you are listening in to the show that teaches you how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website.

Now I’ve got to say this episode is one that I have been looking forward to particularly more so that others because today we’re finally covering the topic of search engine optimization which if you are a regular listener to the show, you will know that it’s something that’s particularly close to my heart, because I do myself run an SEO agency SEO Sherpa and it’s of course it’s a topic I get to talk about everyday coaching my team, educating customers on and of course creating really valuable content around that topic too!

So when we did finally cover the topic of SEO, I wanted to make sure that we got a guest on the show who could add real value; someone that I look up to personally myself and I don’t think my guest today is going to disappoint at all. My guest today is none other than Rand Fishkin. He’s the CEO of moz.com which I have got to say are rather up there in the go to resources for all things SEO as far as I am concerned, probably my top 3 if not my top 1 actually. I really do love everything that moz.com do. He is also the co-author of the art of SEO and co-founder of inbound.org. Both inbound resources of SEO in their own right. And aside from all of that cool stuff, he is a fan of NFL Football, he likes a bit of theater and he likes a good drink of scotch so in my mind he is a pretty cool guy.

Rand’s interview is coming right up but of course you don’t want to go anywhere after that because we’ll have the regular segments which we all so much like and enjoy – at least I enjoy making them. Anyway we’ve got the one minute news in traffic, this week’s news in traffic, and of course to play out the show we have our musical jam which is always a bit of fun so I guess without any further ado today I really want to get stuck right in to the episode right away, the topic is search engine optimization, inbound marketing and we do cover some other stuff related to social media and some cool other traffic tips that Rand serves up to. So that’s served up right away, right now is my interview with Rand Fishkin, here it is.

James: Okay, so this is Traffic Jam episode #22 and my guest in the Traffic Jam hot seat today is the CEO of Moz, the founder of Inbound.org co-author of The Art of SEO and self-confessed search and social addict, Mr. Rand Fishkin. Rand, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Rand: James, thank you so much for having me.

James: I guess I could have added a bit of a PS there and said you are a bit of a scotch lover as well, I did notice that.

Rand: Oh, that is definitely true!

James: Good. Well the conversation is not going to be about scotch, at least in the most parts today. We are going to dive deep in to a few different topics but mainly focused around search engine optimization because that’s kind of your real area of expertise should I say. Now my only question is, you started out online in about 1997 I believe, before there was even Google. Now when you take away all the tricks and tactics, what’s actually changed in the art of search engine optimization in that time?

Rand: We’ve actually had a huge amount of change in that kind of period; I would kind of separate us in to three unique blocks of about 5 years each. ’97 to about 2002, SEO was pretty much – well you could be very successful with SEO simply by doing a small number of manipulative things and I think that was really the start of the black hat, gray hat SEO world; you know, stuffing your SEO title tags, meta keywords tags with terms and phrases that would help you come up on the engines, putting white on white text so that you have the keyword repeated on your page more than your competitor would, buying crappy links from link networks, spamming blogs, all these kinds of things. And really Google’s rise to dominance in the early 2000 helped put an end to a lot of those practices and made them tremendously harder and those folks who still did practice the gray hat- black hat got much more sophisticated and then we had our first generation of what we’d call our SEO marketers in the early mid-2000s and those folks, I think many of them are still practicing today of course but this is when you’ve really got an art behind SEO, it was a practice that required some technical expertise; making websites search-friendly and search-optimized as well as doing some classic kinds of marketing things like building a brand and earning links and getting attention and PR and press and those kinds of things. And today I think that’s become an even wider array of things. If you want to be good in SEO in 2013 you really have to be good at a lot of different kinds of marketing because the search engines are taking in to account signals that are far broader than what they’d ever consider in the past so links are still important of course, what’s on your pages is still important as well. But now we’re looking at things like social shares and user and usage data; there’s a lot of signals coming from a lot of interesting places! Topic modeling kinds of things that they’re doing on text analyses with updates like Penguin they’re doing more and more sophisticated kinds of query matching. So this has become an art and a science; it’s big broad marketing and it’s also getting technical in the details.

James: Okay, good. I’m going to ask you a question now where you may cringe at a little when I ask you because guys like you and I have to sort of respond to this question it seems extensively, perhaps more times than we’ve had hot dinners. In 2013 with everything that’s gone on in the past 12 months and perhaps even before that, is SEO as we know it finally dead?

Rand: Well, it depend on what you call – I mean, what’s dead is an old style of SEO that had barely existed and chugged along in from the late ‘90s into the early 2000s and now is almost completely dead and that sort of SEO is Oh look here’s a keyword people are searching for, I’m going to go make a page, put that keyword in my title, put it all over the page, build a bunch of links to it with that anchor text and it doesn’t really matter on the page or whether my site’s any good, I can still rank because I’ve got the links, I got the anchor text, and I got the keyword matching. That kind of SEO, if not dead, is definitely on life support!

James: Yeah. Well I want to kind of roll forward a bit now and we’ll talk about some of the stuff that really does influence ranking in 2013 and over at moz.com you’ve got access to a lot of data via your tools where you do your sort of bi-yearly SEO ranking factors study. Let’s talk a bit about what really does affect ranking at this point. If Google’s own official language is anything to go by, they say that all you need to do is focus on having a good website with a good user experience and I certainly agree with the fact that you can’t rank a shitty website in 2013, but is it really that simple? I mean is that really where the focus should be?

Rand: It’s not that simple! And I think that Google’s advice is actually kind of poor on that front. Like many things in the world of marketing or in the world of building a business, it’s complicated, there’s a lot of new ones, and there’s a lot of things of grey. And one of the things James, I think this is an important distinction, what I don’t want to say is I or any other expert in the SEO field knows all of the things, or even most of the things that Google actually uses on their ranking algorithm on who should be higher in ranking than somebody else. However, what we do know a lot about is the features and factors that predict that on average a site that performs above other sites, or pages that performs than other pages – what are the features that that site or page has? And we can tell you that from looking at lots of broad correlation stuff from first-hand experience of earning particular kinds of signals and seeing sites go rank above them. Of course in our ranking factors, the bi-yearly one that you mentioned, we also do a survey of a large number of professional SEOs and we aggregate their opinions and that’s where a lot of this data comes from. So today if you go and search Google for ranking factors, you’ll find this big list and you can go and check it out at your leisure but essentially we’re talking about a few big categories that most of the elements have fallen under. The big important one is domain authority. This is essentially how powerful, important, reputable, influential, how effective in gaining and keeping an audience is the website on which you’re hosting your pages. So for example if I were to go and try and rank for orange ipods, I would have far greater success if I put a page on Wikipedia.org than if I put a page in rands-house-of-ipods.info.

James: Which you don’t own that domain?

Rand: Oh I just bought it, yeah, yeah.

James: Well good luck!

Rand: Yeah, right! And this is because Wikipedia has all these signals right? It has all these signals that Google has seen over time. It has seen lots of people going to those pages and clicking on that site using it, remember they have access to Google Chrome which is tied to the #1 most popular browser, they have the toolbar, they have data from Google Analytics, they have data from providing wifi and internet service, they’ve got a ton of information on who visits what, when or why, how – all of that stuff and so they can take those signals in to account when determining how important a site is. They also know if a site has earned a lot of links, a lot of mentions, a lot of brand extensions, then that site is probably more important than others. That’s kind of the concept of domain authority and that’s why in the SEO world one of the things that I always recommend to people is don’t be building multiple websites targeting different things, build a brand, build a business with a brand that people know and has a positive association. Build it on one website, keep all of your content on that one website if you possibly can.

James: Yeah, and I guess the spin-off of that Rand is that it is also far easier to manage one resource than be trying to split your attention to multiple websites all particularly set up to target a particular keyword phrase. It is particularly heavy on resource- that type of strategy.

Rand: Yeah absolutely! And I think you’re doing exactly that with Traffic Jam right? You’ve built up a brand that people know, when you emailed me, I recognized it, I googled it, I saw the other guests – it builds a brand right? And that’s exactly what you’re searching for. Some of the other elements are, there’s obviously page level signals meaning are lots of people pointing to the page from lots of good sources? Google has gotten really good at differentiating essentially editorially given links from the classic kinds of links that SEO has given to build or acquire. And I think they have really shifted to a world where acquired links – links that you can get without interfacing with another person or without earning them are going away in terms of their value and importance. They do look at things like anchor text, what the links say, but they’re also looking at things like surrounding text and the text of the page that the link is on and we’ve seen some pretty interesting rankings where something will be ranking really well for keywords that has virtually no anchor text. You’ll go and look and a lot of the pages to it happen to mention or be about that term or phrase. So that is contextual matching on Google’s part. And then there’s social shares using a number of other technical things obviously keyword matching on the page is still relatively important as well.

James: Good, well I think we might tackle a couple of those in a moment or so but before that, I read in a post recently where you likened link building to sex. I’m not quite seeing the connection, tell me more about that.

Rand: Yeah it goes in a off-handed relation; let me put it differently. It is very similar to dating, right? What you definitely don’t want to do if you want a long term positive relationship with Google is to go and do all kinds of things that are one time paid activities. And this is true in dating as well, generally speaking right? If you’re seeking a long term positive relationship with a man or a woman you generally don’t want to do one time paid kinds of activity.

James: Yeah, got it. And I think that this is something that is underlying within the kind of SEO community at large that people are very much focuses on this transaction on the type of SEO where they’re just thinking on the tactical elements of building links as opposed to what you are speaking about and I certainly advocate building up authority and a brand online.

Rand: Yeah, actually I think you nailed it James, the term transactional SEO is what I’d use to describe this and I’d say that is dying or dead.

James: Yeah, let’s talk a bit about social signals; you know the amount of likes and shares and how that influences rank, I think that came up recently highly within your moz.com report and you also made a comment recently about Google+ having a significant impact on page rank passing or something to that effect which then got you in to an online squabble with Matt Cutts. Tell us a little bit about what happened there.

Rand: Sure, yeah. So Cyrus Shepard who’s one of our senior content editor in Moz, fantastic guy, really, really smart SEO, he basically had noted this very high correlation between things that earn Google+1s and Google+ shares and the way that those pages rank. And so he wrote about this, in a way which I think was pretty well done, he did not say Google is clearly using +1s or Google+ shares to rank. He said, pages that are earning these signals, pages that are getting lots of +1s and lots of shares tend to be outranking pages that don’t at a very high rate. And Matt Cutts had jumped on and he said, his language was extremely careful – it was something to the effect of – I’m not sure how to best debunk this.  I think that was what he said and then people jumped in and said, hey wait, what do you mean? Do you mean this was a poorly done correlation study? Do you mean Google isn’t directly using +1? Are they not using shares? I know that if someone I follow in Google+ +1 something then it ranks higher for me, you know, that personalization element is certainly there. Google shows you in there if you +1 something it will say James Reynolds +1 this, follow them. So the clarity around what is exactly is wrong I think is unknown at this point. I think Matt Cutts was essentially trying to say we don’t directly use +1s as a ranking signal in themselves exclusively and that actually you can sort of prove to yourself and I think that Eric and Mark on Google+ did a pretty good experiment. They essentially said, hey let’s go take a page that’s ranking on Page2, were going to get a bunch of people to +1 that page but not do anything else- no link building, none of those things, let’s see what happens. Gosh we replicated that experiment a few different times and no movement on any of those search results. It does look like independent of everything else, Google+1s exclusively are not the kind of transactional tactic or transactional SEO that’s going to move the needle for you. But, I think it is really, really dumb if you take that experiment and Matt Cutts’s words and you say to yourself oh, well there is no reason for me to use Google+ to help my SEO both because of your personalization and because what’s certainly going on there because there is some sort of secondary or associated signal that’s causing that high correlation meaning maybe it’s the page that has the ability or in general would earn lots of +1s also earns other things that Google is considering also gets whatever it is, links mention some sort of secondary element. Maybe they’re using their +1 in combination with other sorts of data on Google+ or in their world of signals that they consider in general. But whatever it is, it is a really high correlation; it is a weirdly high correlation.

James: That’s interesting. Has there been anything Rand that in all of your studies at moz.com and access to all the data that you have that has been a really surprising ranking factor if you like that has caused significant movement, something perhaps that Google would see as being insignificant? Has there been anything like that that you’ve come across your time?

Rand: Yea, we’ve seen a few weird ones. I think one of the more odd ones a few years back was the high correlation with no-followed things in the ranking factor specifically and we did see some experiments. That was one that we tried to perform some experiments and seem to see movement from no-followed links and we weren’t exactly sure what was going on, that correlation by the way has over time decreased; when people tried to replicate the experiment and seen less impact or maybe no impact from no-follow links so it could have been Google used to consider or maybe just some weird data. There was one a few years back, this has gone back a while now, but we noticed that Google would not index a page if it ended in the extension 0. Most pages in the internet right, they’d have no extension or an extension of .html or .php or what have you but we had a page that was .zero and we looked around and we found there were other pages that were .zero and we learned that none of them are indexed. So we actually dropped a line to some folks in Google and I emailed Matt Cutts and some other folks in the search quality team, they fixed it.

James: There you go!

Rand: Some weird ones.

James: It is some weird ones! Okay, so I guess we could just wrap that up and say probably the biggest mistake that you can make in SEO in ending all of your pages with .zero.

Rand: But Google fixed it now so you’re okay.

James: We’ll say back in the day. What about now Rand, is there anything that you’ve seen come up time and time again that you see is a big mistake that people just generally make with their SEO beyond the transactional stuff that we’ve talked about in terms of the general direction, is there any big clangers that people should be aware of?

Rand: This is really consistent, I don’t know where it comes from but I have seen people who target keywords right, they say, I want to rank for this orange ipod and they do the sort of ranking of things right and they get the user experience totally wrong! They don’t think about when people go to this page what do they actually want not what’s the content that’s going to help rank me well. But what does a human being, who clicks over at the search result looking for, and what’s going to help them discover that? And the problem is that it doesn’t just hurt you from a conversion and optimization standpoint although of course it does, it also hurts you from a ranking standpoint and the reason is that they have used, and Google has talked about is that they do use signals, not directly like bounce rate but something they kind of call pogo sticking, which is essentially, I’d perform a search on orange ipods, I click on your page, it loads for me and I immediately click the back button because you did not have what I want, and instead of performing a new search, or going on to a different activity, I’ve gone back to Google so now Google knows that  I am no longer on your page and on theirs and they click on a different result or they find your search query, and that tells Google, hey wait a minute, I know you’ve got a bunch of signals saying you have that but the user data is telling us this is a crappy experience and maybe we shouldn’t be ranking this page. So that’s one that I have seen people get wrong time and time again – they’re kind of good on the SEO side and then bad at delivering what people want!

James:  I guess that’s just inherent of people thinking about SEO as a tool for traffic rather than thinking what the end game is and that would be some form of business metric, a sign up or sale, or a contact – whatever it would happen to be, the secondary action you want people to take once they get to your website but ultimately what you really want to be driving your SEO right?

Rand: Absolutely! Why are you trying to get this traffic if not to help people accomplish some goal?

James: Yeah, got it! Well, Rand, let’s turn our attention and conversation to moz.com. You’re a company that primary offers content and tool to kind of gear towards inbound marketing, what are some of the most effective marketing channels that you’re using in your own business right now?

Rand: Sure! SEO actually is a big one for us, social media actually is huge so Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, Facebook actually has gotten sort of more effective over the years for us which is interesting because I always think of Facebook as being a very consumer focused network and not really B2B and I always think gosh, who’s going to share moz’s post with their friends and family in Facebook, but it has been happening but I think people are using it more and more as a personal network. We actually have a lot of success on the paid media guide with remarketing and retargeting which is essentially you come visit moz through one of those channel searches or social for our content, maybe you type it in, maybe enter a community, and then we drop essentially a cookie that says hey this person has visited moz, we especially drop that cookie if you go and check out our products section, take a tour of Moz Analytics and then as you’re surfing around the rest of the web, we’ll have the display ads, a lot of them featuring our robot kind of popping up all over with people commenting on Twitter and those kinds of things like hey I visited your website and now Roger is following me around like a lost puppy and that’s actually been quite an effective channel on paid site. I do invite folks to check out remarketing I think it is a cost effective way and one of the only ones I consider inbound media because you’re really taking people who have already expressed an interest and showing them ads based on that.

James: Yeah, we’ve done a whole episode on that, I forget to recall the episode number but it’s the one with Justin Brooks so I’ll link to that within the show notes because I personally have been getting great results with remarketing as well. Rand, now you mentioned also in our kind of pre-interview discussion that you’re getting really good results with Facebook promoted posts that were promoted in the first few minutes of seeing a good strong interaction. Would you share that little tip with our listener?

Rand: Yeah, well basically Facebook, it’s no longer about the purely, about the edge rank algorithm because of course what shows up in the feed as getting so different over time with Facebook but what we have seen is that Facebook essentially relies on acceleration rate in the very early moments of a new post going out so when we’re using a Facebook share that we’re getting a lot of activity on, what we’ll generally do is we’ll almost always use an image, a photograph, a screenshot, something that’s interesting and would make someone want to click on the link or the post and would want to share it, as opposed to just sharing a raw link, just sharing a raw text. And then, in those first 5 to 10 minutes – it’s really about a 10 minute window and in the first five you should know, you want to look and see how much interaction you’re getting, how many likes, how many shares, how many comments and if that number is sort of exceeding your general average by a lot. So let’s say you’ve got, let’s say from my personal page I have around five thousand fans and when I see a post that’s got 50 likes in the first 7-9 minutes, I really think to myself okay, this is an opportunity to pay for a promoted post and spend a lot less money to reach many, many more people than I ordinarily would. And that’s because essentially Facebook’s algorithm at that point is showing show this to a broader set of people because that’s earned an early traction and attention and if you’re getting high engagement rates with it every person or every group of a hundred people who see it are going to be even more and be cause for every share and every like that you have. So that’s a really interesting thing to pay attention to is that Facebook is not one of those fire and forget ad networks especially if you’re using the promoted posts functionality you want to be paying close attention to for the first few minutes.

James: Yeah and I think Facebook really introduced recently a little prompt or a little pop up or something that tells you in the first few minutes you know this is your above average interaction, do you want to promote it? Do you want to put some money behind it? So it’s quite an easy way to keep tabs at that now right?

Rand: Absolutely! And I think that’s very smart on Facebook’s part but it also kind of exposes and interesting portion of their algorithm for showing stuff so just make sure- you actually have to visit your Facebook page again in these first few minutes right? Don’t be hitting refresh every three seconds but every ten or twenty seconds maybe.

James: Yeah, good stuff. Cool, well, over at moz.com you have recently changed your brand’s name from SEOMoz to Moz.com a few months ago, what was the move behind that change?

Rand: Well, it was a few things, one is we threw some acquisitions and threw some things that we built in-house, we’ve expanded quite a bit beyond SEO so we now offer a number of tools for things like social media marketing, a lot of social media marketers using brand mention trackers, freshweb explorer; so given that we have gone beyond SEO, it is actually quite hard, I’m sure you can imagine, to have a bran that says SEO Moz but does things that are not SEO and so we realize we needed to expand the brand we needed to do that. But to be honest there are other reasons, one of those was our take on the expansion of SEO which is that the responsibilities of someone who does search engine optimization have expanded very far outside of what is classically considered as SEO and so for a lot of those folks, the SEO name is saying I help with SEOs as saying I am an SEO is very limiting because then you don’t get budget or authority or influence to do all the kinds of things that you need to do just to influence SEO alone, and then one of the more peculiar ones was actually having SEO in our name made it very hard to hire software engineers. Software engineers are a group who in general has a bad taste in their mouth about SEO and so even though we could get someone in for an interview, it could be a very compelling place to work, just getting that application is tough.

James: Yeah, well that’s interesting. It is a bit of a black word in many circles right? If you are an SEO consultant, it kind of has a tarnished view in many cases to previous experience so I can see exactly why you did that. Did you have to pry the domain away from someone who already pre-owned it?

Rand: Yeah there was a guy who did own the domain though he wasn’t using it so we bought it from him, he was actually pretty cool about it, I think his price was quite high but reasonable enough.

James: Yeah, I’m sure, and based on everything that we’ve discussed here earlier, building that brand up, getting that domain name right itself, I’m sure that investment will pay itself over many times in the future.

Rand: That’s what we’re hoping.

James: Good stuff. Well Rand, to close out, what’s on your own personal radar coming up?

Rand: Gosh, I am seeing this more and more, the trend in content marketing, helping to drive a lot of attention and awareness back to SEO. It is kind of weird now that content marketing has become such a buzzword and such a big practice in the industry like social media marketing was a few years ago. The overlap with SEO from a content marketing perspective is even higher so we’re seeing a lot of renewed interest in that. Also on the transactional SEO side, many folks use and have used for years a strategy that is very reliant on guest blogging and Google has made a lot of statements in the last couple of months suggesting that guest blogging is going to be, guest posting anyway, is going to be a part of the algorithmic update that may devalue a lot of those and so I think if you’re doing – Ink or Fast company reached out to me and asked if I’d write an article for them and I said sure. They put it up and there’s my bio line on Inc’s website. That kind of stuff is not going to get you in trouble and that’s probably a very, very valuable link. But if you are posting on hundreds, thousands of sites with mediocre to crappy contents, stuff that you’ve copied everywhere, stuff that no one cares about or reads jus to earn a link back, I’m guessing Google’s going to find a way to devalue those links as an influence in a near term algorithmic update.

James: Yeah. And I think you did a whiteboard Friday update on this not too long ago right? Rand, would I be correct in saying?

Rand: Yeah, I did film a bit about guest posting maybe a few months ago.

James: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Good, well I’l dig those links out and I’ll make sure that they’re included in the show notes for today’s episode. Rand, other than moz.com and your own blog section in moz.com, is there anywhere else that I should send our listener off to as a result of hearing you today?

Rand: Well, if your particularly passionate about Twitter I do spend a lot of time there and I’m @RandFish.

James: There you go, well all of that will be included in the show notes, Rand thank you so much for coming on and sharing your marketing advice all about SEO and depths further than that here on Traffic Jam, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you!

Rand: You too James, thank you so much!

This Week’s News in Traffic

It appears that Facebook have lost a whole chunk of advertising revenue, in fact, $1billion worth of advertising revenue they could have yielded in 2013 had they rolled out their video ads. According to All Things D, the digital website, their video ads expected this year won’t now be rolled out until 2014 so if you have got that chunk of cash ready for when they roll out these ads you will just have to wait a little bit longer.

In a story I picked up from searchengineland.com, Google has confirmed that they’re testing incredibly large banner ads for specific phrases. In fact the story that’s posted there picks up on a tweet by Synergy HQ who showed a very large full width banner ad showing from the search query Soutwest Airlines. These banner ads look pretty much like those that appeared on top of YouTube. Spanning the whole width of the frame and really taking up the majority of the real estate right at the top of the page. This is interesting because in 2005 Google promised that banner ads would never come to web search. In fact, their quote is there’ll be no banner ads from the Google homepage or web results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, geographical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site ever. Well, it does seem that Google have gone back on their word or at least ready to do so.

Lastly, in this week’s traffic news, I actually want to tell you about a little app that I had been playing with over the past few days and it’s called the LinkedIn intro app and it’s an add on to your mail application for iPhone. If you are familiar with reportive this is basically a development of reportive specific for iPhone mail. What reportive does is pull from LinkedIn profiles, now you can see a full kind of profile of a person that you’re sending or receiving an email from including a photograph of them and links to their other social media accounts. I absolutely love reportive because it is so, so good for kind of one to one directories on mail communication i.e. if you want to you’re getting right in to the right person in a targeted email contact then reportive really helps you to do that so not much use on that really just something that I want you to check out and try out this week. If you’re not already using reportive for Gmail go and give that a try and if you’ve got an iPhone go try this app you can download it from intro.linkedin.com. Go give it a try I think you’ll enjoy it.

Thank you to my man Zach Reese from the United States who left me a five-star iTunes review this week and it reads James you’re the man, keep up the good work, thank you for offering such useful information, it’s been extremely helpful. I secretly do a little dance before every one minute traffic tip. Well Zach I’ve got to tell you I secretly do a little dance for your review, so thank you for that I appreciate for feedback and of course the five-star review as well. To you the listener, I’d love to hear your feedback on Traffic Jam, and of course to do that, do what Zach Reese did and head on over to iTunes, search for Traffic Jam podcast and then submit a rating and a review. The best ratings and review will get read out on the show so if you want to get some airtime here in Traffic Jam, that’s the way to do it.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

In this week’s tip I want to tell you about another tool that I have been playing around this week that will help you identify what type of content is most effective in your market on Facebook. This little app is called ShareGrab and the way it works is you could basically pick out or identify which pages on Facebook you want to follow and then what ShareGrab will do, it will show you the top rated content for that particular page assessed by most shared, liked and commented on. Now the idea being here is you can basically see which type of pages on those content get the most interaction and then follow the format for your own Facebook page. I have started to follow a few pages in my market and I have got some great ideas for really good shareable content for my own page. The thing that I like most about this tool is the fact that it is free so I am going to encourage you to go check it out for yourself. You can get it from ShareGrab.com. Once you’ve given it a little test drive head back over to TrafficJamCast.com, head on over to episode#22 and then post on the page you experience. I really would love to get your feedback. It’s something that I had been getting a bit out and I am sure you will too.

Okay so that rounds out episode#22 of Traffic Jam, I’ll be back with episode#23 this week for a discussion with Amy Porterfield, all about Facebook traffic. Stay tuned for that one. In the coming week please be sure to check out all of the post at Veravo.com, we’ve got things covered such as how to make sure that you never run out of content ideas for the SEO tip and training of the week and in Google Adwords training I’ve got a little tip on how to track and measure the return on investment from your marketing channel so that you can make better decisions as to which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of so that’s over at Veravo.com

Playing out this episode today of Traffic Jam is a track of course picked out by my guest today Rand Fishkin. It’s a track from RJD2, The Final Frontier is the track name. It’s from 2009 and it’s quite apt because the lyrics in it are “the show is over” do listen out for that one. Anyway, kind of enough of my singing, let’s play out this week’s track, I look forward to welcoming you back next week for another episode, see you again soon!