Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Microsoft adCenter Increases Ad Description, Adds Budget Widget & More Mobile Targeting Options Microsoft announced their January 2012 adCenter release…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Tags: 2012, February, Search, SearchCap

Posted by neilpatel

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

In the world of link building, getting an authority link to your site/blog has been one of the most important aspects of growing your blog. Back in 2009 Page Level Link Metrics and Domain Level Authority Features accounted for over 46% of your pages own authority:

In 2011, that percentage has dropped, but only by 4% [42.58%], suggesting that link building will continue to be a critical factor to your blog/website’s success.

But we pretty much know that not just any link will do. The better the site the link is coming from, the better the link.

That’s why your link-building campaigns need to be built around attracting authority links. But how do you do that? And what exactly is an authority link? Let me explain.

Absolute and relative authority links explained

There are two types of authorities. There are the absolute authority sites like Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Google’s blog. These sites are also labeled “informational” authorities versus navigational authorities like DMOZ.

On the other hand, you also have relative authority sites. These are sites run by bloggers or webmasters that are authorities in a niche. Bloggers like Robert Scoble, Dooce or Mashable are authorities in their markets. While the link juice they’ll give you if they link to you is not as high as what an absolute authority site could give you…they are definitely worth attracting.

But how do you actually get a link from these sites? Here are the ten golden rules to attracting authority links.

Rule 1: Write content that attracts Editorial In-content Links

The most fundamental tactic of attracting authority links is to write content that is worth a link. What does this content look like?

• Cornerstone – this content fills an obvious gap in the web information world that you fill with expert advice, detailed posts and well-reasoned arguments. This content will also define you, so it’s important to establish up front what your blog/site is going to focus on. This is also a large portion of the content you share.
• Personal content – About a quarter or less of the content should contain personal stories about yourself that helps your readers to understand who you are and where you come from. My How Being a Patel Made Me Somewhat Successful is a great example. It stays within the cornerstone content of the site, but it gives you a peek into my personal life.
• Spicy content – This is a small fraction of your content and is made up of controversial posts you write about. Typically you attack a high-profile idea or person or explain why something popular is really dumb. These are for linkbait purposes typically, but generally also give your readers an idea of who you are.

Building up a blog/site with this kind of content will take time, so you may not pick up a natural authority link out of the gate. Better yet, once you have a solid archive of content, approach these authority sites and ask for a link. Give them a good reason, which could be one of the following:

• You wrote about the author and now he might be interested in sharing with his circle the blog post that you published.
• You wrote a post that works well with a series that he wrote our compliments it. You could even critique something he or she did, which might spark an across-blog debate. If that sparks a firestorm of other responses…then you’ve won!

Rule 2: Fix other people’s broken links

Links die all the time. People shut down website or pull web pages. When these documents or sites vanish all the links pointing to them are dead.

For example, if you work through a web page by a publisher who links out a lot and the page is a few years old, you are bound to find at least one or two dead links on that page. Work through the entire site and you could find dozens.

Mashable is a good example of a site that links out a lot and will probably have a lot of dead links on older pages since they tend to report on startups that don’t always last.

You can easily solve this in 2 ways:

• Manual – Make a list of all the dead links you find, then approach the author of those pages. It’s better if you focus on one author/one person and offer several options for content instead of having to contact different authors for each dead link. That can become an administrative nightmare.
• Link validator – Use a tool like the W3C’s Link Checker to find dead links on a website or blog. It’s pretty easy to do. Here are the steps I took to check Mashable.

Drop link into sub form:

Choose your options:

Click “done” and then wait 644.47 seconds:

You can then work your way through the status report:

From that report you can build a list of dead links, the pages that need to replaced and the authors you can approach if it is a multi-author site like Mashable.

Rule 3: Create a desirable image library

If you have high-quality images on our site, you can use those images as an incentive to get people to link to you. Imagine you have a gallery of large, high-resolution pictures…well, then offer a contact form that allows a person to grab the file and linking code right there on the page.

You don’t have to go all out like a photl.com:

Or freepixels.com:

The last site specialize in photos, for you though being a content publisher looking for ranking juice, you could build a sub-domain devoted to photos like these.

Here’s what you have to do, though.

• Hire a decent amateur photographer – If you are not a good photographer and to keep it inexpensive you could hire a local photographer who is good but not really good to charge outlandish fees.
• Use your phone – Now a days, however, most cameras on smart phones can take high-quality photos. It’s often the skill of taking a good picture…like having the right angle and light…that a decent photographer should know about. In any case, the better the photos, the more likely you will get interest in the images.

And to help you benefit fully from this tactic, keep this in mind when building a library of images:

• The higher the quality of each image the better link building potential these photos will have.
• Search out affordable ways to take pictures. This could mean hiring a inexpensive photographer or buying a decent smart phone with a great camera.
• Each image should be posted on its own page.
• The delivery service should be as easy as possible. Test different set ups and use the one that makes adoption easy.
• Add images on a schedule, whether one a day or once a week.

Rule 4: Offer to write a column or do a guest post

Giving a publisher practical, highly-researched content as a guest post is a great way to get links to your site from him or her.

Keep in mind this tactic typically be easier to pull off for those relative authority content sites than absolute authority sites due to their blogging policy. But if you have a guest posting strategy that involves focusing on building links, traffic and exposure via guest posting on a select few relative authority sites, you’ll eventually have an arsenal of content that you can pitch to the absolute authority sites.

Some authority sites like Open Forum or Huffington Post have so much need for content that you can usually get a post on there. But you typically still have to provide a portfolio of posts so they can understand what level of writing you are at and not just someone off the street.

Here are some resource to help you write, submit and get published guest posts:

• A Quick and Dirty Guide to Writing Your First Guest Post
• Neil Patel’s Guide to Writing Popular Blog Posts
• Write a Guest Post for I Will Teach You to Be Rich (while Ramit Sethi focuses on tips on how to write for his blog…they are valuable for any blog, really.)
• Why Submit Your Best Posts as Guest Posts?
• How to Land a Guest Post Without Fail: 21 Secret Tips

Rule 5: Go to where your target audience hangs out

As bloggers and people of the internet we often forget about all of the face-to-face connections that can provide us with valuable links from relative or absolute authority site publishers.

For example, travel to conferences and hook up with some of the people you want to influence and convince to link to your site. Don’t be a pest to these people, but hang out, be cool to them, and then leave them alone for the rest of the events. You then need to go to the after-event event at the bar. This is where you can make things happen by simply buying them a drink or two.

If you really want to take it to another level, offer to take them out for dinner and pick up the check. During that dinner suggest they link to you in some purposeful way…perhaps you offer to create an infographics or a beginner’s guide.

But even if you don’t get some agreement like that you can say as you grab the check, “No, let me get this. You give me a link or something.”

That way the person thinks, “A $ 50 dinner for a link? You got it.”

Rule 6: Fill gaps in content

As I mentioned above, when you are talking to content publishers, ask them what content they are missing…and offer to create it for them. It could be a video interview of Guy Kawaski or a periodic table of the fundamentals of link building. It could be an idea they’ve had for an ebook.

Whatever it is, offer to create it for them.

Once you create the content you will get the credit as a link back to your site. Make sure you offer content that you can create professionally and will attract people who are in your target audience. Creating a weight-loss calculator for a site when you are in real estate will drive traffic to your site…but it will be the wrong traffic. You might as well done nothing.

Rule 7: Contact big media at the right time

When you are trying to attract the attention of big media sites like CNN or The Economist, knowing when they publish their content is important.

For those sites who are less tied to a content schedule, like a Drudge Report, you will not need to know when they publish their links because they do it pretty much as the story breaks.

Still, having some kind of bead on when that time is will improve your chances. Here’s a guideline to follow:

• For many absolute authorities like the one I mentioned above, you can be certain that they will plan Monday’s content on Sunday.
• Around 6:30 am to 9:30 am, the media staff will put together a list of their top 15 stories for the day. This is the news list. Contacting them during this time is more likely to influence their decision even more than if you called or emailed them the day before.
• The next step for the media staff is to present the completed list of news stories to a team who will then decide which stories will get front page billing. This usually happens around 9:30 am to noon. This is your last chance to send anything. Do it now, because unless you have something spectacular, sending anything over after 1 pm will end up in the trash.

And even if you do get coverage…it won’t be a lot and it probably won’t be a link. Late content entries are typically reduced to the show that doesn’t impact SEO at all.

8. Approach government or education sites

A sure sign of an authority site is a .edu or .gov. This could be a link from a college like Harvard or Stanford or a link from the White House or Usability.gov. Getting those links are not always easy.

One example is to look for ways you can register accounts with these institutions. For example, Harvard has The Harvard H20 Playlist Project. It’s simply a series of links to books, articles or content that hopes to spark content.

Simply create a playlist and add a link to a useful post inside your site.

Creating meaningful, researched content or break an interesting story and these sites might naturally attract these sites might link to you. Examples of content that you could write that might actually grab their attention include:

• Write a solid, thorough review about one of their programs, pulling in information from historical data sets, current events and future predictions. This will likely catch their eye.
• Sponsor a student event. This will not cost very much.
• Volunteer to be a guest speaker for graduates.
• Approach their business school and offer to be a case study.

The kind of content you could create that would attract a government link could be:

• Create a community page/sub-domain on your site that supports some club or event in your city.
• Create content that supports some sort of charitable cause.
• Put on an event. Not only the .gov sites will approach you, but the local press will do so as well.
• Run for an office in your community. The commitment is usually low, so it’s not like you will be consumed with it.

In some cases you will just have to approach these institutions. When you do, you are more likely to get an answer however, and a positive one at that, if you inspect their site, identify the content gaps and then offer to fill them.

Again, it’s going to be important that you have something to show that you can pull off the content professionally, so don’t try this tactic until you have a good catalog of posts in your archives.

9. Buy links without penalty

It’s no secret that buying links violates Google’s policy and the penalty can be very stiff. So you may be wonder why I’m suggesting you buy links.

There are ways to buy links that will not be a violation of Google’s policy. Here are two:

• Donate to a charity – Depending on how much you donate, some organizations will display you name and donation amount on their sites.
• Offer to pay influential bloggers to post on your site – The content is simple. Give an authoritative blogger some kind of incentive like cash to write a post you can post on your site. In all likelihood they’ll link to it once it’s published.
• Fund research – Sometimes when you fund research projects people will link back to your website to show people who provided them with the funding. It’s their way of saying “thanks” and showing appreciation.

As you can see these examples are based on an exchange of value between two people and their websites that can relate to the relevancy of content…so it’s an ethical way of buying links.

Rule 10: Know the difference between a good and a bad site

Finally, one of the most fundamental rules to link building is knowing the difference between a good website and a bad one. This might sound obvious but it’s sometimes easy to get tricked into asking a site that looks like an authority but is in reality spammy.

What are the elements that determine if a website is a bad one? Here are five ways:

• Negative PPC – If you come across a site that has SEO links based on pills, casinos or porn, then it’s not a good site to get a link from.
• Link overload – Also avoid sites that have a high link-to-content ratio. Anything above 20% links to 80% content is probably too high.
• Keyword stuffing – Some sites that rank high in search engines will be notorious for keyword stuff. You’re first clue is the title description. If it looks like someone treated it like a keyword meta tag, they are probably employing spam techniques elsewhere, too. Perhaps it’s in the footer, behind images or in the source code.:
• Ad overload – These sites will be like a sore thumb when it comes to the number of ads they have. They’ll have ads down both sidebars, above the header and multiple times throughout the content.
• Poor content – Another clue this is not a great site is the low content-to-ad ratio. This one can be tricky because even absolute authority sites can push the limits when it comes to displaying ads. Look at Marketing Pilgrim, for example:

• Poor design – Does the site look like they used a free theme? Are the fonts irregular in size or shape? These are usually signs that someone has not spent anyone on the site…which is a signal they could be spammers.

Conclusion

Trust me when I say that you will not be wasting your time if you invest it in attracting authority links to your website or blog. Remember: nearly half of what determines the rank of your site is based upon the types of links driving to your site. Hopefully this guide has given you the tips and the tools necessary to help you succeed.

About the author: Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Tags: Attracting, Authority, Golden, Links, Rules

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Tags: Cowbell, facebook, more, Need, Pages

When you say the name Bruce Clay and you are someone who reads this blog, you know who I am talking about…

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Tags: Bruce, Clay, Down, Industry, Lets

Facebook’s 2011 advertising revenues were $ 3.1 billion, up 69 percent from the year before, according to the Menlo Park, CA-based firm’s S-1 filing today for its initial public offering.

Search Engine Watch

Tags: 2011, facebook, Increased, Revenue, Show

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

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Tags: 2012, Daily, February, Forum, Recap, Search

I saw these ideas in an article by Neil Patel that appeared on Search Engine Journal. He goes into great detail explaining why you should use these techniques and what you can gain from them. If anything I tell you here piques your curiosity, I suggest you check out that piece. We’ll start with a ranking factor that’s near and dear to every writer’s heart: authorship markup. Google has been supporting authorship markup since the middle of last year. Even today, not everyone uses it, though you’ll find it on most of the major publishing websites. If you run a site with authored content, you’ll…
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Tags: Factors, Google, Overlooked, Ranking

This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille talk about buying goofy stuff on Fiverr, a controversial ad promoting the return of Mad Med, Super Bowl commercials, and the increasing talk about Pinterest.

They also talked about the Meet Market selling out for Affiliate Summit Central 2012, affiliate nexus tax news, meetups, and how to get a free booth at Affiliate Summit East 2012.

Show Links

• Affiliate Summit Feeds Homeless Cats
• Squeezebox Hero Sez Go to Affiliate Summit Central 2012
• New Mad Men Poster Sparks 9/11 Controversy: Is the Ad Insensitive?
• The Bark Side: 2012 Volkswagen Game Day Commercial Teaser
• Official 2012 Honda CR-V Game Day Commercial – “Matthew’s Day Off” Extended Version
• Pinterest Becomes Top Traffic Driver for Retailers
• Meet Market is Sold Out for Affiliate Summit Central 2012
• Affiliate Nexus Tax on Hold Until September in Pennsylvania
• Any Merchants Want Free Tradeshow Space at Affiliate Summit East 2012?
• Highlights from Affiliate Summit West 2012
• Want to Contribute to Issue 18 of FeedFront Magazine?
• Affiliate Summit Meetups
• Examples of Direct Mail to Recruit Affiliates
• rapportive
• Internet Marketing Party

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

Affiliate Marketing Blog

Tags: Affiliate, Booths, Bowl, Commercials, Fiverr, Free, Mania, Summit, Super

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

If you're reading this blog, congratulations! You are a customer of SEOmoz. I've probably personally spoken to at least a few of you, and provided help and support to many more of you. Have you ever wondered how SEOmoz supports 15,000 PRO members and over 250,000 free members and blog readers? After all, Roger can't personally answer every email we receive here. He's not Santa Claus! Instead, the six mozzers that make up the Help Team answer all of the emails, phone calls, and chat requests we get every day. I want to tell you a little bit more about them and give you a look at the way we've built the SEOmoz support channels to meet our overall goal: to provide the best customer service on the planet. It's a hard goal to reach, but I can't think of any more worthwhile endeavor.

The Help Teamsters

Crissy Hall

Crissy is old school! She came to SEOmoz in the spring of 2010. Back then, the Help Team was just Sarah Bird (our COO) and Crissy, and I joined soon after. She loves the fact that she’s been able to watch our team and SEOmoz grow since she started. Things are always changing with our site and tools, and as she says, it keeps us on our toes! Her favorite part of working at SEOmoz is the balance between fun and productivity that makes our team and company such an amazing place to work. Crissy spends her time helping users with their tool and billing questions, planning kick-ass Help Team outings (we made terrariums together last month), and helping the Marketing & Ops teams keep track of our weekly membership reporting.

When she’s not in the office, Crissy likes to take her son Sam on adventures around Seattle. She likes to sew up a storm, particularly to make clothes for her toddler (instant gratification, according to her). In the "warmer" Seattle months she rides her bicycle, named "Tom Selleck," to work and back.

Megan Singley

Megan's been a help teamster for a little over a year now and loves connecting with our users. With several years of experience in customer service, she really strives to make every interaction with SEOmoz users a positive one. Besides responding to emails, calls, and chats, Megan plans and organizes our weekly software demos and investigates billing issues to keep any possible fraudsters at bay. She's also been known to do some writing, whether it be on the SEOmoz blog or in product messages throughout the site.

When not at the MozPlex, Megan likes to watch The Daily Show and Battlestar Galactica with her cat, Lily, and her awesomely-cool-fun-amazing neighbor across the hall, me! (Those are her words of course.) She also enjoys reading anything she can get her hands on (lately, it's been The Hunger Games series) and even started a library for the office. On weekends, she hangs out with friends (including lots of fellow Mozzers), goes dancing to anything from funk & soul to 90's hip hop, and cooks as much as possible.

Kenny Martin

Kenny joined up last year and is one of our few Washington natives! He grew up in a small, sleepy Northwestern town, thus is afraid of the sun. He compensates for a lack of natural energy sources by drinking copious amounts of black coffee. Kenny spends most of his time pursuing the TAGFEE dream by diagnosing tough technical issues, getting his hands dirty with a little web design, and filming each week's Whiteboard Friday.

He never wanders off too far away from his MacBook and for this reason alone his girlfriend mistakenly thinks he loves it more than her. It's probably because most of his spare time is spent designing websites or leaning about some fantastic new technology on the internet. He also loves the Daily Show, puppies, pizza, and tacos.

Nick Sayers

Nick joined our team in September last year and got up to speed lickety-split! Like the rest of our team mates, he answers customer emails, phone calls, and live chat questions. Nick has also spear-headed our new help documentation project that gives customers the resources learn anything about SEOmoz's tool set. This effort makes our company more scalable by answering customers' questions before they call, write, or chat with us, which gives them more instant gratification, as well. Needless to say, he spends a lot of his time creating screencasts and typing up FAQs. Nick has a passion for educating and helping others, so is constantly looking for new resources to show SEOmoz's customers.

Nick enjoys film, video games, reading, and cooking. He is an avid reader of anything from Eastern Philosophy to some of the nerdiest sci-fi/fantasy novels ever written. When not at work, Nick is usually spending time with his wife and partner in crime, Becky. On most nights, they cook new recipes together, play an unhealthy amount of Left 4 Dead 2 or Skyrim, and watch movies. On the weekends, Nick and Becky explore Washington and go to retro theaters. Nick is also involved in independent film-making and has produced, written, and directed a feature film and many shorts. On the sci-fi geek front, Nick has a huge collection of memorabilia from the Alien(s) films. He also has a cat named Ash after Bruce Campbell's character in the Evil Dead series. Of course, this means Nick calls her Evil Ash when she is bad.

Chiaryn Miranda

Chiaryn is the newest edition to the team, having been here for about two months. Don't let that fool you though: she's caught up real quick-like! She's been doing customer service for a long time and is working on learning new things about SEO every day. What better place to learn, eh?

When she's not in the office, she likes to make art and take photographs. She's been working on a sketchbook that will be going on a national tour. She also likes to take trips around the beautiful Seattle waterfront with her camera. When she can, she tries to take candid portraits. Check out some of her artwork on her Art House Co-Op page. She's also an avid movie fan, with a particular love of horror movies, and reads as much as possible. In her words, she'll gobble up pretty much any nonfiction book you put in front of her. That's why we call her Turkey Miranda! Just kidding – that's not why we call her that.

Aaron Wheeler

If you've made it this far, you've probably figured out that this is me! I started at SEOmoz in the summer of 2010 and am loving every minute of being here. A couple months ago I became the manager of the Help Team, which means I do what I can to support the lovely members of our team, and provide our customers with the best service on the planet. It's a tough goal – we have very discerning customers – but a goal I think we can eventually fulfill. Some background: I studied sociology and cognitive science at UC San Diego, but starting doing SEO after graduating. Turns out that ranking for attorneys in San Diego is tough work! I left San Diego early 2010 for Seattle, and eventually found my way at SEOmoz.

Besides working at a place I love, I enjoy reading (currently Steve Jobs), watching great shows (currently my third run of Deadwood), and seeing my favorite bands in Seattle's historical music venues (this month: Junip, Nada Surf, and The Asteroids Galaxy Tour). I also enjoy trying out vegan recipes with my girlfriend, Holly Haymaker, who has the coolest name in the world and a whimsical interactive e-cards site, to boot!

What Do We Do?

You know how, sometimes, you have a question about our site and tools? Or about your account or payment? We're the people you call, email, live chat, and post to our help forums for. Unlike huge companies with call centers and many tiers of support and different people doing phones and chats, though, everyone on our team does everything. It's a great way to keep everyone fully informed about site issues and keep our support fresh and agile. That's not all we do, though! Let me show you all of the ways we keep our customers happy:

Email: Using a Robust Ticketing System

When you send an email to help@seomoz.org, it gets forwarded to our ticketing system. We use ZenDesk, the same help desk software used by companies like Groupon and Box.com. ZenDesk allows us to manage customer emails, assign them to specific people, and easily share them with engineering and product so we can get answers to questions quickly! This is important because we receive over 2,000 emails a month: way too many to respond to from a single email address effectively.

How Does It Work?

When we receive an email, the sender gets an email back with a ticket number. As you see, it gets added to our queue of tickets to reply to. We try to answer 80% of tickets within 8 hours, but if it's a situation where someone has a billing problem or can't access their account (lost password, etc.), we try to answer even faster than that. Our goal is for each member of the Help Team to answer 20 tickets per day. If we don't have the knowledge to answer a question, we'll send the ticket to our engineers and product managers to get an answer. If it's a bug, we let the customer know and open a bug fix with our Triage team. They assign the bug to an engineer, who fixes it and lets them know. Triage sends it back to us when it's fixed, and we email the customer and close the ticket.

When we close a ticket, we send a one-question survey through SurveyMonkey asking how happy we made a customer with our customer service. We try to make 90% of our customers happy, and 30% of our customers delighted. Sometimes, though, we fail to satisfy a customer. When this happens, we ask for the customer's email address and ticket number so we can get in touch and make it right. I've found that when a customer has had a bad experience, reaching out to them to make it right almost always turns the situation around.

Phones: Not a Phone Bank

We get a relatively small amount of calls at SEOmoz: about 100 to 150 a week. Makes sense, as most SEOs do their research online. =) We don't have a sales team and don't do phone marketing, so the only employees that really have phones here are in Operations or the Help Team. We get a lot of calls from potential customers asking about what we do, though we do get a few from PRO members, too. Here's a chart with our phone stats for last week:

How Does it Work?

When a person calls in to SEOmoz, they usually start out talking to Hillari, our fantastic office manager. She makes sure they're not a spambot and, when they're a lovely customer, transfers them to the Help Team pool. The first available person picks it up and starts helping! Pretty straightforward process, as you telephone users know. After the call is over, we try to create a ticket and follow up with the customer to make sure they had all their questions answered. If it's an SEO question, we refer them to the Q&A or to our list of recommended SEO consultants.

Live Chat: What You Need, When You Need It

When potential customers are browsing our software sales pages, they often have questions they want answered now. Same thing goes for existing customers with questions about a payment or their account status: these are the kinds of questions people want to know the answers to quickly. Live Chat comes to the rescue! Instead of requiring a customer to call or send in an email, we usually keep someone logged into Live Chat throughout the day so customers can get help immediately. This leads to happier customers and cuts down on our ticket and phone levels. We use the awesome chat widget SnapEngage, and installed it to a few choice pages.

How Does it Work?

Kenny coordinated with SnapEngage to create a custom view of the widget. When you click "Chat Now," it pops up a dialog box that displays three FAQs, and has a field for the email address of the customer and the question they have. When they've typed those in, all they have to do is click "Message" to open a ticket, or "Live Chat" to start talking! Interesting point: we didn't always have those three FAQs. Adding them reduced chats about these topics about 90%. Yay for preemptive answers!

After we finish chatting with a customer, the chat transcript is automatically added to ZenDesk as a ticket, where we can save it for future review and for long-term tracking. We can also follow up with a customer there. If we're offline, or if a customer chooses the "Message" option instead of the "Live Chat" option, it creates a ticket from the get-go instead.

We can also track the types of computers and browsers people are using when they chat with us, which helps us diagnose the issue faster and get an idea of what our average customer needing immediate support looks like. The chart to the left is a look at last month's chatters.

Forums & Documentation: Help More People More Quickly

We maintain both our customer service and API forums through the SEOmoz help desk. We've also started adding all of our tool documentation, videos, and walkthroughs here to make them all available in the same place. This makes our Help Desk a one-stop shop for looking at frequently asked questions, checking out known issues with the site or tools, and just generally getting more knowledgeable about how to use a PRO subscription to its fullest. It's also where we ask customers to submit feature requests.

How Does it Work?

When a customer has a question, they can go to our Help Desk and do a search for the answer, or browse existing questions and documentation. Many of the forums are straight-up questions and answers, but a lot of them are longer-form pages that are part of our documentation project. We want to document the bejewels out of our tools! Yes, there will always be questions from customers, but the more information you can put in their hands early on, the more happy they'll be, and the more scalable our service becomes.

One cool feature: the Feature Request Forum has a voting system so customers can vote on the features they want to see most. Our product team reviews this feedback to get an idea of what to prioritize and what to put further down the roadmap. It's a great way to get customers more involved in SEOmoz's future!

This, That & The Other: Events, Office Tours, Webinars, Demos, Cookies…

We do a bunch of other stuff to help our customers, and it's hard to get it all down in words! We give weekly software demos to help new customers get the most out of PRO,

represent at MozCations,

give tours of the MozPlex and help out at MozCon,

and bake plenty of cookies (you gotta help your fellow mozzers out, too!):

All in all, it's a wonderful life. SEOmoz has the best customers around, and there's no other place I'd rather be. I'd love to share more with you and hear your stories about great customer service, as well as get feedback on what you'd love to see more of in the customer service biznez. Please feel free to write me in the comments, shoot me an email, or tweet me at @aaron_wheeler. See you around the site!

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This is part one of three in a geeky Google Analytics version 5 series to help you get accustomed to the new Google Analytics and use the new neat reporting features to impress your clients and bosses.  In the next article, I will share my top 6 new features in Google Analytics version 5.  And [...]

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