Day 2 just wrapped, and holy bombshell revelations, Batman! No, seriously, I’m not even being sensationalist here. The some of the info that these lovely folks dropped on us today represents an enormous shift in how we will think about your site content’s role in ranking.

(If you haven’t read about Day 1 yet, click here to make sure you don’t miss out on any of the fun!)

First, though, a HUGE shout out to Jen Lopez, who retweeted yesterday’s post. WHBB’s analytics were awfully pretty today, and I even got called out at lunch. “Hey, weren’t you the one who…” Hah! Thanks, lady, you rock!

And second, a shout out to Rand Fishkin, who really needs no shout out from me at all, but I want to point out that the fact that he loves SEO, and I mean truly and completely loves it, pours out of him like sunshine from the sun. The joy he clearly feels as he bounces around the room, immersed in all of the SEO geekery, is so tangible it could be bottled and sold. That enthusiasm was so incredibly cool to watch. I love SEO as well, but I know I have tons yet to learn. I want to be Rand when I grow up. Well, kinda. You know what I mean.

Without further ado, here are the top insights from today’s sessions.

The first step of linkbuilding is NOT building links – it’s developing a game plan.

Should be a no brainer, but so many of us seem to just be told “do link building” and try to tackle it without any real sense of direction. What kinds of links? How do you find them? Put a plan in place before you begin.

Reporting, reporting, reporting.

If today had a theme, it was reports. Graphs, trends, APIs, a million ways to use Excel… slice and dice your data, learn what is and is not important, what you should and should not show a client, and what you do show them should be presented as simply as possible.

On that same note…

Stacked bar graphs are the new black.

SEO fashion guru Will Critchlow saws that pie charts are out. Banish them from your reporting repertoire! Even the cool 3-D pie charts! Pies should be eaten, not spewed from a color inkjet printer! (Mmm, pie…) Stacked bar graphs are cleaner and are better at showing ratios, proportions, and such.

Give your link building efforts the sales treatment.

Do you really think you’re going to get a link just because you asked? No wonder so much link building fails! Pick up the telephone. Introduce yourself, talk about your company, sell your link to the people from whom you want a link. Rob Ousbey notes that outreach is huge. Once they agree, make it stupid-easy for them to follow through. Spoon feed them the embed code. If you’re looking for an article from a journalist, stop just short of writing the article for them entirely.

Context can be more important than link building.

This was the showstopper. First, we were all massively confused by the flurry of data and incomprehensible charts and equations, but then the meaning of it all dawned on us and we all went absolutely crazy. Stunned! Rand, who was seeing it for the first time with the rest of us, was beside himself! Seriously, Ben Hendrickson dropped a BOMB on us and probably changed the way we all move forward from here on out. Basically, Google knows how to tease out keyword context. We’ve known this for awhile, and I believe it’s discussed in some depth in The Art of SEO, but I know I never truly appreciated the extent to which it gets it, and none of us ever guessed exactly how much of the algorithm depends on context. It turns out that topicality and relatedness is a massive, huge, colossal, giant part of the algorithm – something which Ben managed to prove after ten months of data research. SEOmoz just launched a new Labs tool that boils all of Ben’s insanely complicated calculus to a number, which, when compared to competitors, is actually actionable. The thing that made this so huge was that in nearly all cases, we can now predict who will outrank who based on content, and that the link profile played a much smaller role than we all previously thought. It’s incredible stuff, really, and I don’t think my interpretation is really doing it justice. To add a little more perspective, Rand said afterwards, “Remember 45 minutes ago when we all still believed that links were important?” It’s THAT big, y’all. This changes everything. Welcome to the next era in SEO, folks. Seriously. I know I say “seriously” too much, but seriously, I mean it.

Steal your competitors’ broken links.

Wil Reynolds’ tip about finding broken links on other sites and replacing them with your own resource seems anticlimactic after Ben’s revelation about context, but link building IS still important! Wil suggests fishing for broken links, especially interactive stuff like “BMI calculator” for our own bariatric clients, alerting the webmaster to the broken link, reminding them that Google doesn’t look so favorably on sites that are linking out to broken stuff, and offer your own resource up as a replacement. Sneaky sneaky!

And now the #mozinar is pretty much over. There’s an after party tonight, which I’m heading out to just as soon as I wrap up this post, and yes, Patti, I got a photo with Rand – halfway through writing this post, actually, when he just happened to end up hanging out three feet from the chair I’m currently parked in for post-writing purposes. I’m flying back to Denver tomorrow morning, sadly. I’d love to stay and continue the full-on geek-out with my fellow SEOs, but alas, duty calls.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 7:50 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.