The latest video from Matt Cutts talks about the value of SEO to Google.

The questioner asks:

"Why does Google support SEO specialists with advice? Google's business is to sell text ads..."?

Matt explains that Google sees SEO helping, rather than hindering, their business model long term.

How?

SEOs create - and encourage site-owners to create - the very sites that Google's technology demands i.e. context accessible by an automated crawler, largely text based, and clearly marked up.

By having sites that jive well with Google's technology, this lowers Google's costs, and helps make Google results more relevant in the eyes of the end user. The larger their index, the more chances Google has to answer the query. SEOs love creating crawlable content!

This means the end user keeps coming back, which in turn translates to Google's bottom line.

It's also a good idea to give webmasters something, else Google risks an more adversarial relationship, which again can cause Google problems.

So SEO is good for Google's business - the "good" type of SEO, as defined by Google, of course.

Win-Win

Matt, as always, is giving the side of the story Google wants you to hear.

His position sounds reasonable, generous, and inclusive, and it is - in many respects. But make no mistake - Google aren't there for webmasters. Google will do what is good for Google. If SEO was bad for Google, Google would not be reaching out to the SEO community, in much the same way they don't reach out to, say, the malware writer community. They just stamp it out.

Matt is a master of public relations. Webmasters can learn a lot from Matt in terms of how to handle their own public relations challenges.

Here are a few pointers, based on Matt Cutts approach:

Public Relations Is Relations With The Public

Matt doesn't talk from on high. He doesn't talk at his audience. He talks with them. He attends events where his audience congregate, and he encourages interaction and questions. This activity serves to build a personal relationship, which helps make his messages easier to convey and sell.

Look for ways in which you can go *to* your audience/customers. Where do they hang out? Address them on their own terms, and in their own environment. Regularly encourage questions, criticism and feedback. When it comes time to announce new products and services, your audience is likely to be more receptive than if your communications are anonymous and sporadic.

Ok, this might be all very well for Matt Cutts. Everyone pays attention to Google, because Google are important. However, no matter how big or small your audience, you still must find a way to relate to them.

These days, it's not so much what people say, it's often who is saying it. Modern media is driven by personalities. The content of the message is seldom good enough to stick, unless it is truly remarkable.

People listen to Matt in ways they don't listen to an anonymous Google press release because of the personal relationship he has worked hard to establish. This works just as well for small businesses. In fact, this is one of the big advantages of a small business - the personal touch. Google is a big company, but they work hard to appear like a small one, at least in terms of their personal relations approach with webmasters.

Matt also gets out in front of issues. If there's something going on in the web community relating to his area, he's almost certainly quick to comment on it. By doing so, he can control and frame the conversation in terms that suit Google. If there are industry issues that relate to your work or company, use them as an opportunity to grab the spotlight. Try to become the media go-to person in your local community for issues by building relationships with media and news outlets.

PR consultants aren't quite as necessary as they used to be. They aren't redundant, but the most important lesson to learn from Matt Cutts is that PR is something you need to embody. It's not just a function that you slap on, or hire in, when it suits, and still be as effective. Make PR flow through all you do.

Matt's greatest skill is not making it look like PR at all.

I recently came across an interesting stream of search traffic.

The demographic using this search stream was one I had no direct experience of previously. I was amazed at the high level of site interaction this group engaged in. It was related to the wedding of two people I'd never previously heard of - Ti & Tiny. From the names of the people who responded, I determined the traffic was mostly African-American. Pretty obvious given the topic, right.

What was interesting was this group engaged and responded at a much higher level than other groups I was targeting on similar campaigns. It was a reminder of the different ways some demographics choose to participate online, especially when the marketing pitch reflects them.

Target Marketing

Target marketing, otherwise known as market segmentation, is marketing focusing on specific groups of people.

Marketers use demographic profiles to break down groups into a series of traits, such as gender, race, age, income, disabilities, mobility, educational attainment, home ownership, employment status, and location. This helps marketers determine the correct pitch, language and approach to use when trying to appeal to a given audience.

When we use search keyword lists, it's often easy to lump people who use the same keywords together. However, if we add demographic information into the mix, our marketing can become more focused, which can translate to higher conversions, and higher returns.

For example, according to a recent demographic study, the African-American market makes up 13 percent of the U.S. population and spends more than $600 billion every year. African-American buying power is expected to reach $1 trillion this year. 26 percent of African-American households had incomes of $50,000 per year. 64 percent of African Americans—versus 51 percent of Caucasians—spend more on products they perceive as being “the best”. That last piece of information is very useful if you were designing a page to appeal directly to this market.

How about the gay market. This market tends to be affluent. The average annual income for a gay household is $61,000, 20.4 percent higher than in a heterosexual household. This group tends to have a high level of education. Some 83 percent of gays and lesbians have either attended or graduated from college. This market is also brand-loyal. Approximately 89 percent of gays and lesbians are brand-affiliated and are highly likely to seek out brands that advertise to them - i.e. advertising that depicts gay lifestyles and models, for example.

How about women. Women make up 51 percent of the US population and influence at least 80 percent of all spending on consumer goods in the United States. By 2010, women are expected to control $1 trillion, or approximately 60 percent of the nation’s wealth. Retail stores are designed around women, and it would be interesting to note how women and men may respond differently to the online retail equivalent.

General marketing one-size-fits-all messages may miss such groups. How much advertising language is geared towards white, middle class family groups, for example? That's fine if a white, middle class family group is the target market, but it pays to be aware of groups we may be missing.

Relevance

Relevance is more than matching a search keyword to page topic.

"Know they customer" and reflect your audience in your site design, language and pitch. Do your pages reflect your world view, or the world view of your customers? Is there a difference? Can you use keyword terms to identify and segment specific demographic groups? Are there keywords that women are more likely to use than men? Keywords that Hispanics are more likely to use than African Americans? Think about the ways different groups in our society use language.

Your website should hold up a mirror to your target audience, using their language, depicting their lifestyles, and speaking directly to their wants and needs.

Research

In my Ti & Tiny example, the demographic was pretty obvious. It was easy to picture the fanbase, and adjust the language, and pitch, accordingly.

For more in-depth demographic information, you could look at census data, available at the US census beureau, or your regional equivalent. Check out the Country and City databook.

Using keyword research tools, look for broad keyword associations to get a feel for language use and associated areas to target.

The Inside Facebook Blog often provides interesting snippets of demographic data about Facebook usage and trends, which will likely be reflected in the wider online community.

Professional data mining companies, such as Nielsen, are great sources, if you have the budget. And if you want to dig even deeper, check out the VALS survey.

Forbes AdVoice, a new Forbes editorial strategy that does away with the traditional barriers between advertising and editorial content:

The pitch is this: We'll sell you a blog, and your content will live alongside that of Forbes' journalists and bloggers. This isn't the "sponsored post" of yore; rather, it is giving advocacy groups or corporations such as Ford or Pfizer the same voice and same distribution tools as Forbes staffers, not to mention the Forbes brand.

"In this case the marketer or advertiser is part of the Forbes environment, the news environment," Mr. DVorkin said.

If that stuff has legs & spreads across most the major media sites then Google's "authority first" relevancy algorithm strategy is dead.

Google has always considered paid links bad (as Forbes certainly knows) but as paid content spreads how will Google fight it? And if that content contains links then is it still a paid link? Will Google once more end up purging the payola?

The other question is ... when media has tons of press releases alongside the articles, what value add is there for consumers to pay attention to the media? And if the media teaches advertisers to create their own media, won't many of those advertisers do so on their own websites & cut the mainstream media out of the loop?

About a year ago my wife and I started to notice Google's increasingly aggressive push into demoting the organic results and extending AdWords ads. Based in large part on that we decided to partner with Geordie Carswell to create a sister site to SEO Book focused on paid search & contextual advertising - PPC Blog. I have been meaning to interview him for a while & just finally got around to it.

How did you get into pay per click marketing?

I started with Adwords around five years ago, independently marketing software apps and other consumer technology products. From there I continued running my own campaigns while blogging and doing one-on-one Adwords coaching in addition to other marketing ventures.

How has PPC changed since you got into the field?

When I started there were very few big brands doing PPC in a significant way and, at least in the niches I was working in, affiliates were dominating. That of course has flipped upside down in the last 12 months with brands dominating and affiliates being flushed out the bottom of the system.

I feel Google's implementation of various forms of Quality Score into the Adwords platform has been the highest impact spate of changes in terms of direct effect on advertiser performance.

On the platform options side, the growth of Facebook Ads as a PPC channel has also been hugely significant, notwithstanding the merger of Yahoo and Microsoft on paid search.

On organic search I feel that if you work on a big brand, SEO is mostly about information architecture & getting buy off from key players in your company. Whereas if you run thin affiliate sites you have to be quite clever with your link building strategies to build up enough authority to compete. In the same way I think PPC is likely much harder as an affiliate than as a merchant. Would you agree with that?

Well, to be perfectly candid, a pure-play affiliate effort on Adwords in particular is becoming nearly impossible over the long term as Google shows affiliates the door. There's still some room on Microsoft adCenter/Yahoo and Facebook, but the editorial squeeze is on there as well.

The affiliate play of the future would need to involve a recognizable, highly-branded site that "people have heard of" vs. one-off mini or article sites etc...

A lot of affiliate stuff seems to race toward 0 margins. I had one killer offer I was buying traffic for a couple years ago & I was paying about 25 cents a click for traffic that was worth about $6 a click. Within about 3 days someone stole my ad copy word for word and then when I raise my bid to $6 my ad still wouldn't show. How can an affiliate fight the trend toward lower margins?

That's tough. Highly successful affiliates by nature tend to be very good at finding a small sliver of inefficiency in a system and filling that gap. That tends to inevitably be a 'point-in-time' win that ends up competitively saturated.

Often, a lateral move running the same type of campaign on alternate PPC platform can work, but let's face it: competition eventually finds its way there as well, and there are only so many PPC platforms to run on. I strongly believe the best defense against the endless push towards lower margins is to test more than the other guy. Competition will always be there, but he who tests more and thereby extracts more margin wins in the long run.

In terms of leading people astray, how often would you say major search engines give self-serving advice that harms advertisers?

One of the biggest things we still see Google doing is opting advertisers into the Google Display Network (previously known as the content network) by default when creating new campaigns. I'm sure Google needs ways to generate interest in the Display Network, but they know full well that blending search and content campaigns together is a recipe for disaster and I'd like to see them step up and stop that.

Additionally, offers from reps to 'optimize' your campaigns (while well intentioned) have lead to a lot of unnecessarily broad campaign expansions that can truly destroy the profitability of an already-successful campaign.

Part of the problem comes from advertisers trusting Google a bit too much: Google is there to extract as much revenue as they can from their keyword inventory without permanently scaring away advertisers with unmanageable costs. An advertisers' job is to generate as much net profit from Adwords as possible. Those two goals are at odds by nature, so discernment is vital when evaluating why Google is offering something or making an 'improvement' to the system.

Google offers a number of automated optimization tools for advertisers. When does it make sense to use them? Who should avoid using them?

Most of the automation solutions offered by Google like Conversion Optimizer or Automatic Bidding really won't have much benefit to smaller advertisers who don't typically have enough paid click traffic to measure the results of using these offerings. That said, if you have a decent amount of traffic you can save considerable time using their optimization tools, particularly when fishing for new traffic and/or placements.

One area I would suggest some caution on however is the "New Keyword Opportunities" feature that shows up at the top of your campaigns interface. This is an awesome tool for Google to snag new bidders on additional keyword inventory in their system, but it can cost you a pretty penny if you just accept and add whatever keywords they happen to "recommend" for you. You really need to be careful with these and look at the expected avg. CPC amounts to see if you can afford to add what's being suggested. Burning through your budget unnecessarily on overpriced or untargeted keywords isn't fun.

You buy traffic on most the major platforms. What business models do you feel work best with each of the major platforms - say Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, and Facebook ads?

I think local, education, online dating, and mobile represent some of the best fit for Facebook. Other niches can be genuinely daunting uphill push on Facebook. With Yahoo and Microsoft now consolidated into the Adcenter ad platform, managing alternate campaigns on another network is now much easier and can't be ignored given the combined search marketshare Microsoft and Yahoo have put together. There's really no excuses for not running your campaigns on both Adwords and Adcenter in tandem.

Some people have been hyping Facebook as the next Google. Is it? Why or why not?

Well, I think it's more accurate to compare Facebook Ads to Google's Display Network. They're both considered contextual advertising as Facebook search hasn't really turned out to be a particularly lucrative opportunity yet.

When comparing Facebook Ads to the Google Display Network, I think the key advantage that Google has with Adsense is the topical blend. The blending of content ads via Adsense has gotten so good that in some cases even ad professionals have to look closely to determine if a link or placement is an ad or original content. Facebook doesn't really have this advantage, pretty much every Facebook user knows that those are ads in the right siderail, and unless the image in the ad is incredibly compelling, it's just going to be ignored. As Facebook builds out their contextual ad empire, it'll be interesting to see what options come up.

I don't think however that disgruntled Adwords advertisers looking over the fence at Facebook Ads will find instant success. It's a different beast from an ad server behavior perspective and it's also extremely competitive.

When you are working with smaller clients, what are some of the most common roadblocks they run into when they begin paid search advertising?

The learning curve is number one, closely followed by issues with account architecture and Google Quality Score. From what I've heard and read, the churn rate on new small business Adwords accounts is immense as people try it, fail, and then leave. Google has tried to fix this I think with the learning center resources and videos, but most new advertisers won't even get around to looking at those.

Part of the challenge is prepping clients for the fact that PPC is going to take real time and effort to be successful, and that time has to be budgeted and weighed against other demands. Obviously it's worth it in the long run for well-organized businesses who have optimized their websites for shoppers. Those who don't have a clear path to purchase or request additional info will find their PPC spend tends to go into a black hole.

When you are working with larger clients, what is the hardest part of paid search?

Many large companies have some sort of PPC campaigns running, but it's not a core marketing focus for them to the extent that it should be. There's almost a tendency to say "what we've got going is good enough" or "we're breaking even" and leave it at that. Some of the easiest ways for the marketing team to move the needle sales or leads-wise in a large organization is to exploit paid search to the fullest extent possible. Overpaying Google and accepting less-than-ideal sales performance from PPC is something too many large clients put up with.

This is a big reason we had such a great time building out the Adwords Tax Calculator on PPCblog. When you actually quantify what you're paying in overhead to straight to Google due to a number of completely fixable campaign tactics, it's really motivating.

You have been running PPC Blog's training program and community for close to 3 months now, and it has been getting strong reviews. What are some of the most important and interesting things you have learned from that experience?

It's been very interesting. I really felt prior to running PPCblog that there wasn't anywhere "safe" to discuss advanced tactics and observations about Adwords without Google either closely watching the discussion or directly hosting it. It's been great to share and compare real campaign data in a trusted environment like the one we have going there.

Another thing I've noticed is that the level of discussion and discourse is much higher when people are paying to participate. It weeds out a lot of noise and repetition. Additionally, I've also found that I'm using the custom tools we've developed for members far more often than I had originally thought I would, and that's been helping me save time while keeping up with the community and running campaigns.

How do you feel paid search and SEO tie into each other?

Personally I feel they're both essential 'legs on the stool' (email marketing I think follows closely thereafter). It always amazes me that SEOs will spend huge bucks buying links or doing biz dev deals to get traffic that's not 100% guaranteed to flow, but they won't spend a dime buying traffic directly with Adwords or Adcenter. When you see the amount of brand bidding that goes on with PPC, its a good reminder that if you're not buying even in the least of your brand's keywords, your competitors likely are. With organic results getting pushed farther and farther down the page each year, a two-pronged approach only makes sense.

---

Thanks Geordie. You can catch his latest paid search thoughts on PPC Blog & follow him on Twitter @geordiecarswell. There is a free 7-day PPC starter course here, and on the PPC training program he is currently offering a coupon for 25% off for new members.

Influence Finder is a new link analysis tool that aims to make link research more targeted and less time-consuming while producing better results.

Despite how SEO has evolved over the years one aspect remains crucial to the success of any SEO campaign, links. So just about any tool that claims to make the process faster, smarter, and better quality is worth taking a look at.

Starting a Project

Influence Finder is a web-based tool which has a clean interface and is pretty easy to use. When you log in the first thing you'll see is the project dashboard, where all your current projects are located.

The projects you see there are some templates they provide, however you are free to choose a custom project and name it whatever you'd like. The project options are:

• Understanding Your Brand - here they recommend you get an index of your own link profile
• Competitor Profiling - this is where they suggest you get the profiles of your competition
• Narrow Keyword Targets - this is the recommended report to identify sites that are ranking for a broader keyword associated with your targeted keyword (think "credit cards" if you are targeting "low interest credit cards". So you can get some potential competitor data here as well as additional linking opportunities from sites that link to these sites or these sites themselves.
• Vertical Media - here they suggest to target influential media sites related to your keyword. This is where you would search for blog and news sites related to your keyword. These sites can turn out to be potential link sources and you can also look at their backlinks to see which sites are linking at them for those core keywords, which can be potential targets for your as well.
• Interested Media - interested media would be sites or blogs which cover topics related to your topic but are not direct competitors. If you are targeting hybrid cars you can look up sites related to things like renewable energy or sites and blogs which cover environmental topics.
• Custom - a report you can name anything you want.

It's important to note that the report creation interface is exactly the same whether you choose Competitor Profiling, Vertical Media, or Custom. These initial report types are just there to give the user an idea of what they might want to cover in their research.

We ran through a report as if we were running a "Brand" report so you can see how the system works.

Brand Report

Let's say we work for Waste Management, a leading provider of trash removal and recycling services here in the US. So we selected the first project type in the image above and clicked "go to step 2".

The interface is simple to work with. You can do the following in this screen:

• Name your project (we named it Brand Report - Wm.Com). Again, you are free to name it whatever you'd like
• A box to the right gives you the ability to leave notes about the project
• The next field is where you'd add a URL for Influence Finder to index
• Once that is added it will appear in the gray highlighted area where you can select the domain links, links to the page (if you have a sub-page), or links to the sub-domain if you are dealing with a sub-domain. You can add as many URL's as you want but since this is our "Brand" report we are just adding ours
• The last options are whether you want to include or exclude expired links and no-follow links
• Once you are ready and the URL has been indexed just click "step 3".

Once you move on to step 3 you are presented with some more options. Here you can add keywords manually or via the anchor text they found when crawling the targeted URL's. They will look for occurrences of these keywords in the following places:

• Anchor text
• Page title
• Folder name
• Body copy
• Page names

You can choose whether they are brand or non-brand keywords. As of this writing actual anchor text is not available, however I have been told that this will be an enhancement in version 2.

So basically if you choose "trash removal" as a non-brand keyword and "recycling" as a non-brand keyword, then they will be grouped under the "non-brand" keyword data point in the results section.

The second place you can add them is via the keywords found during the initial crawl by Influence Finder's bots (over Majestic SEO's data). They are sorted by frequency.

When they are looking for these keywords they are looking based on phrase match and not exact match. The idea here is that you are looking for link opportunities around a keyword or phrase rather than for specific data about an exact match keyword. So if you have a site about auto insurance you'll get results that will show linking opportunities based on auto insurance, online auto insurance, dirt cheap auto insurance, and so on.

It is based on phrase match and I think the addition of the actual anchor text will be helpful in making this tool both a link opportunity research tool as well as a competitive research tool with respect to competitor backlink profiles.

When you are ready to begin the full index simply click "create index". Above the "create index" tab you can show more keywords from the initial crawl if you want. This can take anywhere from a hour to a few hours depending on the size of the backlink profile.

So here is the results pane for this report. There are 2 panes, the left pane which is for Link Sources and the right pane which are Page Level details related to the domain you highlight in Link Sources (we'll get to the numerous data points in just a moment):

Here is the right pane. When you highlight a source in the left column (Link Sources), the right pane (Page Level) contains the pages within that site that reference either the brand or non-brand keyword (note, these are sites that do and do not have links to the current domain which can be filtered as discussed later on in this review):

When you highlight a page you can see a screenshot and open it in a new tab, as shown above.

For the left-side pane, Link Sources, you have the following data points available:

• Max Authority - a scale of 1-15, being the highest, that measures the site's authority via PageRank, Alexa data, and link data from Majestic
• Blog - based on site data gathered by Influence Finder, this shows whether the site might be a blog or not
• Heartbeat - checks to see if the site or blog is publishing content on a regular basis, bigger publishers show up with no heartbeat and will be given their own category in the next update
• Traffic Rank - based on global Alexa Ranking
• Traffic Country - the country that drives the most traffic to the site per Alexa
• Non-Brand Keyword in Title - percentage of pages where the non-brand keyword appeared in the page title (on pages relating to the non-brand keyword)
• Brand Keyword in Title - percentage of pages where the brand keyword appeared in the page title (on pages relating to the brand keyword)
• Non-Brand Keyword in External Anchor Text - percentage of pages where the non-brand keyword appeared in an external link (on pages relating to the non-brand keyword)
• Brand Keyword in External Anchor Text - percentage of pages where the brand keyword appeared in an external link (on pages relating to the brand keyword)
• Commission Junction Network - checks to see if the site or page is an affiliate of Commission Junction (or any of the following networks)
• Trade Doubler Network
• AWin Network
• Affiliate Future Network
• DGM Network
• Web Gains Network
• Linkshare Affiliate Network

You have the same options within the Page Level area in the right pane. Both sets of options are available from the Change Filters -> Link Source or Page Level Filters options within the tool.

Customizing Your Results

The left pane (Link Sources) of the application is where your results are populated, where the right pane is domain or page specific information (Page Level) based upon what is highlighted on the left (more on that in a moment). The left side has the following options, as shown below:

• A dropdown for easy switching between projects
• The next drop down is where you can show domains which link to the chosen domain, or domains that do not currently link to the domain but are good linking prospects based on the brand and non-brand keywords



• A .CSV export option
• Change Filter options are where you can deeply customize the output of your data, this populates in the right. Covered in more detail below



• Custom Sorting options with lots more data points to choose from

They also have a flagging system, which is purely optional:

Flags are color coded, with the following colors available. Use them for whatever system you devise :) :

• Checkmark
• Black
• White
• Yellow
• Red
• Blue

Custom Sort Options

In addition to the data points mentioned earlier (Max Authority, Heartbeat, Affiliate relationships, etc) The custom sorting feature gives you these additional options which you can include in the dropdown referenced above, but in case you missed it here it is again :)

(click the more button to add additional sorting options)

The additional options include:

• Influence Index
• Relevance Index
• Achievability Index
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword in internal link anchor text
• Average Authority
• Inlinks Count
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword in H1 tag
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword in Body
• E-Commerce Site
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword in body, first 100 words
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword in heading
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword in folder name
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword in page name
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword as first word in H1
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword as first word in title
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword in root domain
• Brand keyword or Non-Brand keyword in subdomain
• Majestic ACRank of homepage
• Links to homepage
• Domains linking to homepage
• Unique IP's linking to homepage
• Percentage of direct links to page
• Percentage of redirected links to page
• Frequency of feed update

Clearly lots and lots of options here. Just one usage example could be that you wanted to see sites that are currently not linking to you, but talk about your brand on their site (in key areas like title tags). These could be good link prospects. First thing to do is change the link display option to "no target links found".

The next thing is to change the sorting options to have the Brand keyword in the H1 and the Body, these should be good link targets. They do not link to us, they have our brand keyword in the H1 and/or Body copy.

To show those columns you have to go to "Change Filters" as shown below, so they will show those columns in the Link Sources (Left Pane) if you click the checkboxes on the right as we did with Brand keyword in H1 and Brand keyword in Body:

And here you can see the new columns, noted with red dots:

We can see that Earthtimes.org appears to be a worth link prospect with a Max Authority of 12, possibly being a blog (guest post), has a strong heartbeat, and not only has pages with our brand name in an H1 tag but also has it within the body copy.

When we highlight a domain in the Link Sources area, the right pane populates the Page Level data like so:

What's great here is that now you have pages that are targeted to your content which (most) use your brand keyword in the H1 tag and Body copy. Remember too that there are many, many other filters available as mentioned above. This is just one example of what you can do. It certainly is a pretty targeted way of building links. Now, you know the following:

• You do not have a link from the domain
• They have pages specifically targeted to your brand
• The relative strength of the site
• How they are using brand and non-brand keywords

You have a whole host of other filters available as well, but this makes for a fairly targeted link prospect.

In order to get custom columns, like we did with Link Sources, you have to go into Advanced Page Filters on the right to select those custom columns (Brand keyword in H1 and Body in this example):

Change Filter Options

We have discussed some of these already as it is used in the normal flow of how you would use Influence Finder. There are an enormous amount of data points available to you within this tool and it's likely that you will not use all of them on every report you run.

The interface for this part of the tool looks like this:

You have 4 options here:

• Link Source Filters - for the default data points located in the left pane of the interface
• Page Level Filters - for the default data points that come with the information on the pages of the selected site, these results are in the right pane (Page Level)
• Advanced Link Source Filters - all the additional data points for your Link Sources
• Advanced Page Filters - the additional data points available for page level data

These are essential tools for slicing and dicing the data to suit your report needs (link research, competitive research, link prospecting, and so on).

How Does Influence Finder Compare?

Influence Finder has a lot of features. Chances are you have a link tool or two already. As more and more tools enter the online marketing space it's important to consider the overlap and unique features of the tool you are considering and the tool(s) you might already have.

Influence Finder, as we have outlined for you, has a seemingly endless array of filters you can use to target link prospects. The 3 bigger players in the link research and/or management space are typically thought to be:

• Majestic SEO
• Open Site Explorer
• Raven SEO Tools

When comparing tools in the same space it's important to make sure they are designed to do the same things, in this case Influence Finder is unique in its stated purpose. Influence Finder is much more about finding worthwhile link prospects in a very targeted manner.

These other tools are much more about pure backlink research (like Open Site Explorer and Majestic) or backlink management, tracking, and workflow (like Raven, which also has Majestic functionality baked into their research features).

Majestic SEO

Influence Finder runs off of Majestic's data. When you run a report in Influence Finder, their bots re-crawl the Majestic data to make it a bit more fresh and to customize it to your chosen parameters. The key points of differentiation on Majestic's side are

• Majestic provides strong historical data which can be very useful when doing competitive research
• Majestic's minimum analyzable backlinks are up to 1,000,000 (on their lowest plan). This illustrates Majestic's position as more of a pure link data tool whereas Influence Finder tends to be more of a link acquisition tool.
• Majestic does have some strong filtering capabilities which are great for analyzing a domain's backlinks. However, it not as strong in terms of finding link partners across the web which is, of course, due to the fact that these tools mostly serve 2 different purposes (remember, Influence Finder uses Majestic's data).

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a solid link research tool from SeoMoz. It doesn't quite have the size that Majestic does but it's certainly big enough to be a worthy link research tool. The UI is top notch and it is very easy to use. Some of the cool things you can do with Open Site Explorer:

• See linking domains with a variety of filtering options (followed, no-followed, 301's, etc)
• See top linked to pages on a domain, with domain link counts and http status codes
• Quickly see a targeted display of the external anchor text distribution for the domain
• A whole host of other link metrics like mozRank, mozTrust, percentage of internal/external and follow/no-follow links
• You can compare 2 URL's as well

So much like Majestic, Open Site Explorer is more of a link research tool/competitive analysis tool. Though, with either, you can certainly find worthwhile linking partners off of a competing site and you can look up sites of "influence" and check backlinks that way too.

Influence Finder's core benefits are finding linking partners which are relevant to your brand and non-brand keywords so they are naturally much stronger in this area than Open Site Explorer and Majestic. Conversely, Open Site Explorer and Majestic are much stronger in the area of competitive link research.

Raven SEO Tools

We recently reviewed Raven and Raven certainly sets the standard for link workflow, management, and reporting at the moment. Raven uses Majestic's data in their link research feature set.

Raven is kind of in the middle here. They have Majestic built in so they are part competitive research plus part link management plus part link building workflow.

While Influence Finder is planning on introducing reporting and workflow into an upcoming version, their current tool combined with Raven's link building and monitoring tools make for a powerful link building toolset. So with Raven:

• You get access to Majestic's data as a competitive link research tool
• Top notch reporting options
• Deep, time-saving link workflow management options
• Affordable pricing

With just about anything you buy, generally you'll get features you either don't need or are just a bit beyond what you need them for in terms of depth. The nice thing with Raven is you get access to a bunch of tools in one spot for a fair price.

Do they have all the features? Nope but do you really need every single option on every single tool? There's something to be said for managing most aspects of a campaign in one spot.

So if you take Influence Finder's unique core features and combine it with Raven for reporting, workflow, and research and/or with another link research tool like Open Site Explorer then you'll have a really strong set of tools.

The point is, none of these tools do everything the other does so it's a good idea to take a look at each of them and weight the features, benefits, and costs against what you "need" for your campaigns.

Workflow and Final Thoughts

Lots of data here, so we'll outline how it all ties together.

You can use this tool for many different purposes and they even give you some guides as to what you might want to use the reports for. I just want to stress that those reports are only exclusive of each other in naming only, the functionality of the tool after you select the report "type" is the same irrespective of which report you choose or if you just go with custom.

We talked about left pane and right pane a lot, here's a condensed screenshot of the interface:

• (Left pane) Link Sources are located in the left pane, these are domains (even if a subpage is listed, they will show the main domain) matching your initial search parameters
• (Right pane) Page Level Detail shows the pages associated with the selected domain and the data points you've chosen to show

The left pane also houses the Custom Sort data when selected while the right pane houses the Change Filters options as mentioned eariler.

So this was an example of a report on your domain for one core keyword and some brand related keywords. This is a pretty powerful tool and if they add the actual anchor text where a link exists as well as some stronger work flow (assignments, notes, etc) and reporting features then I think this will be a tool well worth a look for you or your company.

They did tell me the features I mentioned above will be a part of version 2 which they are working on as we speak. When that comes out, we will certainly take a look and post that new information as well as our thoughts. As it stands now this is a really comprehensive tool for link prospecting and link building.

You can find out more at InfluenceFinder.Com.