A note from Sage:

I just want to quickly say that I don’t believe I’ve had the opportunity to meet Duncan before he pitched this idea to me. He wrote me a nice email that was clearly written to me (not a form letter). And he outlined the article he wanted to write.

All I had to do was say “Yes.” Which I did.

I liked the article he was proposing because it tied nicely into what I normally write about. Plus it meant that I didn’t have to write an article one day.

I wanted to tell you this because this is a great way to increase your exposure and get a few good links to your site in the meantime.

Good work, Duncan!

Here’s his article (He gives me some credit for this at the end. But the truth is he wrote it all… another good guest blogging technique.)

A lot of us have probably read Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz’s excellent Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization post. The subtitle of that blog post is ‘How do I build the Perfectly Optimized Page?’ and we thought it’d be interesting to drill down a little into this and examine how to write the perfectly optimized Guest Post, from an SEO point of view. Guest Posting, as you may or may not know, is an excellent, if somewhat time consuming way to build backlinks (and get some traffic) to your site. In this post we are going to assume that SEOMoz has covered the basics of the perfectly optimized Title, Meta Description, Alt attributes etc. so we’ll take a look at some guest post-specific issues, in Q&A form:

Q. Ideally, what should I write about in my guest post and where?

You should, ideally, write about a topic related to your website, on a blog that covers topics related to your website. So if your site sells antique door bells, ideally you should be writing about antique door bells, on a Blog that usually features content about door bells, doors or home décor. There is a slight boost to the Google juice your backlinks from a guest post will receive from a related-content page, but more importantly, you’ll get more traffic back to your site and more social shares. Remember that social shares (Facebook, Twitter etc.) help increase a page’s standing in Google’s eyes and the affect will become more and more important as time goes by. If nobody enjoys your post, nobody will share it or link to it.

Q. How many backlinks to my site(s) should I insert into my guest post?

Put the maximum you are allowed, but obviously avoid link stuffing, you want everything to look natural, both to appease the search engines and to get your post read and shared socially. It’s widely believed although never confirmed by Google that there are some small SEO benefits to having a backlink that’s in a sentence in the body of an article, rather than just as a random link in the signature of the blog post. So if you are offered the chance to insert a backlink in the body, take it.

Q. What anchor text should I use in the backlinks?

When your website gets written up on news sites and blogs, usually the link to your site will use your company/services’ name as anchor text. Thus you already have a high % of your backlinks using your company/service’s name and you don’t need any more. Therefore, you should use one of your target keywords as the backlink anchor text. You can see this in action at the bottom of this post where I, the guest author of this post, have inserted backlinks to my site, with the first links pointing to my homepage, with target keywords (online suggestion box) as the anchor text, not my company’s name.

Q. Should I point the backlinks in the guest post to the same page on my own site?

No, not to the same page. Unfortunately, I often see guest posts where the author makes the mistake of not making the 1^st backlink they insert link to their most important page, with the best possible anchor text. I’ve made the mistake myself too, so learn from it. Make sure your first backlink points to the page you want to receive the most link juice and never point to the same page with additional links, as these links will create barely any link juice.  Point the 2^nd backlink at a targeted landing page or noteworthy blog post that you hope to rank high for.

Other tips and tricks

• To add authority to your post you should add in links for reference. Nobody says these can’t be links to 1) a blogger you’d like to reward with a link and then email them later pointing out that you gave them a friendly link – they might return the favor later; or 2) to a page where there’s a link to one of your sites on it – you’ll boost that links value.
• Link to another post on the blog that you are posting on, Blog webmasters love that.

This post was co-written by Sage and Duncan Murtagh, co-founder of Vetter, an Online Suggestion Box service, that can help companies find cost-savings ideas and navigate the fuzzy front end.

I love Netflix.

The strange happenings of 2011 with them will probably go down in business history as one of the most bizarre turn of events ever to befall a wildly successful company.

But whatever. Netflix is better than anything else out there. I just watched two episodes of “Breaking Bad” last night on my Android phone in bed through Netflix. Which leads me to my point.

If you do a search in Google for ‘Breaking Bad’ you get something like this:

Netflix is nowhere to be found.

They finally show up in the middle of the second page of listings with this result:

http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/Breaking-Bad/70143836

It’s no wonder they don’t rank well. It’s a terrible page.

It’s nowhere near the same ballpark as what IMDb offers:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903747/

IMDb has a trailer you can watch. You can add it to a Watchlist. There are 112 user reviews, 59 critic reviews. And of course you can share it on Facebook and Twitter. It just goes on and on.

That Netflix page is embarrassing.

Once you log in to Netflix the page gets a little better. It then looks like this:

There is a little more information about the movie. And they then let you see the reviews of people who have watched the show.

First, this is annoying.

I often want to post to Facebook or Twitter my thoughts on something I’ve just watched on Netflix. Even if I’m watching the movie on my Blu-ray player that has Netflix installed, I would like to go to Netflix on my phone, find what I’m watching and send out a tweet or something.

Second, this is concerning.

With the insane mistakes that were made at this company over the last year, they have to show that they are the cutting edge company we all believe they are. In fact, they now have to be even better than we once thought they were because we’re now looking at them suspiciously. (Like I’m doing in this post.)

We all now know the search engines are really into using social signals as part of their algorithm.

Not using social sharing is not only way behind the times (especially for a movie company) from a user experience, it is also very likely negatively impacting their search ranking.

Here are my recommendations:

1. Open up all your content. Put every single word of content on the front of your site… reviews, comments and all. It would seem to me that if a person is not logged in and they see a button that says “Play Season 1″, they should be able to click on that. If they click on it this seems like a great time to convince someone to try Netflix. Let your “Add” and “Play” buttons be sales people for you.
2. You need a social sharing strategy yesterday. This is just crazy. Twitter, Facebook and Google+ on every single page. I would classify this as a Web marketing emergency. If you were selling industrial training videos I might not make a big deal out of it. But you are supposed to be the leaders in what is happening in video culture.
3. You need way more content on everything in your database. You need to be the IMDb of the future. Trailers, analysis, history, tie-ins.
4. You need to invent new ways for your customers to engage with you. I’m talking stuff that has never been done before. Have you been following the Battlefield 3 Battlelog private social media platform? You need something like that.

Look, I don’t want to be alarmist or anything about this. But I am a touch worried.

If you look at those search results I post above you will see that Amazon and Hulu are on the front page.

Hulu has reviews, discussions and sharing.

Amazon currently has 211 customer reviews for Breaking Bad. And of course they have social sharing.

You don’t have to lose this game. But your competitors are out for your blood. And right now your blood is everywhere. You are a wounded animal.

Please please please find that innovative, visionary place you came from. I love you guys. You can make this work.