Well, at Linkdex we’ve been working behind the scenes on a brand new website. A place where you can curate, discuss and promote the best content from any industry.

So here it is! Without further ado we’re delighted to launch smartercontent.org into Beta:

What makes SmarterContent.org so special?

Because almost everyone in our industry is on Twitter (plus, that’s where so much great content is shared), we’ve integrated the social network very closely with our site. You can:

• Upvote a submission simply by re-tweeting it (this is triggered when you click an ‘up arrow’ on the site)
• Even better, you can publish content examples to the site by simply including the #smartercontent hashtag when you tweet a link! (see image below)
• You can also log into the site via Twitter to upload content case studies.

We think this is a really interesting way to easily share and promote the best content, whilst also providing a nicely presented, integrated website to showcase the best of the best.

  Submitting via the #smartercontent hashtag when using Twitter.

What makes content smarter?

OK content isn’t OK. If you really want your content to attract, educate, engage and convert visitors it needs to tick some of the following boxes:

How is this connected to Linkdex? Do I have to pay for anything?

smartercontent.org is separate from the Linkdex platform and it’s completely free – just login with your Twitter account.

We created this site because we believe in creating and sharing smarter content. We also recognize it can be hard to find inspiration when you need to create something amazing! So hopefully in the future you can search for content in your industry (e.g. “#automotive”) and find the newest or the all-time-greatest examples of content relevant to you.

What do you mean it’s in Beta?

Because we’ve just launched the site – and since there is so much cool functionality that comes with it – there are bound to be a few hiccups. Over the next week or two we’re going to be working really hard on making this perfect. In the meantime, if you see anything out of place please let us know. It’s a great chance to familiarize yourself with the site and get on the leaderboard before everyone else hears about it!

So try it out, send us feedback and don’t forget – when you’re about to tweet an example of great content, chuck the #smartercontent hashtag on the end and we’ll turn it into a submission on the site!

Great Speakers

Leading speakers who are working with some of the biggest brands in the world will be sharing their thoughts on how to create, publish, socialise, optimise and measure the impact of great content. Speakers include:

• Simon Penson – Zazzle Media
• Andrew Smith – Escherman
• Marcos Guerrero – Thomas Cook
• Mat Morrison – Starcom MediaVest
• Danny Denhard – VoucherCodes.co.uk
• Matt Roberts – Linkdex
• Jonathan Alderson – Twentysix Digital
• Phil MacKechnie – MoneySupermarket

Great Venue

It takes place at the Grange Holborn Hotel, the event will be followed by complementary drinks at the hotel’s Sky Bar (below) but, like our previous events, it is invitation only since tickets go so quickly! If you would to join the waiting list for a ticket please email us now!

So what’s Content 360 all about and why you should use it?

Before I write about what we’ve just done I wanted to quickly recap on what Content 360 is about.

Inside the ‘Content’ part of the platform we want you to be able to audit and optimize your website’s content. This means we do two things. The first is to find issues like 404’s, broken links and duplicate content. The second is to bring in the data that enables you to make informed decisions on content and site architecture.

To get the data and insight to do this you simply kick off a site crawl and Linkdex does the heavy lifting of doing the crawl and mashing-up data from Analytics, ranking data and backlink data.

Your website’s pages can be viewed, filtered and sorted by types of data e.g. by pages with traffic, rank, issues, internal links, backlinks and other metrics, as well as grouped / filtered by keywords using our advanced search operators:

Intitle: page title
Indesc: page META description
Inurl: any part of page URL
Indomain: domain part of page URL
Infolder: path part of page URL
Inheading: H1 tag
Inintanchor: anchor text for an HREF pointing to another page within the crawl
Inoutanchor: anchor text for an HREF pointing to a page not in the crawl
Inalt: ALT text
Inpage: page BODY

These can be used in a simple way to find your content or in more advanced ways. For example, operators can then be combined with each other and ‘-‘ operators can also be used.

intitle:music -inurl:about

This will return all pages where the title contains “music” AND the URL does NOT contain “about”.

Multiple terms can be combined using logical operators (“AND” & “OR”). The AND “terms” will be evaluated first, then the OR terms.

We can also use parentheses to group the terms:

intitle:linkdex and (inintanchor:home or inintanchor:top)

will return all pages with “linkdex” in the title and with internal anchor text containing “home” OR “top”.

Without the parentheses:

intitle:linkdex and inintanchor:home or inintanchor:top

We would get all pages with “linkdex” in the title AND “home” in an internal anchor, OR pages with any title and “top” in an internal anchor.

When you then review groups of pages on a topic you’re able to see the pages that have:

• Organic Traffic
• Ranking Visibility
• Keyword Reach (The number of unique organic keyword phrases a page is found for)
• Internal Link Counts
• Internal Link Anchors & Count
• Backlink Counts
• Backlink Anchors & Count
• Technical issues e.g. duplicate titles
• Keywords Mapped (The keywords being rank checked that are mapped against the page) NEW
• Tags (Pages can be tagged, tags can have a Conversion and Sale/Lead Value associated with them) NEW
• Value (Traffic x (Tag: Conversion x Value) NEW

When these data points are together you’re able to see what might need to be done to improve performance. For example:

Issue:
Pages that have keywords mapped, relatively low traffic and ranking visibility.

Check:
Does the page have any technical issues?
Does page have relatively low internal link counts?
Does the page have no or low backlink counts?

Opportunity:
Assign tasks to improve metrics and track improved performance through-time.
Issue:
Reduce the number of pages that are similar to others, making little / no contribution

Check:
Find pages that have page / link equity but are not mapped to keywords, have little or no search visibility or traffic and are not paid media landing pages.

Opportunity:
Redirect using 301
Use rel=”canonical”

There are lots of other opportunities the combination of these search operators and integrated data points bring. I hope you’ve got the idea.

Names / Dates / Paths / Parameters / Agents / Proxies – NEW

To improve this area further we really wanted to capture this data through time. So from today you can name a crawl and go back and review historic content analysis.

In addition, to help target these data insights at specific parts of your website and get better site coverage you can set the path of the crawl e.g. to a folder e.g. /UK/ and ignore paths and query parameters that generate a lot of pages with no insights.

You can crawl as Google’s Web Search user agent and because it’s important to see how your site looks when crawled on a smartphone – a mobile user agent.

If your site is best crawled from the UK or the US these can be set as well as part of the crawl configuration.

What type of questions can you answer?

It’s always important to know the questions when using technology like this. The kind of questions that Content 360 is good at answering is:

• Which pages have top 3 / 10 / 20 rankings?
• Which pages have organic traffic?
• How many unique organic phrases is the page found for?
• Which pages have backlinks and where are the links from?
• What are the anchor texts of the backlinks to the page?
• How many internal links does the page have?
• What are the anchor texts of the internal links?
• How much value is the page creating?
• Which authors write on this website?
• Which authors have written about keyword X on this website?
• Which pages don’t have analytics or other tracking scripts installed?
• Which pages have issues like duplicate content, broken links, 404’s and redirects?
• Why is this page underperforming?
• What is the potential traffic that could be generated to this page if it ranked at #1 for the keywords mapped against it?

What’s more, with the exception of the insights that need Analytics access, this data is available for any website you want to crawl.

And because all of these questions combine, it’s even more powerful. For example, which author’s content generates the most backlinks?

The power of integrated data

The ability to collect this data in one place to easily drill down on metrics is very powerful if you’re tasked with using data to making smart decisions that grow traffic and revenue.

I get the real satisfaction when I watch the tasks being generated from this data and watch the performance metrics associated with those tasks improve, which for me is the real power of integrated data.

The future of Content 360

This is Phase 2 of 4 that are planned, with Phase 3 and 4 being close behind. At a time when we’re all talking about Content Marketing, I think this is a massive help to anyone tasked with making their content perform.

Watch this space for another update soon!

March is going to be a very busy month for Linkdex since we’re attending many conferences around the world. The first will be SMX West in San Jose, CA from the 11th to the 13th of March at San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

There’s no better location than the capital of Silicon Valley to host an SEO expo. This year the main topics will be related to the Valley’s big shots: Google and Facebook and their innovations. You will be able to learn more about Facebook’s Graph Search and Google’s new Enhanced Adwords and how to avoid SEO penalties.

We will be at booth no.214 and we look forward to talking about:

• Content 360
• Linking Authors and Social Circles
• The future of Linkdex

We would love to discuss our new features with you, we’re sure you’re going to love them!

Our VP of Product/Marketing, Matt Roberts, will also be giving a theatre presentation on “Why it’s vital to integrate Search, Social, PR and Content“. You can listen to him on the 12^th of March at 11:20am at SMX Theatre, and it’s open to all the attendees!

Matt will also be introducing Linkdex at the Solution Spotlight before the panel discussion “From Authorship To Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters“.

Here is what you need to remember:

Where you can find us:  Linkdex booth is no.214 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center

When you can meet us: You can meet our team the 11^th and the 12^th of March

Where you can listen to us:

• Theatre Presentation -12^th March at 11:20am
• Solution Spotlight – on the Semantic SEO Track on 12^th March at 3:30pm

I recently joined Linkdex to lead our rapidly expanding business development efforts in the U.S. I’ve lived and worked in NYC since the beginning of the millennium. My experience in the online and interactive space ranges from SaaS technology platforms to real-time biddable media. It’s an honor working to bring Europe’s leading SEO, content & social platform to brands and agencies in the U.S.

Having a permanent residence here in New York is a pivotal step in Linkdex’s continued growth. We are now even better positioned to deliver our award-winning data and technology platform to new and existing customers across the U.S.

We are quickly ramping up our team here in New York and are looking forward to introducing new team members along the way.

Please feel free to reach out to me at marc.blumberg@linkdex.com or at 212-297-6191.

I always had a crush on London, so far this was only platonic – until this August! I came for the Olympics and that trip represented the point of no return. All the little doubts I had magically vanished.

I left my job (we weren’t made for each other!), I sold my car, packed my stuff and bought a one-way flight to London. Was I impulsive? Yes, probably that’s what most people thought about me.

There’s a Latin proverb that says “Audentes fortuna iuvat”, it means “Fortune helps the brave” and that’s what happened to me. I found the job that I wanted in a great company where I learn something new every day, thank you Linkdex!

My role is to organise and promote Linkdex’s events and I feel this will be pretty challenging but great fun at the same time. We have big plans for 2013, it’s already guaranteed to be a very busy year. We will be travelling the world, covering expos from London to San Francisco, from Oslo to New York.

The first event I’ll organise for Linkdex will be SES London – one of the biggest. It might be a bit of a challenge for a newbie like me – well, but challenge accepted!

What else can I say? I really look forward to see the fruits of my labor and showing them to you.

Together with your feedback we want to continue this process and fine-tune the UI in a gradual evolution. So what will you notice when you login today?

Design

The most noticeable changes are the new color palette and the alterations to the main navigation, which is now a simple bar at the top. We’ve kept much of the basic structure so you shouldn’t find it too hard to navigate. But why not log in and see the changes for yourself? We hope you’ll like what you see.

Along with the new UI we’ve included some other, more functional improvements. These include changes to:

Rank Tracking

With access to historical rankings, easy keyword uploads and better integration with Content data, this update promises to make your rank tracking even more powerful. Here’s what’s included in the release:

• You can now view the rankings on historic dates where we gathered the data for you.
• You can now click through on a ranking URL using the new ‘eye’ icon to get a view on why a page might be performing or under-performing in Content.
• Where in the past you could only add single keywords or upload a bulk file, you can now add up to 100 keywords by simply pasting them in.
• Content published via campaigns is now recorded on the ranking and analytics charts so you can see if your new links are helping performance.

Content

Your site crawl data is now much more than link counts, rankings and traffic data. You can now drill down on the external link anchors in the right navigation to see the individual links by clicking on the eye icon.

Where we’ve crawled a domain with authors, you can also click through and see all the information we’ve found on them in the Social tab. What’s more, you can also add an author directly to your contact book from this section.

We will be increasing your ability to drill down on even more metrics in the near future.

Campaigns & Circles

You can now export Campaign and Social Circle data to a CSV. Just look for the Export link at the bottom of the page as you would normally.

Dashboards

Because it’s important to analyze and report on your data we’ve made some nice, simple alterations to the Dashboard widgets.

• There are now additional options inside the Analytics widgets allowing you to display the chart trend line for the previous period.
• Inside the link reporting widget payment details can be removed from Link Widgets.
• Inside the ranking by Keyword widget you can remove Universal Results.
• Inside the Competitor Detective you can now display the top 30 and 50 domains competing for all or groups of keywords.

API

And finally inside the API you can access rankings, campaigns and author & circle data.

We think this is a nice product release to round out 2012. With a huge step forward in UI & UX, coupled with a host of tweaks to functionality, there’s plenty of new possibilities as we approach the new year. Please let us know what you think of the update in the comments section below!

Today I am struggling to get to the Terminal due to flooding, the result of torrential rain currently battering the UK.

Thanks to the Twittersphere, following the hashtag #UKRain was incredibly useful to follow the trail of destruction and determine whether trains were managing to get through. Although some clever fella did ask what the Ukraine had done now. Very amusing…

One of my girlfriends telephoned and asked why I was bothering. I realized it hadn’t even crossed my mind to not go.

I am spending a lot of time crossing the Atlantic, for a number of reasons. The New York office is still in its infancy (embryonic is probably a better description!). We have a lot of US customers and it is really important to support these customers from inside the territory. Linkdex evolves – thrives on – feedback from our customers. If we don’t know what customers require from the platform – how can we build it?

Yes we are an internet company – SaaS to more precise – and of course we can and do provide support online; it’s a strong support channel for us as we run lots of online demonstrations and more & more webinars. But nothing beats shaking hands and conducting business face to face – deep, honest, long lasting relationships cannot be built up over a few online sessions.

So my American Cousins. I am planning to be hanging out a lot on your side of the pond – make sure I’ve got a meeting booked in with you

Featured Image: James Cridland

Now, following the popularity of this London based event, we are happy to co-host a conference in Leeds along with our friends at Blueclaw. This Think Tank will take place on 5th December at The Queens Hotel.

You can now reserve your free tickets from Eventbrite - but hurry, tickets are limited (and free, which will make them disappear even faster)!

Agenda and Speakers

The Leeds Think Tank will call upon a series of speakers (below) to discuss how AuthorRank is emerging as a key component of digital marketing, and talk about why it’s important to discover and approach authors as part of an integrated search, PR and social strategy.

We will also show off our latest release of Social Circles and encourage our speakers to discuss how they are using Authorship Data and Content Marketing.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Matt Roberts – VP Product/Marketing – Linkdex
• David Harling – Head of SEO – Razorfish
• Mike McDougall – Head of Search & Matt Hall – SEO Consultant – Blueclaw
• Paul Spreadbury – Account Director – MEC
• Pak Hou Cheung – Content Outreach Specialist – Blueglass

Will you be in Leeds on 5th December? Reserve your free tickets at Eventbrite now.

What are Social Circles?

Where Linking Data provides you with a huge list of all the authors in your market, Social Circles allows you to curate  groups of influencers. For example one circle might contain PR experts and another SEO professionals. Alternatively, instead of dividing by industry you might segment them even further – what social groups exist within your industry? Which cliques of friends influence and communicate with each other?

Analyze Contacts

From Social Circles you can also see:

• where they write and link to
• their social profiles
• their recent content
• the circles and campaigns they currently belong to
• you can add them to your contact database
• understand how well connected they are to other people within that group.
• and see their Klout scores

Almost like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (yes I did just manage to reference that), you can see who’s at the center of the circle – the most connected – via a new metric called ‘Network Score’.

Circle Suggestions

One of the most powerful new features shipped with Author Circles is the new ‘Circle Suggestions’ section. Once you have curated a circle you can ask us to generate suggestions based on the existing members. We then quickly make a few checks and come back with profiles on other people who are perhaps already a part of that circle in real life, and should be added as a member.

So, for example, if you had all the Linkdex bloggers except for me in a circle, we might come back and suggest ‘Matt Roberts’ be added – as I would be connected to them in various ways.

Learn More

We’re keen to help everyone get the most out of this new innovation, so keep your eyes peeled for news of a webinar which we will host on the topic. Have a play around in the platform and, if you get stuck, please email us at support@linkdex.com. Let us know what you think in the comments! Will this help you organize and improve your outreach?