In our second video from our series of SMX Sydney interviews, we speak with Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz on seo tools, link building and social networking.

Jacqui: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX Sydney and we have Rand Fishkin right here from SEOmoz.

Rand: Hi, How are you Jacqui?

Jacqui: Welcome to Australia.

Rand: Thank you.

Jacqui: It’s a bit bright isn’t it? It’s very sunny.

Rand: I think this is just about the best weather I’ve had at a conference. Maybe one of the best cities too, it’s incredible here.

Jacqui: That’s a lovely thing to say. As I just mentioned, one of our analysts in our US office, she wanted to ask a question about the sluggish-nish of your web site, so what is the case?

Rand: There are a few issues with SEOmoz. One is it was not built to handle the traffic that it gets right now. It was architected for maybe a max of 10,000 visits a day and it gets close to 15-20,000 on a lot of days. The other thing is the tools slow it down heavily. So as the tools have gotten more popular, that’s a tonne of database requests and it’s a tonne of pulling data from other places. One of the biggest problems was, I think a couple of weeks ago was running super slow, and were going what the heck’s going on, and we found this spammer in Singapore had like signed up for a tonne of accounts and was running like 50 tools at a time, so we’re constantly monitoring for that kind of thing. So, November we’re going to co-locate hosting in New York and Seattle. Were gonna have a new version of the site which runs a lot faster. Hopefully it will get better.

Jacqui: Ok, so in the meantime, you know, do we just have to persevere?

Rand: Yeah, I would say visit it during, no you shouldn’t have to do anything. It’s ridiculous to ask people to not like, come and visit. I mean were doing the best we can and I do apologise for the sluggish-nish. I promise it’s totally worth it dude, just you know, come on over.

Jacqui: Another question I have is how did you come up with the name SEOmoz? What does moz actually mean?

Rand: So, we stole it from the Mozilla foundation, and Chef Moz and DMOZ and all of those sites. So, they had this philosophy that we just loved, which was of openness and of sharing a lot of robust, free content. And we’ve always subscribed to that moto. So even though we have paid stuff, kind of behind the pro membership, there is thousands and thousands of pieces of great free content on SEOmoz. There’s a lot of stuff that users contribute themselves through YOUmoz, through the market place. All that kinda thing so, yeah, we took it from the kind of ethos of openness.

Jacqui: You’ve got a range of professional analytic tools available on SEOmoz. Can you tell us a little bit about what they are?

Rand: Sure, so I mean there’s a tonne of them, but one of the ones, how about I’ll tell you about one of the new ones, one of the ones that’s coming out, that no one has seen yet! So, in, what’s it gonna be, it’s June 3rd I think it launches, and it’s, I don’t know, we haven’t come up with a name yet, maybe like the video watchers can help us, you can help us come up with a name for it. Internally we call it the Trifector tool. So, it is page strength, which has been probably our most popular tool right, which gets a bunch of factors about your web site from the search engines, from Yahoo, from Google, from Alexa, all these places and then comes up with kinda score of how important we think you are. And, we took that one step further and said you know, page analysis is fine, but for a lot of time we need to analyse a whole domain, and other times we wanna… there’s blogs right and we specifically want to break out blogs, so we have page strength, blog strength and domain strength, thus we call it Trifector right, and so that is launching June 3rd. We have a tonne of tools in there, but I think this one is going to be huge, it’s gonna be very, very popular.

Jacqui: We’re looking forward to seeing that being launched. A question from one of our analysts Tim in our US office… he wants to know, can you actually add more than one site to the pro analytics tool.

Rand: You can’t right now, but you’ll be able to add five sites in total, so your site like plus four top competitors starting May, I think its like, May 20th, May 25th, something like that. We launched it in a preview Beta mode, knowing that’s what folks would want. We all ready have internally, some stuff where you can see like four sites at a different time. You can see oh well, Search Engine Land is going up and SEOmoz is going down, and oh we have to catch up to that Danny bastard, you know, yeah.

Jacqui: So what do you think what are some of the greatest challenges in search for Australia and New Zealand and I appreciate you have only been here for 5 minutes, but what are your observations so far?

Rand: I have a really good friend who’s based here in Australia and he spent a week with us at SEOmoz. Lucas Ng from Fairfax digital and I think he’s just brilliant, absolutely brilliant about SEO stuff and he commented that Australia and New Zealand are always about a year behind the US in terms of technology. Everything from Ajax, to social media marketing, to Twitter, you know, to Digg, or whatever it is, their always kind of a little bit behind, and so I think it can be tough to come to some of these presentations and to hear these tactics described and then say to yourself, ok we’re not quite there yet, but this does gives us an opportunity to be on the cutting edge.

Obviously some of the other things are it’s really tough to network from Australia, in person networking is extremely hard because it’s so far to fly to you know, London, or to Los Angeles, or San Francisco or New York, I mean these are just far, far away destinations, and so I think that there’s a lot of opportunity therefore in the power of social networking. I mean I had, you know, I had never met, Colina Jordan until I came here, but she was a huge name for me and the same is true with Barry Smyth and you know a lot of the other folks who are here. I knew them through the social profiles and media that they contributed to and participated online, so I think that recognising that challenge and also that opportunity.

Jacqui: Great, so for those particular people, they would want to have an international profile to network with people like yourselves and others in the industry in the States. So for businesses in Australia and New Zealand where they primarily want Australian and New Zealand business and traffic, if they were to participate in social media sites in the US, does that really provide a lot of benefit to them?

Rand: So, probably not quite as great as the other side, however that being said, if you participate in those sites, you can probably earn links that none of your competition will have and you can earn this branding outside of what your competitors can get. And that will help you right, so all of those links will help you to rank well for queries even here in Australia. You’ll earn that trust and the authoritative domain status and all these kind of things and then when your competitors are you know, struggling, they might say, oh man how did they get those links, how can I get those links and that’s a pretty powerful thing.

Jacqui: If you are generating global links, does that really benefit your site? I mean surely regional links will be better than a global link?

Rand: Not necessarily, not entirely. There’s something to this idea that authoritative domains gather links from all different countries, all different languages and recognising that is going to be really important. SEOmoz is a good example. Once we started getting links from Germany, from the UK, from Canada, from Australia, from Singapore, from China, and we look at all these different markets and said oh my gosh like this is really establishing us as an authority on the web on this subject and it means that our rankings are going to increase in the US as well as overseas. Let’s say you want to say target Singapore, getting links in Singapore is absolutely very important, but if you’re working here in Australia and you’ve got an Australian domain and you have lots of Australian links already and now you’re trying to expand your link profile, going international can be a great, great help.

Jacqui: We’ve been speaking with a range of PR consultants recently, and they’re just starting to learn about social media and PR online which is great and one of the question they ask is well, how do you actually value a link because they’re so use to when they get a mention in a newspaper article, they can put a dollar value on that, so how do you actually value a link? Is that possible?

Rand: Not, not right now, not, at least not from the prospective of this helped me this much to get the rankings that I want. I think you can do it arbitrarily and you can do it a little bit, you can kinda say, hey we through out this piece of content, it got this many links, it’s earned us this much traffic and referrers to that page sent us this many conversions. You might be able to puzzle out something, but chances are it’s gonna be a low ball. I think that low ball number is probably an ok thing to use, but yeah it’s a very, very tough thing to do because you don’t know whether that link is going to be, oh hey that increased my trust rank, that increased my page rank this much. I think that eventually there will be tools that will help us to analyse those.

Jacqui: Great, well that’s all the questions I have for today, so thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of your time in Australia and also New Zealand when you go there next week, so thank you.

Rand: Thanks Jacqui, it’s been terrific.