In this the second interview with Ed Fry, he shares the secret sauce for getting your content from YouMoz to being published on the SEOMoz main blog, earning the respect of your industry peers, and getting a real life high-five from Rand Fishkin in the process.

Ed, can you give us a quick run down of the blog posts you’ve had promoted from YouMoz to the main SEOMoz blog? What were they about?

I’ve been following the main SEOmoz blog for almost two years (testament to how good it is!) – I’ve rarely missed a post. The ideas on their are generally new, interesting and engaging for advanced SEOs.

I think part of the mission with the moz blog is to teach the pro’s something new – that’s perhaps why it’s so successful; SEOmoz, along with their associates and YOUmoz contributions are constantly thinking, researching and talking about SEO. The blogs are where the community’s ideas are shared.

I’ve noticed however that SEOmoz has generally skipped around the topic of awesome content. Yes, they’ve defined the need for good content, suggested where good content would be good – even suggested what content is not… but never what it is, and how to make it.

This is the area I had interest in before. Having started my own website entirely because it was impressed into me that with awesome content that was ranking, you could win. This has generally always been my favourite part of SEO.

I’ve been taught using Site Build It, I follow CopyBlogger avidly and keep an eye on ProBlogger too…

Gradually, I noted down a series of thoughts and ideas about the process of creating awesome content. Then over the course of about two weeks, I figured how to “join-the-dots” and make a remarkable article.

And so I published the Definitive Guide to Awesome Web Content.

I’ve got about a dozen other posts in various draft forms that I’ll tidy up and submit one day as well…

What sort of benefits did you receive as a result of being featured on the main SEOMoz blog? (I.e. Adoring fans, consulting offers, industry cred, traffic to your Twitter profile or a virtual high-five from Rand Fishkin?

I’ve never really got what Twitter was originally intended for – who really cares what you had for breakfast?

Originally, I signed up just to follow people in search (worthwhile, just for the interesting stuff people share) and then later the Distilled folks before my internship there.

But seeing my post flying around the Twittersphere does give a warm fuzzy feeling inside…

Beyond the standard ‘headline + link’ tweet there have been some people who have really taken what I’ve said onboard, or its hit them in a particularly profound way. Those were the people I was really writing for, and I’m glad they chirped up.

The timing of the promotion of the post was pretty good – a week before Distilled’s PRO SEO Seminar.

Meeting people ‘from the internet’ who had seen my post was pretty cool. Having Will Critchlow introduce me to some of the SEOmoz team as the guy who wrote a post ‘this long’ (stretching his arms as wide as far as they go – and he plays basketball so a long way!) was even cooler.

But an ACTUAL high-five from Rand Fishkin was the coolest :-]

Being ‘published on SEOmoz’ is definitely a credibility-builder when talking to people about SEO, especially if the objective is to win over work. It’s also handy just to point clients to the post – I’ve found educating clients really helps.

Do you think it’s worthwhile from a personal benefit standpoint to put in upfront time and effort that’s necessary to create the type of high-quality blog post that has the potential to be SEOMoz main-blog worthy content?

As I put in the post, the world doesn’t need more content. It needs quality content. Remarkable, awesome, white-paper-worthy content.

Always create high-quality content, because then you don’t play the quantity game. As Seth Godin says, we’ve had the race to the bottom (you can ‘buy articles’ with Mechanical Turk now for next to nothing. So is the article worth next to nothing?); now it’s about the race to the top.

From a search and social marketing perspective, what factors will determine whether your the one that gets linked to, gets tweeted about, gets traffic and what SEOs really care about – getting ranked – is it the quantity of content you produce (increasing your odds?) or the quality (going for the win).

I say, if you’re trying to make mediocre content rank, or even if you’re just posting mediocre content then shame on you!

My post took me to write as long as it took me write. That’s the key point about Definitive Content – it’s as long as it needs to be.

My argument is this – if you’re a stranger in a foreign city and you ask someone for directions, you’re not going to stop listening until you’ve got directions to where you need to go, and why should they stop telling you directions? Why should it be any different online?

As someone whose work has been promoted to the main blog before, what sort of content creation advice to you have for others hoping to be recognized there?

There’s three points here:

1.) Write Definitive Content (Remarkable + Awesome + White-Paper-Worthy)

2.) Write about something you know about inside out. Introduce something new, or put a new perspective on something (you’ve read about content before; I joined the dots and added an analogy. You can do that too.). If you know something well, you can write as yourself much easier. More natural posts appear more fluent, more confident and are more likely to be posted.

3.) Write about SEO! There’s a handful of posts on the YOUmoz blog which haven’t had such a great response. Either they weren’t as well written, or didn’t say anything new – or they weren’t writing about SEO or something that is directly related to SEO. Recently there have been a couple of articles about Facebook, but as search and social becomes ever closer together there’s enough relevance for it to be received well by SEOmoz readers. Think of a cornerstone of SEO and hone in on it. Actionable posts go far too, I think.

In your promoted YouMoz post titled “The Definitive Guide to Awesome Web Content” you leverage a number of graphs and photos to articulate your message. How are you able to find or create the type of imagery that helps explain difficult SEO concepts? Do believe including this imagery improves the odds your content is promoted?

For starters, images help to break up a lengthy post. I knew I couldn’t just slap a huge text “essay” on a blog because no one would read it.

Breaking up a post with images, sub-headings, lists and bullet-points is important, especially if your posts are of any length. Images also help emphasize key points. Be this in a humourous way, or with a diagram or something similar, it saves having to type out an explanation which may not even be as clear.

Usually, I first try looking for stock images to add to posts, and failing that I use Google Image Search to find something to swipe (of course they get a reference link). Finding images isn’t the hard part, it’s putting them effectively into the context of a piece.

The key analogy I used of a jet engine to represent the four types of content and how they’re used meant I had to produce a diagram of some sort. I actually ended up using Microsoft Word and then print-screening it into some graphics editing software (Paint.net) where I then adjusted the size and colour before uploading it. Anyone can do that, right? (Credit: Ed Fry’s Sweet Microsoft Paint Jet Engine Below.)

Diagrams, graphs, humourous images and other pictures definitely help your posts hold up reader’s attention and make the post look interesting and shareable.

I also embedded a YouTube video of a Seth Godin talk to explain one of my points. You could use other multi-media too (slide decks, prezzis, videos – even embeddable games!) to help reduce the need for text and retain readers interest.