Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Learning How To Be A Manager'
Posted by caitlin.krumdieck
Introduction from Will Critchlow:
I want to introduce the post that follows for two reasons. First, its a little
different to the majority of posts we write for the SEOmoz blog, and second, its
Caitlins first post here.Caitlin Krumdieck is our Director of Client Development
at Distilled. Until she joined the company (as a sales executive), I had sold
every piece of work that Distilled had done. She (supposedly) joined the company
to assist me in responding to leads and putting together proposals. When she
out-sold me in her third month, it became clear that I should be making way for
her to do her thing and her growth at Distilled has continued from there. Along
the way, shes learned some interesting things about herself and the various
roles shes held in the company. Ihope you enjoy reading about Caitlins growth
and development and take away something useful for your own career and company.
Throwing myself in the deep end (aka learning how to be a manager)
I always thought I wanted to be a manager. Growing up naturally bossy and bit
of a control freak, it just seemed like the natural spot for me to end up. So
when I stepped into my first management position at Distilled, I was surprised
at how hard the transition was. Moving from consultant to manager of a team
required a complete change of mindset and challenged me in ways I never
expected. Today, I'll be sharing the four things I believe are worth thinking
about if you are looking to make the move into management.
Gut check: make sure you actually want to be a manager
About three months after my transition from London Sales Exec into the Head of
Sales role, I had a very frank conversation with Will Critchlow (Distilled's
Co-Founder) about my role. He then asked me point blank if I actually wanted to
be a manager.
For me, this was a career-changing question. At the time, I was having a tough
time letting go of my old responsibilities and moving forward into management
responsibilities. I had been working in sales for over six years. I loved the
buzz of talking to clients and closing deals. I liked the fact that I was
personally responsible for bringing in revenue for Distilled, and I still valued
my contribution to the company by the amount of money I could generate. So
instead of focusing all my time and energy on how to make my team awesome, I was
still spending at least 70% of my time trying to bring in new business. This
meant I was essentially doing two jobs, over working myself, and not giving my
team the management support they needed.
My answer to Will was, Let me think about it. I surprised myself by not going
right back to him with a, Hell yeah, I want to be a manager response. I spent a
few days really thinking about the changes I would need to make if I really
wanted to step into a management position. To help me evaluate both
opportunities, I made a list of the responsibilities for each. I thought about
what it would mean to my day-to-day work, and I asked myself quite frankly, Will
I be happy as a manager?
I think a lot of people make the mistake of skipping this step. They think
that, because management seems like a step up, it is the natural progression
they should strive for. But the truth is that management isnt for everyone. It
is a somewhat thankless job that requires a lot of patience, focus,
determination, and self-motivation. It isnt just a progression from a consulting
role; its a complete job change.
In the end, I decided to challenge myself and devote myself fully to becoming a
great manager. I would love to say that from the moment I made that decision
everything changed, but to be honest, it took about another nine months before I
made the full transition.
So before you eagerly put yourself forward for that management position, ask
yourself, Do I really want to be a manager? If you are currently a consultant
and love working on accounts, would you be happy if your daily responsibilities
shifted from being at the heart of the action to becoming the person setting
team targets, having line manager meetings, and generally solving problems?
Would you miss the thrill of the discovery that only comes from day-in, day-out
work with clients? These aren't easy questions, and it is well worth taking the
time out to really think about what a move into management means.Rand wrotea
great postcovering the management vs contributor conundrum, highlighting how
management isn't everything and shouldn't be the only growth path within a
company.
Transitioning: re-learning how to be a team player
When I was in high school, I was the goalie for my schools water polo team.
This role requires a lot of the same characteristics of a great manager. While
everyone knows that it is the goalies job to stop the ball from going in the
net, it is also the goalies responsibility to set plays into motion. However,
once the ball is in play, they need to get their ass back to the goal and
provide support. From the vantage point in the goal, you can see the whole pool,
so it is your job to let the other members of the team know what's going on, but
you cant actually get involved. A goalie is the ultimate support position. Sure,
you get credit for any major saves, but you never get credit for the goals your
offense scores.
Management is very similar. At Distilled, we subscribe to the belief that good
management means being the support for the whole rest of the team, not the other
way around. We are avid believers of Joel Spolskys support function approach to
management.
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/02/the-management-team-guest-post-from-joel-spolsky.html
As a manager, you have to be constantly aware of everything happening and make
yourself available to help, but you need to let your team score their own goals.
A good manager doesnt take all the great leads/clients; they share their
experience and knowledge so their team is able to step up and perform on their
own.
Another big mind shift for me in going from a consultant to a manager, was
learning to see my teams success as my success. While I wasnt out there directly
making clients happy, I was supporting a team that was getting results. That is
the management win.
Learning to lead: dont dictate, start a flywheel
We talk about the power of flywheels a lot at Distilled. Building a great team
should be approached with the same ideology and methodology as starting a
flywheel. The goal is the same: ideally, when you push hard in a consistent
direction for a length of time, it seems to get easier and easier to build
momentum. With a small team and big targets, it was essential for me to think
about how, as the manager, I could push my team to get the best possible results
and continued growth for Distilled.
Its easy to assume that you know what all the right answers are and that your
team should do things your way. This was a mistake I made when I first started
managing my team. As the first sales person at Distilled, I created a lot of our
original sales material. I thought the most successful approach would be to get
my team to just use what I built and go out and sell the way I would sell
things. That approach worked OK for a while, but it was short-sighted and didnt
allow us to leverage the talent within our team. It also meant I had to be
involved with every major deal we did, which limited our ability to speak with a
larger number of clients.
So I took a step back. I stopped telling people how I thought they should
approach working with a new client, and I started asking them what they thought
they should do. I forced myself to stop getting involved in every conversation,
and gave my team the space and responsibility to own all the client
relationships, only bringing me in when they really need me. Instead of
bulldozing in when trying to solve problems, I started to refuse to give my team
advice until they told me what they thought a solution looked like.
The results have been amazing. My team has grown in confidence and the work
they are doing now is more than twice as good as it was when I was forcing my
approach on them. We are talking to more clients than ever before, and were able
to double business last year without growing the size of our team.
Getting results: make sure your team knows what is expected of them
As a sales team, it was easy to focus target setting on revenue, but that only
looks at part of the picture. If you only focus on the money coming in, you
might miss some crucial areas of personal development that need to also be
addressed as a manager. While I could use our sales reporting system to see how
my team was performing, I couldnt see if they were happy or achieving what they
wanted to in their roles.
The first step I took was to redefine the roles within our team and to set out
clear responsibilities of the roles my team currently filled and what
progression into more senior roles would look like. I made sure to focus not
just on their sales targets, but also team development responsibilities within
the role. I put in more ownership-based responsibilities so the team could see
how they were a part of the big picture and not just a cog. This helped my team
to see exactly what is expected of them and what they can start working on to
progress to the next level within the team. It also allowed me to open up
conversations with my team on what sideways steps might look like, should
someone on the team choose to move in a new direction.
Once I had the roles clearly defined, I sent out a happiness survey to each
member of my team. Here are the questions I asked my team.
On a scale of 1-5 with 5 being the best, how happy are you in your roll at the
moment? On a scale from 1-5 with 5 being the best, how do you feel you are
performing in your role?
Do you feel like you know what is expected of you in your role?
On a scale from 1-5 with 5 being the best, do you feel that you are well
supported in your roll?
On a scale of 1-5 with 5 being the best, do you feel you get the support you
need from Caitlin?
What do you feel is your biggest accomplishment in the past 12 months?
Where do you think you have failed or would like to improve?
What do you think of the targets set for 2012/2013 (this past year)?
What are areas you feel like you could use more support in?
What is one thing Caitlin can do for you to support you in your role?
Do you understand what Caitlin's role is?
What is one thing you would like to see improve/change/grow for the Client
Development team for the New Year?
How would you rank the general quality of leads you have received in the past
3 months?
My line manager Duncan Morris (Distilled CEO) had used a similar tactic with me
in our line manager meetings and I found it was a great way to open up
conversations about happiness and personal development. In the past when asking
my team, How are you doing? I tended to get half thought-out answers. Giving
them the space to write at length about it and asking them to assign a number to
how they felt about how things were going, meant I got much more critical
responses. It also allowed me to ask them what I needed to do as their manager
to get them to the next level, which forced them to give me critical feedback.
This really opened up conversations and has led to better personal development,
increased team happiness, and improvements in openness across the team.
Wrapping up
Every company is going to demand different things from its management team, but
I found getting the team management side of things right is one of the most
important steps I took. It wasnt until I got that right that I really started to
feel like a manager. There have been a lot of lessons along the way and I could
probably write another whole post on the challenges of setting targets, managing
difficult consultants and clients, and the importance of communication. However,
I felt these three things really sum up the major lessons I learned as a person
when moving into a management role and are the most transferable, regardless of
the type of manager you are looking to be.
If you would like some more references, I found these resources very helpful:
Good to Great
Anything from Dale Carnegie especially How To Enjoy Your Life and Your Job
Bob Nelsons 1001 Ways to Energize and Empower Employees
One of the great things about being a manager is that you are always learning
and there is always more to think about when trying to help your team grow. I
hope sharing my own learning experinces has helped and I would love to hear from
others who have advice on how to manage a team effectively.
I'll leave you with an aswer I had to give recently, when someone I was
interviewing asked me what I love about my job:For the past four years, I have
found my self doing something brand new and challanging every day. No week is
the same. Finally, while a manager may not get a lot of credit for all the
behind the scenes work you do supporting the team, seeing your team be
successful can be supremely rewarding and fulfilling.
Good luck!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Fdn3fy4ECik/learning-how-to-be-a-manager
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Monday 27 May 2013
Tuesday 21 May 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The 3 Steps for Success in a
Multi-device Search World'
Posted by Aleyda Solis
We live in a multi-device world, and if you're still focused on improving your
visibility, traffic, and conversions solely for desktop users, you're losing a
great opportunity. This gap, coupled with the fact that you're probably staying
behind your competitors and unconnected with your audience, is not great for
business. Not convinced? Let's see some data...
Mobile search is booming.
It's already driving important multi-channel conversions.
However, we're still not doing our best for mobile and are losing
opportunities.
Despite the multichannel conversions that mobile search drives, we're still not
making the most out of it. There are people that feel it is still too
complicated and insecure to purchase goods on their smartphones:
Unfortunately, what are now fundamental aspects on our desktop-focused
optimization activities are sometimes still unknown when developing a
mobile-focused presence, even for some very important websites. For example:
A. Some websites don't have a mobile-focused presence
Remember that, despite having an audience that may be using the most advanced
smartphones and tablets, they still need an optimized offer that fulfills their
specific behaviors (not necessarily the same than the one from the desktop
users), providing the best experience according to their device characteristics
(and device-specific restrictions).
For example, can you guess which of these two sites provide me the best
experience, is really optimized for me, will make me stay (as a consequence),
and have a higher chance of conversions from me?
Although I have an iPhone 5 and my fingers are tiny, it's very difficult for me
to browse, interact, and consume information if the site doesn't have a version
well-optimized for the device I'm using.
B. Some sites have a mobile presence, but forget about optimization
fundamentals
On the other hand, other websites have a mobile presence (websites and apps
included), but that doesn't mean they're really optimized. As I mentioned
before, basics from our day-to-day "desktop focused" optimization activities are
for some reason forgotten when we go mobile or tablet.
For example, many websites love promoting their apps with intrusive
interstitials that disrupt the user mobile web flow, requiring interaction from
the user in order to continue:
What about relevant, descriptive titles? This optimization basic is frequently
forgotten, even by big websites when they go mobile (although these are
well-optimized in their desktop versions):
How about businesses that forget to create a landing page on their site for
their own mobile apps? When you search for the app, you get the first results
with iTunes store profiles that may confuse you (which one to choose?) featuring
not-so-great descriptions, along with some posts with negative reviews:
Time to get better control of your own app web results? Yes, please.
Two questions arise from these situations:
Can you blame people for not converting from their mobile devices?
How can you change it?
First, let's acknowledge the challenge of a multi-device ecosystem. Once we get
a handle on it, we'll have an overall vision in order to make the best
decisions, optimize your presence accordingly, and maximize your opportunities.
Mobile, Tablet, Web vs. App: The Segmentation Challenge
Usually, the first question we need to answer when we go mobile (whether
smartphone or tablet focused) is: do I develop a website or an app?
As I shared in this State of Search post, your decision should be based on
certain factors such as your business model; the goals you're trying to achieve;
how important is for your content to have a wider reach, and if it is web
indexable or not; whether or not you need to provide a complex functionality
that requires a higher hardware integration or connection independence; and if
your audience is highly-concentrated in few devices types and platforms. You'll
need to asses these characteristics along with mobile web and apps pros and
cons:
When you're deciding whether going mobile with a website or an app is the best
option for you, use the following visualization to analytze the alternatives:
You'll see that is easier to targetyour mobile audience with less web presence
than to do so with an app that is much more segmented.
However, when you think beyond the development alternatives to target your
mobile audience with the required functionalities and start thinking about how
you can optimize, grow the visibility, and generate conversions,you'll find that
most of the principles and good practices are the same (or can be easily
extrapolated):
Realize that, despite the many segmentation levels a multi-device presence may
have from a development and audience perspective, there are optimization
principles that are the same for any type of approach, platform, and device type
that you should be taking into consideration in order to make the most out of
the organic search channels to connect with your audience.
It's now the time to identify these similar principles and good practices to
make the most out the multi-device search opportunity, instead of focusing on
its complexities as an excuse. Otherwise, you will stay behind.
3 Steps to Improve Your Visibility in a Multi-device Search World
1. Optimize your presence for multi-device search visibility
People not only search for websites through web search, but also for apps
(whether from smartphones, tablets, or desktops, remember we're in a
multi-device world), so it's fundamental that you don't forget about creating
and optimizing a mobile web presence to increase your mobile app visibility
through web search, too.
Take a look at the exact-match local monthly search volume for some mobile apps
related keywordsin the US, from desktop and laptop devices:
And the volume for the searches from mobile devices with full Internet
browsers:
So, if you want to maximize the chances that your mobile presence (web or app)
gets the search visibility, users, and conversions it deserves, then you need to
make sure that it's easily found through the web search results. If you have a
mobile app, you'll also need to take into consideration your visibility in the
app store search. Let's see how!
1.1. Mobile web: select and optimize the best mobile web approach for your
situation
When you're developing a mobile website, the key is to select the best setting
according to your characteristics, restrictions, and needs. These settings
include responsive web, dynamic serving, or parallel mobile sites.
I've posted and presented about these many times, so it may be easier to check
out what I've shared before and avoid repeating myself. You'll see that eachone
of these alternatives have their pros and cons, as well as specific and general
SEO best practices that I discussed in this Moz post andMozinarsome months ago
about mobile SEO:
Nonetheless, beyond specifically optimizing each mobile web alternative
according to their characteristics, there are mobile web optimization
fundamentals that should always be followed:
1.1.1. Reorganize your content to be correctly displayed in mobile devices
Prioritizing the devices used by your audience (that you can identify through
your Google Analytics "Audience > Mobile > Devices" report) gives the
required visibility to the most important elements of your content. Think about
your user's goals as well as your own, and align them to reorganize your web
interface:
Beware of elements (like flash or interstitials) that are not correctly
displayed, dont work, or provide a bad user and search experience. Take a look
at the following Mobile usability resources:
Organizing Mobileby Luke Wroblewski
Nielsen's Mobile Website and Application Usability Report and Mobile Site vs.
Full Site article
Brad Frost post about Content Parity
1.1.2. Optimize your mobile pages relevance
Make your titles, meta descriptions, URLs, and, of course, your page's main
content relevant for your mobile web audience. Take your keywords into
consideration, and the visibility limitation of mobile search results in the
different type of devices:
Use mobile emulators and user agent switchers to easily validate by yourself
how your own pages are shown in mobile search results (for smartphones and
tablets, too), along with your competitors.
1.1.3. Enhance your pages visibility with structured markup and Google+
presence
Use structured data markup(reviews, people, businesses, apps, etc.), Google's
authorship,and create a presence in Google+ for your business to enhance your
page's results visibility, not only in desktop results, but also in your mobile
search results (where the visibility provided by these can be even higher in
comparison):
Google has also recently announced content recommendationsfor mobile sites with
a Google+ presence that will make the visibility obtained with it even higher.
1.1.4. Make your mobile site fast
Your mobile site has higher speed restrictions due to mobile networks and CPU
capabilities, which means it's even more important to optimize its speed.
Use your Google Analytics site speed report information to easily identify your
pages load times and analyze them withGoogle's PageSpeed Insights mobile filter
to identify opportunities to improve them:
Follow PageSpeed's mobile best practices and take into consideration what's
explained in this "Make the Mobile Web faster" article.
1.1.5. Serve the right web version according to the used device
It's important to effectively identify the type of device (desktop, tablet,
smartphone) used by your visitors and provide them the right web version by
using different techniques according to the Mobile Web approach you're
following:
With CSS media-queries withresponsive Web
With User agent detection with dynamic serving
With User agent detection and redirects with aparallel mobile site
1.2. Mobile apps: create and optimize landing pages for apps in your site
Give visibility to your app beyond the app store search results by creating a
landing page for each of your mobile apps on your own website. Make the landing
pages relevant, and optimize them to rank for popular searches of users looking
for your apps:
Make sure to feature testimonials and reviews, and add a visible link to your
app store page with call to actions to incentivize downloads:
Integrate your social presence as well, inviting for shares in social networks:
Additionally, Google has recently announced even more integration with Google+
for apps by showingGoogle+ Sign-Inapp activitiesin their results, which would
also give your results more visibility:
1.2. App Store Search
Although app store search optimization is still in early stages when we compare
it with web search and is specific to each app store (Android Market and the
Apple App Store),it's also evolving,aligning each time more with web search type
of factors, with an algorithm that is looking to reward:
Relevance: with the relevant terms in the App name, description, and keywords
Popularity: with download rate, install base, ratings, comments, and even
external review sites
Take these into consideration for your app store presence, by optimizing the
different elements of your profile:
In addition to promoting, gamifying your mobile experience (with profiles,
levels, badges, rewards, lists, etc.) to incentivize your app users activity is
a huge download driver. Take a look at how successful apps do it, like
Foursquare:
You can additionally promote your app through relevant sites in the sector,
such as app review blogs and communities:
On the other hand, take into consideration that sometimes app store preview
pages also rank in web search results and that there's also a specific
"Applications" search feature in Google, listing only application related
presence, for which these optimization best practices would be also beneficial
in order to get a better visibility:
There are also sites and tools like App AnnieandSearchman that provide free app
store statistics about the top apps per store, category, and country, which can
serve you as an input when optimizing your app:
2. Cross promote between your multi-device presence
Create awareness of your multi-device web and app presence through each other.
Promote your mobile app in a non-intrusive way (no interstitials) by inviting
users to download it when accessing the mobile site with a relevant device or to
switch to another web version, as shown in these images:
Make sure you also create awareness about your different multi-device presence
through all of your channels, from email signatures to social profiles to your
home page and emails, with updates and specially targeted mobile offers:
3. Measure to improve your multi-device presence
You cannot improve what you cannot measure, so it's fundamental to track,
continuously analyze, and make improvements not only to your desktop, but also
to your mobile presence based on their analytics data. You can still usingGoogle
Analyticsfor this, which provides anSDK for mobile app analytics.
3.1. For your web presence
You can use Google Analytics mobile reports and default segments along with
your own advanced segments and dashboards to follow-up and verify if you're
advancing as expected with the traffic and conversions volume and trend per
device type, keywords, and pages:
To easily check your Google Analytics campaign tagging and referrers for your
mobile site (or your competitors), you can use user agent switchers along with
Google Analytics debuggers extensions for your browser:
For Firefox: use thisuser agent switcher and Google Analytics debugger
For Chrome: use this user agent switcher and Google Analytics debugger
Unfortunately, there are issues with the search referrer data that are not
passed from the Safari search box in iOS 6,and as a consequence, it's shown as
direct traffic in your analytics platform. Something similar also happens for
Android 4 mobile search traffic. Check outthis post by AJ Khonshowing how we can
create an advanced segment in Google Analytics to calculate the approximate
amount of the lost search traffic.
3.1. For your apps
The mobile app analytics will give you information about the amount of active
users, screen views, sessions to demographic information, used app versions,
goal completions, and in-app revenue:
Additionally, to verify your Google Analytics campaign tagging and referrers
for your mobile app (or your competitors), you can set a proxy on your own
computer, using a software like Charles Proxy(available for Windows and Mac), so
you'll be able to monitor the HTTP traffic that goes through it, even the one
from the apps installed on your mobile (that you'll need to set so it uses your
computer as proxy).
Follow these installation and configuration stepsto set your computer as a
proxy and configure your mobile network settings to use it as an HTTP proxy
(you'll need to add in the manual proxy settings your computer IP as the server
one with the 8888 port):
Now you'll able to monitor the HTTP requests made from your mobile through
Charles, including the ones made by your apps, as it can be seen in the
following example:
You can use this not only with your own apps, but with your competitor's to
check how they're tracking their mobile traffic and with your providers or
partners to see if they're effectively tagging their campaigns.
Be sure to take a look atthis Distilled postwith a complete check-list that
will guide you with the necessary settings and questions to better measure your
mobile presence.
Conclusion: There's no excuse. Start optimizing for multi-device search now.
As you can see, there's no excuse to not optimize for a multi-device search
ecosystem. It's true that the landscape may become more segmented, but many of
the best practices and optimization steps can be aligned between the different
presences, and will give you the chance to connect with an audience that you're
likely already losing.
Remember that search is always evolving, and if you don't catch it now, it
might be even more difficult with new type of device andsearch interactions in a
future that look even more segmented.
Do you have any questions or would like to share your opinions? I look forward
to your comments!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Wx18qDazoRw/the-3-steps-for-success-in-a-multidevice-search-world
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Multi-device Search World'
Posted by Aleyda Solis
We live in a multi-device world, and if you're still focused on improving your
visibility, traffic, and conversions solely for desktop users, you're losing a
great opportunity. This gap, coupled with the fact that you're probably staying
behind your competitors and unconnected with your audience, is not great for
business. Not convinced? Let's see some data...
Mobile search is booming.
It's already driving important multi-channel conversions.
However, we're still not doing our best for mobile and are losing
opportunities.
Despite the multichannel conversions that mobile search drives, we're still not
making the most out of it. There are people that feel it is still too
complicated and insecure to purchase goods on their smartphones:
Unfortunately, what are now fundamental aspects on our desktop-focused
optimization activities are sometimes still unknown when developing a
mobile-focused presence, even for some very important websites. For example:
A. Some websites don't have a mobile-focused presence
Remember that, despite having an audience that may be using the most advanced
smartphones and tablets, they still need an optimized offer that fulfills their
specific behaviors (not necessarily the same than the one from the desktop
users), providing the best experience according to their device characteristics
(and device-specific restrictions).
For example, can you guess which of these two sites provide me the best
experience, is really optimized for me, will make me stay (as a consequence),
and have a higher chance of conversions from me?
Although I have an iPhone 5 and my fingers are tiny, it's very difficult for me
to browse, interact, and consume information if the site doesn't have a version
well-optimized for the device I'm using.
B. Some sites have a mobile presence, but forget about optimization
fundamentals
On the other hand, other websites have a mobile presence (websites and apps
included), but that doesn't mean they're really optimized. As I mentioned
before, basics from our day-to-day "desktop focused" optimization activities are
for some reason forgotten when we go mobile or tablet.
For example, many websites love promoting their apps with intrusive
interstitials that disrupt the user mobile web flow, requiring interaction from
the user in order to continue:
What about relevant, descriptive titles? This optimization basic is frequently
forgotten, even by big websites when they go mobile (although these are
well-optimized in their desktop versions):
How about businesses that forget to create a landing page on their site for
their own mobile apps? When you search for the app, you get the first results
with iTunes store profiles that may confuse you (which one to choose?) featuring
not-so-great descriptions, along with some posts with negative reviews:
Time to get better control of your own app web results? Yes, please.
Two questions arise from these situations:
Can you blame people for not converting from their mobile devices?
How can you change it?
First, let's acknowledge the challenge of a multi-device ecosystem. Once we get
a handle on it, we'll have an overall vision in order to make the best
decisions, optimize your presence accordingly, and maximize your opportunities.
Mobile, Tablet, Web vs. App: The Segmentation Challenge
Usually, the first question we need to answer when we go mobile (whether
smartphone or tablet focused) is: do I develop a website or an app?
As I shared in this State of Search post, your decision should be based on
certain factors such as your business model; the goals you're trying to achieve;
how important is for your content to have a wider reach, and if it is web
indexable or not; whether or not you need to provide a complex functionality
that requires a higher hardware integration or connection independence; and if
your audience is highly-concentrated in few devices types and platforms. You'll
need to asses these characteristics along with mobile web and apps pros and
cons:
When you're deciding whether going mobile with a website or an app is the best
option for you, use the following visualization to analytze the alternatives:
You'll see that is easier to targetyour mobile audience with less web presence
than to do so with an app that is much more segmented.
However, when you think beyond the development alternatives to target your
mobile audience with the required functionalities and start thinking about how
you can optimize, grow the visibility, and generate conversions,you'll find that
most of the principles and good practices are the same (or can be easily
extrapolated):
Realize that, despite the many segmentation levels a multi-device presence may
have from a development and audience perspective, there are optimization
principles that are the same for any type of approach, platform, and device type
that you should be taking into consideration in order to make the most out of
the organic search channels to connect with your audience.
It's now the time to identify these similar principles and good practices to
make the most out the multi-device search opportunity, instead of focusing on
its complexities as an excuse. Otherwise, you will stay behind.
3 Steps to Improve Your Visibility in a Multi-device Search World
1. Optimize your presence for multi-device search visibility
People not only search for websites through web search, but also for apps
(whether from smartphones, tablets, or desktops, remember we're in a
multi-device world), so it's fundamental that you don't forget about creating
and optimizing a mobile web presence to increase your mobile app visibility
through web search, too.
Take a look at the exact-match local monthly search volume for some mobile apps
related keywordsin the US, from desktop and laptop devices:
And the volume for the searches from mobile devices with full Internet
browsers:
So, if you want to maximize the chances that your mobile presence (web or app)
gets the search visibility, users, and conversions it deserves, then you need to
make sure that it's easily found through the web search results. If you have a
mobile app, you'll also need to take into consideration your visibility in the
app store search. Let's see how!
1.1. Mobile web: select and optimize the best mobile web approach for your
situation
When you're developing a mobile website, the key is to select the best setting
according to your characteristics, restrictions, and needs. These settings
include responsive web, dynamic serving, or parallel mobile sites.
I've posted and presented about these many times, so it may be easier to check
out what I've shared before and avoid repeating myself. You'll see that eachone
of these alternatives have their pros and cons, as well as specific and general
SEO best practices that I discussed in this Moz post andMozinarsome months ago
about mobile SEO:
Nonetheless, beyond specifically optimizing each mobile web alternative
according to their characteristics, there are mobile web optimization
fundamentals that should always be followed:
1.1.1. Reorganize your content to be correctly displayed in mobile devices
Prioritizing the devices used by your audience (that you can identify through
your Google Analytics "Audience > Mobile > Devices" report) gives the
required visibility to the most important elements of your content. Think about
your user's goals as well as your own, and align them to reorganize your web
interface:
Beware of elements (like flash or interstitials) that are not correctly
displayed, dont work, or provide a bad user and search experience. Take a look
at the following Mobile usability resources:
Organizing Mobileby Luke Wroblewski
Nielsen's Mobile Website and Application Usability Report and Mobile Site vs.
Full Site article
Brad Frost post about Content Parity
1.1.2. Optimize your mobile pages relevance
Make your titles, meta descriptions, URLs, and, of course, your page's main
content relevant for your mobile web audience. Take your keywords into
consideration, and the visibility limitation of mobile search results in the
different type of devices:
Use mobile emulators and user agent switchers to easily validate by yourself
how your own pages are shown in mobile search results (for smartphones and
tablets, too), along with your competitors.
1.1.3. Enhance your pages visibility with structured markup and Google+
presence
Use structured data markup(reviews, people, businesses, apps, etc.), Google's
authorship,and create a presence in Google+ for your business to enhance your
page's results visibility, not only in desktop results, but also in your mobile
search results (where the visibility provided by these can be even higher in
comparison):
Google has also recently announced content recommendationsfor mobile sites with
a Google+ presence that will make the visibility obtained with it even higher.
1.1.4. Make your mobile site fast
Your mobile site has higher speed restrictions due to mobile networks and CPU
capabilities, which means it's even more important to optimize its speed.
Use your Google Analytics site speed report information to easily identify your
pages load times and analyze them withGoogle's PageSpeed Insights mobile filter
to identify opportunities to improve them:
Follow PageSpeed's mobile best practices and take into consideration what's
explained in this "Make the Mobile Web faster" article.
1.1.5. Serve the right web version according to the used device
It's important to effectively identify the type of device (desktop, tablet,
smartphone) used by your visitors and provide them the right web version by
using different techniques according to the Mobile Web approach you're
following:
With CSS media-queries withresponsive Web
With User agent detection with dynamic serving
With User agent detection and redirects with aparallel mobile site
1.2. Mobile apps: create and optimize landing pages for apps in your site
Give visibility to your app beyond the app store search results by creating a
landing page for each of your mobile apps on your own website. Make the landing
pages relevant, and optimize them to rank for popular searches of users looking
for your apps:
Make sure to feature testimonials and reviews, and add a visible link to your
app store page with call to actions to incentivize downloads:
Integrate your social presence as well, inviting for shares in social networks:
Additionally, Google has recently announced even more integration with Google+
for apps by showingGoogle+ Sign-Inapp activitiesin their results, which would
also give your results more visibility:
1.2. App Store Search
Although app store search optimization is still in early stages when we compare
it with web search and is specific to each app store (Android Market and the
Apple App Store),it's also evolving,aligning each time more with web search type
of factors, with an algorithm that is looking to reward:
Relevance: with the relevant terms in the App name, description, and keywords
Popularity: with download rate, install base, ratings, comments, and even
external review sites
Take these into consideration for your app store presence, by optimizing the
different elements of your profile:
In addition to promoting, gamifying your mobile experience (with profiles,
levels, badges, rewards, lists, etc.) to incentivize your app users activity is
a huge download driver. Take a look at how successful apps do it, like
Foursquare:
You can additionally promote your app through relevant sites in the sector,
such as app review blogs and communities:
On the other hand, take into consideration that sometimes app store preview
pages also rank in web search results and that there's also a specific
"Applications" search feature in Google, listing only application related
presence, for which these optimization best practices would be also beneficial
in order to get a better visibility:
There are also sites and tools like App AnnieandSearchman that provide free app
store statistics about the top apps per store, category, and country, which can
serve you as an input when optimizing your app:
2. Cross promote between your multi-device presence
Create awareness of your multi-device web and app presence through each other.
Promote your mobile app in a non-intrusive way (no interstitials) by inviting
users to download it when accessing the mobile site with a relevant device or to
switch to another web version, as shown in these images:
Make sure you also create awareness about your different multi-device presence
through all of your channels, from email signatures to social profiles to your
home page and emails, with updates and specially targeted mobile offers:
3. Measure to improve your multi-device presence
You cannot improve what you cannot measure, so it's fundamental to track,
continuously analyze, and make improvements not only to your desktop, but also
to your mobile presence based on their analytics data. You can still usingGoogle
Analyticsfor this, which provides anSDK for mobile app analytics.
3.1. For your web presence
You can use Google Analytics mobile reports and default segments along with
your own advanced segments and dashboards to follow-up and verify if you're
advancing as expected with the traffic and conversions volume and trend per
device type, keywords, and pages:
To easily check your Google Analytics campaign tagging and referrers for your
mobile site (or your competitors), you can use user agent switchers along with
Google Analytics debuggers extensions for your browser:
For Firefox: use thisuser agent switcher and Google Analytics debugger
For Chrome: use this user agent switcher and Google Analytics debugger
Unfortunately, there are issues with the search referrer data that are not
passed from the Safari search box in iOS 6,and as a consequence, it's shown as
direct traffic in your analytics platform. Something similar also happens for
Android 4 mobile search traffic. Check outthis post by AJ Khonshowing how we can
create an advanced segment in Google Analytics to calculate the approximate
amount of the lost search traffic.
3.1. For your apps
The mobile app analytics will give you information about the amount of active
users, screen views, sessions to demographic information, used app versions,
goal completions, and in-app revenue:
Additionally, to verify your Google Analytics campaign tagging and referrers
for your mobile app (or your competitors), you can set a proxy on your own
computer, using a software like Charles Proxy(available for Windows and Mac), so
you'll be able to monitor the HTTP traffic that goes through it, even the one
from the apps installed on your mobile (that you'll need to set so it uses your
computer as proxy).
Follow these installation and configuration stepsto set your computer as a
proxy and configure your mobile network settings to use it as an HTTP proxy
(you'll need to add in the manual proxy settings your computer IP as the server
one with the 8888 port):
Now you'll able to monitor the HTTP requests made from your mobile through
Charles, including the ones made by your apps, as it can be seen in the
following example:
You can use this not only with your own apps, but with your competitor's to
check how they're tracking their mobile traffic and with your providers or
partners to see if they're effectively tagging their campaigns.
Be sure to take a look atthis Distilled postwith a complete check-list that
will guide you with the necessary settings and questions to better measure your
mobile presence.
Conclusion: There's no excuse. Start optimizing for multi-device search now.
As you can see, there's no excuse to not optimize for a multi-device search
ecosystem. It's true that the landscape may become more segmented, but many of
the best practices and optimization steps can be aligned between the different
presences, and will give you the chance to connect with an audience that you're
likely already losing.
Remember that search is always evolving, and if you don't catch it now, it
might be even more difficult with new type of device andsearch interactions in a
future that look even more segmented.
Do you have any questions or would like to share your opinions? I look forward
to your comments!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Wx18qDazoRw/the-3-steps-for-success-in-a-multidevice-search-world
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday 20 May 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'APIs for Data-Driven Marketers'
Posted by Dr. Pete
Data is everywhere, and companies are virtually climbing over each other to
give it away. If youre a data-driven content marketer, data is opportunity, but
accessing that data can take some technical know-how. This is a guide to APIs,
one of the key methods for accessing 3rd-party data, and also a mini-directory
of some of the most useful APIs currently available to marketers.
What Is an API?
Lets start with the official definition API stands for Application Programming
Interface. Sorry, Im not the one who lets engineers name things. Put simply, an
API is a way to let you talk to a 3rd-party application, usually either to
retrieve data or update that application. Were going to focus primarily on the
first use (retrieving data), and it looks something like this:
The API itself isnt really a box floating in space, so much as a chunk of code
that acts as a gatekeeper. That code helps translate the third partys data into
something you can read, and it makes sure that only authorized users can access
the data (a process called authentication).
Why Should I Care?
There are hundreds of applications on the market that collect useful data, and
many of them are making that data available for free or very cheaply. You can
use that data to do original research, create unique content or even build your
own applications. If youd rather stick to beet farming, well then thats cool,
too.
Where Do I Start?
Heres the bad news APIs are far from standardized, and youre going to have to
understand data structures and write some code. This is not a how-to manual so
much as an overview of whats out there that can help you decide if the world of
APIs is right for you. There are some bright spots on the horizon tools and
sites that make programming APIs easier and Ill cover some of those at the end.
Following is a list of hand-selected APIs (Ill do my best not to play
favorites, and our competitors are on the list), broken down into a few industry
categories, and alphabetical within each category. For each API, Ill provide a
main link, a documentation link (documentation can be way too hard to find), a
brief description of whats available in that API, and whether or not theres a
free version. APIs are split into five sections:
APIs for SEO
APIs for PPC
APIs for Social
Miscellaneous APIs
API Support Tools
The last section covers sites and tools that can help you if you're new to
APIs, new to programming, or just are hunting for something that's not on this
list.
(1) APIs for SEO
This section contains APIs for organic SEO data, including keyword research and
link profiling.
Bing Search(Docs)
The Bing search API allows you to integrate Bing search results and search data
directly into your applications, including web search, images, news, videos,
related search, and spelling suggestions.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Majestic SEO(Docs)
The Majestic API includes a wide range of link metrics, including full
back-link lists, discovery dates for links, anchor text, redirection
information, and ACRank. Some features are limited to the paid version.
Free Version?YES, but limited functionality.
Raven Tools(Docs)
The Raven Tools API lets customers access and update account and campaign
information. It can also be used to access link data from your Raven campaigns.
Free Version?NO, paid accounts only.
SEOmoz Mozscape(Docs)
SEOmoz's API has access to proprietary metrics, including MozRank, Domain
Authority, and Page Authority, as well as link metrics such as linking root
domains and anchor text data.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
WordStream Keyword Tool(Docs)
WordStream's Keyword Tool API lets you access WordStream's keyword volume
metrics, along with related keywords and structured keyword suggestions.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
(2) APIs for PPC
The following APIs provide access to major ad platforms, including Google,
Bing, and Facebook.
Bing Ads API (Docs)
While primarily a campaign management platform, the Bing Ads API does have
access to useful data, including keword volume and keyword
suggestions/opportunities.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
Facebook Ads API (Docs)
The Facebook Ads API provides access to managing Facebook campaigns, as well
as statistics about Facebook keyword searches and audience segments.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
Google AdWords API (Docs)
Like Bing, the Google AdWords API is mainly for campaign management and
building AdWords apps, but it also the only portal to Google keyword volume
data. Getting authorized can be a long process.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
SEMRush API (Docs)
The SEMRush API has a number of tools for both organic and paid search
campaigns, but where it really shines is in competitive analysis, especially for
paid search.
Free Version?NO, starts at $15/month.
(3) APIs for Social
These APIs can access a wealth of information from major social networks and
social aggregators.
Facebook Graph(Docs)
Facebook's "Graph" API is the primariy interface to building Facebook-based
apps, updating Facebook accounts, and accessing Facebook social graph data.
There are other, secondary Facebook APIs.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
FollowerWonk (Docs)
FollowerWonk's Social Authority API scores Twitter users on a 1-100 scale, for
simple influence scoring and comparisons (Note: FollowerWonk is a part of
SEOmoz).
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Gnip (Docs)
Gnip provides an enterprise-level API with "firehose" and filtered streams for
Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and more. Pricing is custom and is aimed at
large-scale applications.
Free Version?YES, but trial only.
Google+ (Docs)
The official Google+ API allows you to manage accounts, build apps, and access
to data from user profiles, posts, and comments. It includes some limited search
capability.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Klout(Docs)
The Klout API provides access to Klout's aggregate social metrics, including
Klout score, influencers, influence graphs, and topics of influence.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
PeerIndex(Docs)
PeerIndex is another social aggregator, and their API provides data on multiple
influence metrics, including activity, authority, and audience scores.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
SharedCount (Docs)
The SharedCount API lets you access sharing stats on a number of platforms,
including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious,
StumbleUpon, and Pinterest.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Topsy (Docs)
The Topsy Otter API is an alternative source for Twitter data, including a
number of useful search functions - search by keyword, by links mentioned, by
popluar stories on a domain, etc.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Twitter (Docs)
The official Twitter RESTful API includes many tools for account management and
data gathering, including individual tweet and user data, follower stats, and a
variety of search options.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
(4) Miscellaneous APIs
Here are some other useful APIs, including Google products, analytics, and text
processing.
AlchemyAPI(Docs)
AlchemyAPI provides a Natural Language Processing engine to perform tasks such
as sentiment analysis, named entity extraction, author extraction, and topic
categorization.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Google Analytics API (Docs)
The Google Analytics API is a full-featured system to manage GA accounts and
profiles, customize tracking codes, and to access and export analytics data.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
Google Places API (Docs)
The Google Places API allows you to access the entire family of Google local
data, including Google Maps, Google+ Local, and Google Places search.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
PageSpeed Insights(Docs)
PageSpeed Insights is a Google Developer tool for website performance
analysis. The PageSpeed API allows access to PageSpeed scores and
recommendations.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
Repustate(Docs)
The Repustate API provides access to a number of advanced algorithms,
including sentiment analysis, social media monitioring, and predictive
analytics.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
(5) API Support Tools
If you're new to APIs, this section can help get you started or find APIs
outside the scope of this post.
CodeAcademy API Track
CodeAcademy is a resource for learning programming concepts and languages. The
API track has specific online courses designed to help you learn API coding.
Free Version?YES.
Mashape (Docs)
Mashape is an API marketplace that allows you to access over 2,000 APIs from a
single account. Mashape also lets you distribute and monetize your own APIs.
Free Version?YES, depending on the API.
ProgrammableWeb
ProgrammableWeb is a directory of over 9,000 APIs on a wide variety of topics.
ProgrammableWeb has its own API, that allows you to access their search
database.
Free Version?YES.
SEER Interactive SEO Toolbox (Docs)
SEER's all-in-one interactive toolbox lets you access multple APIs via Excel,
including Google Analytics, SEOmoz, Majestic, Raven, Twitter, and Klout.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
SEOGadget Excel API Extensions (Docs)
The SEOGadget API extension for Excel allows you to easily call link data from
Excel spreadsheets, including SEOmoz, Majestic, and additional SEOGadget data.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
What Are Your Favorites?
While I don't intend this to be an exhaustive list of APIs, I'll try to keep
the post up to date with the most useful APIs for marketers (assuming that
people are interested). So, feel free to share your favorite data-collection
APIs in the comments.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/OYIVR1mq-Q4/apis-for-datadriven-marketers
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by Dr. Pete
Data is everywhere, and companies are virtually climbing over each other to
give it away. If youre a data-driven content marketer, data is opportunity, but
accessing that data can take some technical know-how. This is a guide to APIs,
one of the key methods for accessing 3rd-party data, and also a mini-directory
of some of the most useful APIs currently available to marketers.
What Is an API?
Lets start with the official definition API stands for Application Programming
Interface. Sorry, Im not the one who lets engineers name things. Put simply, an
API is a way to let you talk to a 3rd-party application, usually either to
retrieve data or update that application. Were going to focus primarily on the
first use (retrieving data), and it looks something like this:
The API itself isnt really a box floating in space, so much as a chunk of code
that acts as a gatekeeper. That code helps translate the third partys data into
something you can read, and it makes sure that only authorized users can access
the data (a process called authentication).
Why Should I Care?
There are hundreds of applications on the market that collect useful data, and
many of them are making that data available for free or very cheaply. You can
use that data to do original research, create unique content or even build your
own applications. If youd rather stick to beet farming, well then thats cool,
too.
Where Do I Start?
Heres the bad news APIs are far from standardized, and youre going to have to
understand data structures and write some code. This is not a how-to manual so
much as an overview of whats out there that can help you decide if the world of
APIs is right for you. There are some bright spots on the horizon tools and
sites that make programming APIs easier and Ill cover some of those at the end.
Following is a list of hand-selected APIs (Ill do my best not to play
favorites, and our competitors are on the list), broken down into a few industry
categories, and alphabetical within each category. For each API, Ill provide a
main link, a documentation link (documentation can be way too hard to find), a
brief description of whats available in that API, and whether or not theres a
free version. APIs are split into five sections:
APIs for SEO
APIs for PPC
APIs for Social
Miscellaneous APIs
API Support Tools
The last section covers sites and tools that can help you if you're new to
APIs, new to programming, or just are hunting for something that's not on this
list.
(1) APIs for SEO
This section contains APIs for organic SEO data, including keyword research and
link profiling.
Bing Search(Docs)
The Bing search API allows you to integrate Bing search results and search data
directly into your applications, including web search, images, news, videos,
related search, and spelling suggestions.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Majestic SEO(Docs)
The Majestic API includes a wide range of link metrics, including full
back-link lists, discovery dates for links, anchor text, redirection
information, and ACRank. Some features are limited to the paid version.
Free Version?YES, but limited functionality.
Raven Tools(Docs)
The Raven Tools API lets customers access and update account and campaign
information. It can also be used to access link data from your Raven campaigns.
Free Version?NO, paid accounts only.
SEOmoz Mozscape(Docs)
SEOmoz's API has access to proprietary metrics, including MozRank, Domain
Authority, and Page Authority, as well as link metrics such as linking root
domains and anchor text data.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
WordStream Keyword Tool(Docs)
WordStream's Keyword Tool API lets you access WordStream's keyword volume
metrics, along with related keywords and structured keyword suggestions.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
(2) APIs for PPC
The following APIs provide access to major ad platforms, including Google,
Bing, and Facebook.
Bing Ads API (Docs)
While primarily a campaign management platform, the Bing Ads API does have
access to useful data, including keword volume and keyword
suggestions/opportunities.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
Facebook Ads API (Docs)
The Facebook Ads API provides access to managing Facebook campaigns, as well
as statistics about Facebook keyword searches and audience segments.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
Google AdWords API (Docs)
Like Bing, the Google AdWords API is mainly for campaign management and
building AdWords apps, but it also the only portal to Google keyword volume
data. Getting authorized can be a long process.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
SEMRush API (Docs)
The SEMRush API has a number of tools for both organic and paid search
campaigns, but where it really shines is in competitive analysis, especially for
paid search.
Free Version?NO, starts at $15/month.
(3) APIs for Social
These APIs can access a wealth of information from major social networks and
social aggregators.
Facebook Graph(Docs)
Facebook's "Graph" API is the primariy interface to building Facebook-based
apps, updating Facebook accounts, and accessing Facebook social graph data.
There are other, secondary Facebook APIs.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
FollowerWonk (Docs)
FollowerWonk's Social Authority API scores Twitter users on a 1-100 scale, for
simple influence scoring and comparisons (Note: FollowerWonk is a part of
SEOmoz).
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Gnip (Docs)
Gnip provides an enterprise-level API with "firehose" and filtered streams for
Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and more. Pricing is custom and is aimed at
large-scale applications.
Free Version?YES, but trial only.
Google+ (Docs)
The official Google+ API allows you to manage accounts, build apps, and access
to data from user profiles, posts, and comments. It includes some limited search
capability.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Klout(Docs)
The Klout API provides access to Klout's aggregate social metrics, including
Klout score, influencers, influence graphs, and topics of influence.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
PeerIndex(Docs)
PeerIndex is another social aggregator, and their API provides data on multiple
influence metrics, including activity, authority, and audience scores.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
SharedCount (Docs)
The SharedCount API lets you access sharing stats on a number of platforms,
including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious,
StumbleUpon, and Pinterest.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Topsy (Docs)
The Topsy Otter API is an alternative source for Twitter data, including a
number of useful search functions - search by keyword, by links mentioned, by
popluar stories on a domain, etc.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Twitter (Docs)
The official Twitter RESTful API includes many tools for account management and
data gathering, including individual tweet and user data, follower stats, and a
variety of search options.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
(4) Miscellaneous APIs
Here are some other useful APIs, including Google products, analytics, and text
processing.
AlchemyAPI(Docs)
AlchemyAPI provides a Natural Language Processing engine to perform tasks such
as sentiment analysis, named entity extraction, author extraction, and topic
categorization.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
Google Analytics API (Docs)
The Google Analytics API is a full-featured system to manage GA accounts and
profiles, customize tracking codes, and to access and export analytics data.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
Google Places API (Docs)
The Google Places API allows you to access the entire family of Google local
data, including Google Maps, Google+ Local, and Google Places search.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
PageSpeed Insights(Docs)
PageSpeed Insights is a Google Developer tool for website performance
analysis. The PageSpeed API allows access to PageSpeed scores and
recommendations.
Free Version?YES,but authorization required.
Repustate(Docs)
The Repustate API provides access to a number of advanced algorithms,
including sentiment analysis, social media monitioring, and predictive
analytics.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
(5) API Support Tools
If you're new to APIs, this section can help get you started or find APIs
outside the scope of this post.
CodeAcademy API Track
CodeAcademy is a resource for learning programming concepts and languages. The
API track has specific online courses designed to help you learn API coding.
Free Version?YES.
Mashape (Docs)
Mashape is an API marketplace that allows you to access over 2,000 APIs from a
single account. Mashape also lets you distribute and monetize your own APIs.
Free Version?YES, depending on the API.
ProgrammableWeb
ProgrammableWeb is a directory of over 9,000 APIs on a wide variety of topics.
ProgrammableWeb has its own API, that allows you to access their search
database.
Free Version?YES.
SEER Interactive SEO Toolbox (Docs)
SEER's all-in-one interactive toolbox lets you access multple APIs via Excel,
including Google Analytics, SEOmoz, Majestic, Raven, Twitter, and Klout.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
SEOGadget Excel API Extensions (Docs)
The SEOGadget API extension for Excel allows you to easily call link data from
Excel spreadsheets, including SEOmoz, Majestic, and additional SEOGadget data.
Free Version?YES, but rate-limited.
What Are Your Favorites?
While I don't intend this to be an exhaustive list of APIs, I'll try to keep
the post up to date with the most useful APIs for marketers (assuming that
people are interested). So, feel free to share your favorite data-collection
APIs in the comments.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/OYIVR1mq-Q4/apis-for-datadriven-marketers
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 14 May 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'How to Rank: 25 Step SEO Master
Blueprint'
Posted by Cyrus Shepard
If youre like most SEOs, you spend a lot of time reading. Over the past several
years, Ive spent 100s of hours studying blogs, guides, and Google patents. Not
long ago, I realized that 90% of what I read each doesnt change what I actually
do - that is, the basic work of ranking a web page higher on Google.
For newer SEOs, the process can be overwhelming.
To simplify this process, I created this SEO blueprint. Its meant as a
framework for newer SEOs to build their own work on top of. This basic blueprint
has helped, in one form or another, 100s of pages and dozens of sites to gain
higher rankings.
Think of it as an intermediate SEO instruction manual, for beginners.
Level: Beginner to Intermediate
Timeframe: 2 to 10 Weeks
What you need to know: The blueprint assumes you have basic SEO knowledge:
youre not scared of title tags, can implement a rel=canonical, and youve built a
link or two. (If this is your first time to the rodeo, we suggest reading the
Beginners Guide to SEO and browsing our Learn SEO section.)
Keyword Research
1. Working Smarter, Not Harder
Keyword research can be simple or hard, but it should always be fun. For the
sake of the Blueprint, lets do keyword research the easy way.
The biggest mistakes people make with keyword research are:
Choosing keywords that are too broad
Keywords with too much competition
Keywords without enough traffic
Keywords that dont convert
Trying to rank for one keyword at a time
The biggest mistake people make is trying to rank for a single keyword at a
time. This is the hard way. Its much easier, and much more profitable, to rank
for 100s or even 1,000s of long tail keywords with the same piece of content.
Instead of ranking for a single keyword, lets aim our project around a keyword
theme.
2. Dream Your Keyword Theme
Using keyword themes solves a whole lot of problems. Instead of ranking for one
Holy Grail keyword, a better goal is to rank for lots of keywords focused around
a single idea. Done right, the results are amazing.
I assume you know enough about your business to understand what type of visitor
youre seeking and whether youre looking for traffic, conversions, or both.
Regardless, one simple rule holds true:the more specific you define your theme,
the easier it is to rank.
This is basic stuff, but it bears repeating. If your topic is the football,
youll find it hard to rank for Super Bowl, but slightly easier to rank for Super
Bowl 2014 - and easier yet to rank for Best Super Bowl Recipes of 2014.
Dont focus on specific words yet - all you need to know is your broad topic.
The next step is to find the right keyword qualifiers.
3. Get Specific with Qualifiers
Qualifiers are words that add specificity to keywords and define intent. They
take many different forms.
Time/Date: 2001, December, Morning
Price/Quality: Cheap, Best, Most Popular
Intent: Buy, Shop, Find
Location: Houston, Outdoors, Online
The idea is to find as many qualifiers as possible that fit your audience.
Heres where keyword tools enter the picture. You can use any keyword tool you
like, but favorites include Wordstream, Keyword Spy, SpyFu, and Bing Keyword
Tool and bersuggest.
For speed and real-world insight, bersuggest is an all-time SEO favorite. Run a
simple query and export over 100 suggested keyword based on Googles own
Autocomplete feature based on actual Google searches.
Did I mention its free?
4. Finding Diamonds in the Google Rough
At this point you have a few dozen, or a few hundred keywords to pull into
Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Pro Tip #1: While its possible to run over a hundred keyword phrases at once
in Googles Keyword Tool, you get more variety if you limit your searches to 5-10
at a time.
Using Exact search types and Local Monthly search volume, were looking for
10-15 closely related keyword phrases with decent search volume, but not too
much completion.
Pro Tip #2: Be careful trusting the Competition column in Google Adwords
Keyword Tool. This refers to bids on paid search terms, not organic search.
5. Get Strategic with the Competition
Now that we have a basic keyword set, you need to find out if you can actually
rank for your phrases. You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:
Automated tools like the Keyword Difficulty Tool
Eyeballing the SERPs
If you have an SEOmoz PRO membership (or even a free trial) the Keyword
Difficulty Tool calculates on a 100 point scale a difficulty score for each
individual keyword phrase you enter.
Keyword phrases in the 60-70+ range are typically competitive, while keywords
in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.
To get a better idea of your own strengths, take the most competitive keyword
you currently rank #1 or #2 for, and run it through the tool.
Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to
eyeball the SERPs. Run a search query (non-personalized) for your keywords and
ask yourself the following questions:
Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
Whats the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
Are the first few results authorities on the keyword subject?
Whats the inbound anchor text?
Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword?
You dont actually have to rank #1 for any of your chosen words to earn traffic,
but you should be comfortable cracking the top five.
With keyword themes, the magic often happens from keywords you never even
thought about.
Case Study: Google Algo Update
When SEOmoz launched the Google Algorithm Change HIstory (run by Dr. Pete) we
used a similar process for keyword research to explore the theme Google
Algorithm and more specifically, Google Algorithm Change.
According to Googles search tool, we could expect a no more than a couple
thousand visits a month best case for these exact terms. Fortunately, because
the project was well received and because we optimized around a board keyword
theme of Google Algorithm, the Algo Update receives lots of traffic outside our
pre-defined keywords.
This is where the long tail magic happens:
How can you improve your chances of ranking for more long tail keywords? Lets
talk about content, architecture, on-page optimization and link building.
Content
6. Creating Value
Want to know the truth? I hate the word content. It implies words on a page, a
commodity to be produced, separated from the value it creates.
Content without value is spam.
In the Google Algorithm Update example above, we could have simply written 100
articles about Googles Algorithm and hoped to rank. Instead, the conversation
started by asking how we could create a valuable resource for webmasters.
For your keyword theme, ask first how you can create value.
Value is harder to produce than mere words, but value is rewarded 100x more.
Value is future proof & algorithm proof. Value builds links by itself. Value
creates loyal fans.
Value takes different forms. Its a mix of:
Utility
Emotional response
Point of view (positive or negative)
Perceived value, including fame of the author
Your content doesnt have to include all 4 of these characteristics, but it
should excel in one or more to be successful.
A study of the New York Times found key characteristics of content to be
influential in making the Most Emailed list.
Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528077\
7. Driving Your Content Vehicle
Heres a preview: the Blueprint requires you create at least one type of link
bait, so now is a good time to think about the structure of your content.
Whats the best way to deliver value given your theme? Perhaps its an
Infographic
Video series
A new tool
An interview series
Slide deck
How-to guide
Q&A
Webinar or simple blog post
Perhaps, its all of these combined.
The more ways you find to deliver your content and the more channels you take
advantage of, the better off youll be.
Not all of your content has to go viral, but you want to create at least one
tent-pole piece thats better than anything else out there and youre proud to
hang your hat on.
If you need inspiration, check out Distilled's guide to Viral Linkbait or
QuickSprouts Templates for Content Creation.
8. Title Most Important Work Goes Here
Spend two hours, minimum, writing your title.
Sound ridiculous? If youre an experienced title writer like Rand Fishkin, you
can break this rule. For the rest of us, its difficult to underplay the value
delivered by a finely crafted title.
Write 50 titles or more before choosing one.
Study the successful titles on Inbound.org, Mashable, Wired, or your favorite
publication.
Whatever you do, read this fantastic post by Dan Shure and the headline
resources at CopyBlogger.
9. Length vs. Depth - Why it Matters
How long should your content be? A better question is: How deep should it be?
Word count by itself is a terrible metric to strive for, but depth of content
helps you to rank in several ways.
Adds uniqueness threshold to avoid duplicate content
Deeper topic exploration makes your content about more
Quality, longer content is correlated with more linksand higher rankings
I. Uniqueness
At a minimum, your content needs to meet a minimum uniqueness threshold in
order for it to rank. Google reps have gone on record to say a couple sentences
is sometimes sufficient, but in reality a couple hundred words is much safer.
II. Long Tail Opportunities
Heres where the real magic happens. The deeper your content and the more
in-depth you can explore a particular topic, the more your content becomes
about.
The more your content is about, the more search queries it can answer well.
The more search queries you can answer well, the more traffic you can earn.
Googles crawlers continuously read your content to determine how relevant it is
to search queries. They evaluate paragraphs, subject headings, photographs and
more to try to understand your page. Longer, in-depth content usually send more
relevancy signals than a couple short sentences.
III. Depth, Length, and Links
Numerous correlation studies have shown a positive relationship between
rankings and number of words in a document.
The length in HTML and the HTML within the <body> tag were the highest
correlated factors, in fact with correlations of .12 they could be considered
somewhat if not hugely significant.
While these factors probably are not implemented within the algorithm, they
are good signs of what Google is looking for; quality content, which in many
cases means long or at least sufficiently lengthy pages.
- Mark Collier The Open Algorithm
This could be attributed longer, quality content earning more links. John
Doherty examined the relationship between the length of blog posts on SEOmoz and
the number of links each post earned, and found a strong relationship.
10. Content Qualities You Can Bank On
If you dont focus on word count, how do you add quality depth to your content?
SEOs have written volumes about how Google might define quality including
metrics such as reading level, grammar, spelling, and even Author Rank. Most is
speculation, but its clear Google does use guidelines to separate good content
from bad.
My favorite source for clues comes from the set of questions Google published
shortly after the first Panda update. Here are a few of my favorites.
11. LDA, nTopic, and Words on the Page
Google is a machine. It cant yet understand your page like a human can, but its
getting close.
Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to model your sentences,
paragraphs, blocks,and content sections. Not only do they want to understand
your keywords, but also your topic, intent, and expertise as well.
How do you know if your content fits Googles model of expectations?
For example, if your topic is Super Bowl Recipes, Google might expect to see
content about grilling, appetizers, and guacamole. Content that addresses these
topics will likely rank higher than pages that talk about what color socks youre
wearing today.
Words matter.
SEOs have discovered that using certain words around a topic associated with
concepts like LDA and nTopic are correlated with higher rankings.
Virante offers an interesting stand alone keyword suggestion tool called
nTopic. The tools analyzes your keywords and suggests related keywords to
improve your relevancy scores.
12. Better than LDA - Poor Man's Topic Modeling
Since we dont have access to Googles computers for topic modeling, theres a far
simpler way to structure your content that I find far superior to worrying about
individual words:
Use the keyword themes you created at the beginning of this blueprint.
Youve already done the research using Googles keyword tool to find closely
related keyword groups. Incorporating these topics into your content may help
increase your relevancy to your given topic.
Example: Using the Google Algorithm project cited above, we found during
keyword research that certain keywords related to our theme show up repeatedly,
time and time again. If we conducted this research today, we would find phrases
like Penguin SEO and Panda Updates frequently in our results.
Google suggests these terms via the keyword tool because they consider them
closely related. So any content that explored Google Algorithm Change might
likely include a discussion of these ideas.
Note: This isn't real LDA, simply a way of adding relevant topics to your
content that Google might associate with your subject matter.
13. Design Is 50% of the Battle
If you have any money in your budget, spend it on design. A small investment
with a designer typically pays outsized dividends down the road. Good design
can:
Lower bounce rate
Increase page views
Increase time on site
Earn more links
Establish trust
All of which can help earn higher rankings.
Design doesnt just matter, its 50% of the battle.
-Rand Fishkin
Dribbble.com is one of our favorite source of design inspiration.
Architecture
Heres the special secret of the SEO Blueprint: youre not making a single page
to rank; youre making several.
14. Content Hubs
Very few successful websites consist of a single page. Google determines
context and relevancy not only by whats on your page, but also by the pages
around it and linking to it.
The truth is, its far easier to rank when you create Content Hubs exploring
several topics in depth focused around a central theme.
Using our Super Bowl Recipes example, we might create a complete section of
pages, each exploring a different recipe in depth.
15. Linking the Hub Together
Because your pages now explore different aspects of the same broad topic, it
makes sense to link them together.
Your page about guacamole relates to your page about nachos.
Your page about link building relates to your page about infographics.
Your page about Winston Churchill relates to major figures of World War II.
It also helps them to rank by distributing PageRank, anchor text, and other
relevancy signals.
16. Find Your Center
Content Hubs work best with a hub or center. Think of the center as the master
document that acts as an overview or gateway to all of your individual content
pages.
The hub is the authority page. Often, the hub is a link bait page or a category
level page. Its typically the page with the most inbound links and often as a
landing page for other sections of your site.
For great example of Hub Pages, check out:
CopyBloggers Magnetic Headlines
SEOmoz's Learn SEO
Amazons author pages (this one about Stephen King)
On-Page Optimization
17. Master the Basics
You could write an entire book about on-page optimization. If youre new to SEO,
one of the best ways to learn is by using SEOmozs On-page Report Card (free,
registration required) The tool grades 36 separate on-page SEO elements, gives
you a report and suggestions on how to fix each element. Working your way
through these issues is an excellent way to learn (and often used by agencies
and companies as a way to teach SEO principals)
Beyond the basics, lets address a few slightly more advanced tactics to take
advantage of your unique keyword themes and hub pages, in addition to areas
where beginners often make mistakes.
18. Linking Internally for the Reasonable Surfer
Not all links are created equal (One of the greatest SEO blog posts ever
written!) So, when you interlink your internal pages within your content hub
together, keep in mind a few important points.
Links from inside unique content pass more value than navigation links.
Links higher up the page pass more value than links further down.
Links in HTML text pass more weight than image links.
When interlinking your content, its best to keep links prominent and editorial
naturally link to your most important content pages higher up in the HTML text.
19. Diversify Your Anchor Text - Naturally
If Googles Penguin update taught us anything, its that over-thinking anchor
text is bound to get us in trouble.
When you link naturally and editorially to other places on the web, you
naturally diversify your anchor text. The same should hold true when you link
internally.
Dont choose your anchor text to fit your keywords;choose your anchor text to
fit the content around it.
Practically speaking, this means linking internally with a mix of partial match
keyword and related phrases. Dont be scared to link occasionally without good
keywords in the anchor the link can still pass relevancy signals. When it comes
to linking, its safer to under-do it than over-do it.
Spouce: Google's SEO Starter Guide
20. Title Tags - Two Quick Tips
We assume you know how to write a compelling title tag. Even today, keyword
usage in the title tag is one of the most highly correlated on-page ranking
factors that we know.
That said, Google is getting strict about over-optimizing title tags, and
appears to be further cracking down on titles written for SEO. Keep this in mind
when crafting your title tags
I. Avoid boilerplates
It used to be common to tack on your business phrase or main keywords to the
end of every title tag, like so:
Plumbing Supplies Chicago Plumbing and Fixtures
Pipes & Fittings Chicago Plumbing and Fixtures
Toilet Seat Covers Chicago Plumbing and Fixtures
While we dont have much solid data, many SEOs are now asserting that
boilerplate titles tacked on to the end of every tag are no longer a good idea.
Brand names and unique descriptive information is okay, but making every title
as unique as possible is the rule of the day.
II. Avoid unnecessary repetition Google also appears (at least to many SEOs)
on whats considered the lower threshold of keyword stuffing.
In years past it was a common rule of thumb never to repeat your keyword more
than twice in the title. Today, to be on the safe side, you might be best to
consider not repeating your keywords more than once.
21. Over-Optimization: Titles, URLs, and Links
Writing for humans not only gets you more clicks (which can lead to higher
rankings), but hardly ever gets you in trouble with search engines.
As SEOs we're often tempted to get a "perfect score" which means exactly
matching our title tags, URLs, inbound anchor text, and more. unfortunately,
this isn't natural in the real world, and Google recognizes this.
Diversify. Dont over-optimize.
22. Structured Data
Short and simple: Make structured data part of every webpage. While structured
data hasnt yet proven to be a large ranking factor, its future-facing value can
be seen today in rich snippet SERPs and social media sharing. In some verticals,
its an absolute necessity.
Theres no rule of thumb about what structured data to include, but the
essentials are:
Facebook Open Graph tags
Twitter Cards
Authorship
Publisher
Business information
Reviews
Events
To be honest, if youre not creating pages with structured data, youre probably
behind the times.
For an excellent guide about Micro Data and Schema.org, check out this
fantastic resource from SEOGadget.
Building Links
23. The 90/10 Rule of Link Building
This blueprint contains 25 steps to rank your content, but only the last three
address link building. Why so few? Because 90% of your effort should go into
creating great content, and 10% into link building.
If you have a hard time building links, it may be because you have these
numbers reversed.
Creating great content first solves a ton of problems down the line:
Good content makes link building easier
Attracts higher quality links in less time
Builds links on its own even when sleeping or on vacation
If youre new to marketing or relatively unknown, you may need to spend more
than 10% of your time building relationships, but dont let that distract you
from crafting the type of content that folks find so valuable they link to you
without you even asking.
24. All Link Building is Relationships - Good & Bad
This blueprint doesn't go into link building specifics, as there are 100's of
ways to build quality links to every good project. That said, a few of my must
link building resources:
Jon Cooper's Complete List of Link Building Strategies
StumbleUpon Paid Discovery
Citation Labs
Promoted Tweets
Ontolo
eReleases - Press releases not for links, but for exposer
BuzzStream
Paddy Moogan's excellent Link Building Book
These resources give you the basic tools and tactics for a successful link
building campaign, but keep in mind that all good link building is relationship
building.
Successful link builders understand this and foster each relationship and
connection. Even a simple outreach letter can be elevated to an advanced form of
relationship building with a little effort, as this Whiteboard Friday by Rand so
graciously illustrates.
25. Tier Your Link Building... Forever
The truth is, for professionals, link building never ends. Each content and
link building campaign layers on top of previous content, and the web as a whole
like layers of fine Greek baklava.
For example, this post could be considered linkbait for SEOmoz, but it also
links generously to several other content pieces within the Moz family, and
externally as well; spreading both the link love and the relationship building
as far as possible at the same time.
SEOmoz links generously to other sites: the link building experience is not
just about search engines, but the people experience, as well. We link to great
resources, and build links for the best user experience possible. When done
right, the search engines reward exactly this type of experience with higher
rankings.
For an excellent explanation as to why you should link out to external sites
when warranted, read AJ Kohns excellent work, Time to Long Click.
One of my favorite posts on SEOmoz was 10 Ugly SEO Tools that Actually Rock.
Not only was the first link on the page directed to our own SEO tools, but we
linked and praised our competitors as well.
Linkbait at its finest.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/9Oe7VYBoIKU/how-to-rank
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Blueprint'
Posted by Cyrus Shepard
If youre like most SEOs, you spend a lot of time reading. Over the past several
years, Ive spent 100s of hours studying blogs, guides, and Google patents. Not
long ago, I realized that 90% of what I read each doesnt change what I actually
do - that is, the basic work of ranking a web page higher on Google.
For newer SEOs, the process can be overwhelming.
To simplify this process, I created this SEO blueprint. Its meant as a
framework for newer SEOs to build their own work on top of. This basic blueprint
has helped, in one form or another, 100s of pages and dozens of sites to gain
higher rankings.
Think of it as an intermediate SEO instruction manual, for beginners.
Level: Beginner to Intermediate
Timeframe: 2 to 10 Weeks
What you need to know: The blueprint assumes you have basic SEO knowledge:
youre not scared of title tags, can implement a rel=canonical, and youve built a
link or two. (If this is your first time to the rodeo, we suggest reading the
Beginners Guide to SEO and browsing our Learn SEO section.)
Keyword Research
1. Working Smarter, Not Harder
Keyword research can be simple or hard, but it should always be fun. For the
sake of the Blueprint, lets do keyword research the easy way.
The biggest mistakes people make with keyword research are:
Choosing keywords that are too broad
Keywords with too much competition
Keywords without enough traffic
Keywords that dont convert
Trying to rank for one keyword at a time
The biggest mistake people make is trying to rank for a single keyword at a
time. This is the hard way. Its much easier, and much more profitable, to rank
for 100s or even 1,000s of long tail keywords with the same piece of content.
Instead of ranking for a single keyword, lets aim our project around a keyword
theme.
2. Dream Your Keyword Theme
Using keyword themes solves a whole lot of problems. Instead of ranking for one
Holy Grail keyword, a better goal is to rank for lots of keywords focused around
a single idea. Done right, the results are amazing.
I assume you know enough about your business to understand what type of visitor
youre seeking and whether youre looking for traffic, conversions, or both.
Regardless, one simple rule holds true:the more specific you define your theme,
the easier it is to rank.
This is basic stuff, but it bears repeating. If your topic is the football,
youll find it hard to rank for Super Bowl, but slightly easier to rank for Super
Bowl 2014 - and easier yet to rank for Best Super Bowl Recipes of 2014.
Dont focus on specific words yet - all you need to know is your broad topic.
The next step is to find the right keyword qualifiers.
3. Get Specific with Qualifiers
Qualifiers are words that add specificity to keywords and define intent. They
take many different forms.
Time/Date: 2001, December, Morning
Price/Quality: Cheap, Best, Most Popular
Intent: Buy, Shop, Find
Location: Houston, Outdoors, Online
The idea is to find as many qualifiers as possible that fit your audience.
Heres where keyword tools enter the picture. You can use any keyword tool you
like, but favorites include Wordstream, Keyword Spy, SpyFu, and Bing Keyword
Tool and bersuggest.
For speed and real-world insight, bersuggest is an all-time SEO favorite. Run a
simple query and export over 100 suggested keyword based on Googles own
Autocomplete feature based on actual Google searches.
Did I mention its free?
4. Finding Diamonds in the Google Rough
At this point you have a few dozen, or a few hundred keywords to pull into
Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Pro Tip #1: While its possible to run over a hundred keyword phrases at once
in Googles Keyword Tool, you get more variety if you limit your searches to 5-10
at a time.
Using Exact search types and Local Monthly search volume, were looking for
10-15 closely related keyword phrases with decent search volume, but not too
much completion.
Pro Tip #2: Be careful trusting the Competition column in Google Adwords
Keyword Tool. This refers to bids on paid search terms, not organic search.
5. Get Strategic with the Competition
Now that we have a basic keyword set, you need to find out if you can actually
rank for your phrases. You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:
Automated tools like the Keyword Difficulty Tool
Eyeballing the SERPs
If you have an SEOmoz PRO membership (or even a free trial) the Keyword
Difficulty Tool calculates on a 100 point scale a difficulty score for each
individual keyword phrase you enter.
Keyword phrases in the 60-70+ range are typically competitive, while keywords
in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.
To get a better idea of your own strengths, take the most competitive keyword
you currently rank #1 or #2 for, and run it through the tool.
Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to
eyeball the SERPs. Run a search query (non-personalized) for your keywords and
ask yourself the following questions:
Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
Whats the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
Are the first few results authorities on the keyword subject?
Whats the inbound anchor text?
Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword?
You dont actually have to rank #1 for any of your chosen words to earn traffic,
but you should be comfortable cracking the top five.
With keyword themes, the magic often happens from keywords you never even
thought about.
Case Study: Google Algo Update
When SEOmoz launched the Google Algorithm Change HIstory (run by Dr. Pete) we
used a similar process for keyword research to explore the theme Google
Algorithm and more specifically, Google Algorithm Change.
According to Googles search tool, we could expect a no more than a couple
thousand visits a month best case for these exact terms. Fortunately, because
the project was well received and because we optimized around a board keyword
theme of Google Algorithm, the Algo Update receives lots of traffic outside our
pre-defined keywords.
This is where the long tail magic happens:
How can you improve your chances of ranking for more long tail keywords? Lets
talk about content, architecture, on-page optimization and link building.
Content
6. Creating Value
Want to know the truth? I hate the word content. It implies words on a page, a
commodity to be produced, separated from the value it creates.
Content without value is spam.
In the Google Algorithm Update example above, we could have simply written 100
articles about Googles Algorithm and hoped to rank. Instead, the conversation
started by asking how we could create a valuable resource for webmasters.
For your keyword theme, ask first how you can create value.
Value is harder to produce than mere words, but value is rewarded 100x more.
Value is future proof & algorithm proof. Value builds links by itself. Value
creates loyal fans.
Value takes different forms. Its a mix of:
Utility
Emotional response
Point of view (positive or negative)
Perceived value, including fame of the author
Your content doesnt have to include all 4 of these characteristics, but it
should excel in one or more to be successful.
A study of the New York Times found key characteristics of content to be
influential in making the Most Emailed list.
Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528077\
7. Driving Your Content Vehicle
Heres a preview: the Blueprint requires you create at least one type of link
bait, so now is a good time to think about the structure of your content.
Whats the best way to deliver value given your theme? Perhaps its an
Infographic
Video series
A new tool
An interview series
Slide deck
How-to guide
Q&A
Webinar or simple blog post
Perhaps, its all of these combined.
The more ways you find to deliver your content and the more channels you take
advantage of, the better off youll be.
Not all of your content has to go viral, but you want to create at least one
tent-pole piece thats better than anything else out there and youre proud to
hang your hat on.
If you need inspiration, check out Distilled's guide to Viral Linkbait or
QuickSprouts Templates for Content Creation.
8. Title Most Important Work Goes Here
Spend two hours, minimum, writing your title.
Sound ridiculous? If youre an experienced title writer like Rand Fishkin, you
can break this rule. For the rest of us, its difficult to underplay the value
delivered by a finely crafted title.
Write 50 titles or more before choosing one.
Study the successful titles on Inbound.org, Mashable, Wired, or your favorite
publication.
Whatever you do, read this fantastic post by Dan Shure and the headline
resources at CopyBlogger.
9. Length vs. Depth - Why it Matters
How long should your content be? A better question is: How deep should it be?
Word count by itself is a terrible metric to strive for, but depth of content
helps you to rank in several ways.
Adds uniqueness threshold to avoid duplicate content
Deeper topic exploration makes your content about more
Quality, longer content is correlated with more linksand higher rankings
I. Uniqueness
At a minimum, your content needs to meet a minimum uniqueness threshold in
order for it to rank. Google reps have gone on record to say a couple sentences
is sometimes sufficient, but in reality a couple hundred words is much safer.
II. Long Tail Opportunities
Heres where the real magic happens. The deeper your content and the more
in-depth you can explore a particular topic, the more your content becomes
about.
The more your content is about, the more search queries it can answer well.
The more search queries you can answer well, the more traffic you can earn.
Googles crawlers continuously read your content to determine how relevant it is
to search queries. They evaluate paragraphs, subject headings, photographs and
more to try to understand your page. Longer, in-depth content usually send more
relevancy signals than a couple short sentences.
III. Depth, Length, and Links
Numerous correlation studies have shown a positive relationship between
rankings and number of words in a document.
The length in HTML and the HTML within the <body> tag were the highest
correlated factors, in fact with correlations of .12 they could be considered
somewhat if not hugely significant.
While these factors probably are not implemented within the algorithm, they
are good signs of what Google is looking for; quality content, which in many
cases means long or at least sufficiently lengthy pages.
- Mark Collier The Open Algorithm
This could be attributed longer, quality content earning more links. John
Doherty examined the relationship between the length of blog posts on SEOmoz and
the number of links each post earned, and found a strong relationship.
10. Content Qualities You Can Bank On
If you dont focus on word count, how do you add quality depth to your content?
SEOs have written volumes about how Google might define quality including
metrics such as reading level, grammar, spelling, and even Author Rank. Most is
speculation, but its clear Google does use guidelines to separate good content
from bad.
My favorite source for clues comes from the set of questions Google published
shortly after the first Panda update. Here are a few of my favorites.
11. LDA, nTopic, and Words on the Page
Google is a machine. It cant yet understand your page like a human can, but its
getting close.
Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to model your sentences,
paragraphs, blocks,and content sections. Not only do they want to understand
your keywords, but also your topic, intent, and expertise as well.
How do you know if your content fits Googles model of expectations?
For example, if your topic is Super Bowl Recipes, Google might expect to see
content about grilling, appetizers, and guacamole. Content that addresses these
topics will likely rank higher than pages that talk about what color socks youre
wearing today.
Words matter.
SEOs have discovered that using certain words around a topic associated with
concepts like LDA and nTopic are correlated with higher rankings.
Virante offers an interesting stand alone keyword suggestion tool called
nTopic. The tools analyzes your keywords and suggests related keywords to
improve your relevancy scores.
12. Better than LDA - Poor Man's Topic Modeling
Since we dont have access to Googles computers for topic modeling, theres a far
simpler way to structure your content that I find far superior to worrying about
individual words:
Use the keyword themes you created at the beginning of this blueprint.
Youve already done the research using Googles keyword tool to find closely
related keyword groups. Incorporating these topics into your content may help
increase your relevancy to your given topic.
Example: Using the Google Algorithm project cited above, we found during
keyword research that certain keywords related to our theme show up repeatedly,
time and time again. If we conducted this research today, we would find phrases
like Penguin SEO and Panda Updates frequently in our results.
Google suggests these terms via the keyword tool because they consider them
closely related. So any content that explored Google Algorithm Change might
likely include a discussion of these ideas.
Note: This isn't real LDA, simply a way of adding relevant topics to your
content that Google might associate with your subject matter.
13. Design Is 50% of the Battle
If you have any money in your budget, spend it on design. A small investment
with a designer typically pays outsized dividends down the road. Good design
can:
Lower bounce rate
Increase page views
Increase time on site
Earn more links
Establish trust
All of which can help earn higher rankings.
Design doesnt just matter, its 50% of the battle.
-Rand Fishkin
Dribbble.com is one of our favorite source of design inspiration.
Architecture
Heres the special secret of the SEO Blueprint: youre not making a single page
to rank; youre making several.
14. Content Hubs
Very few successful websites consist of a single page. Google determines
context and relevancy not only by whats on your page, but also by the pages
around it and linking to it.
The truth is, its far easier to rank when you create Content Hubs exploring
several topics in depth focused around a central theme.
Using our Super Bowl Recipes example, we might create a complete section of
pages, each exploring a different recipe in depth.
15. Linking the Hub Together
Because your pages now explore different aspects of the same broad topic, it
makes sense to link them together.
Your page about guacamole relates to your page about nachos.
Your page about link building relates to your page about infographics.
Your page about Winston Churchill relates to major figures of World War II.
It also helps them to rank by distributing PageRank, anchor text, and other
relevancy signals.
16. Find Your Center
Content Hubs work best with a hub or center. Think of the center as the master
document that acts as an overview or gateway to all of your individual content
pages.
The hub is the authority page. Often, the hub is a link bait page or a category
level page. Its typically the page with the most inbound links and often as a
landing page for other sections of your site.
For great example of Hub Pages, check out:
CopyBloggers Magnetic Headlines
SEOmoz's Learn SEO
Amazons author pages (this one about Stephen King)
On-Page Optimization
17. Master the Basics
You could write an entire book about on-page optimization. If youre new to SEO,
one of the best ways to learn is by using SEOmozs On-page Report Card (free,
registration required) The tool grades 36 separate on-page SEO elements, gives
you a report and suggestions on how to fix each element. Working your way
through these issues is an excellent way to learn (and often used by agencies
and companies as a way to teach SEO principals)
Beyond the basics, lets address a few slightly more advanced tactics to take
advantage of your unique keyword themes and hub pages, in addition to areas
where beginners often make mistakes.
18. Linking Internally for the Reasonable Surfer
Not all links are created equal (One of the greatest SEO blog posts ever
written!) So, when you interlink your internal pages within your content hub
together, keep in mind a few important points.
Links from inside unique content pass more value than navigation links.
Links higher up the page pass more value than links further down.
Links in HTML text pass more weight than image links.
When interlinking your content, its best to keep links prominent and editorial
naturally link to your most important content pages higher up in the HTML text.
19. Diversify Your Anchor Text - Naturally
If Googles Penguin update taught us anything, its that over-thinking anchor
text is bound to get us in trouble.
When you link naturally and editorially to other places on the web, you
naturally diversify your anchor text. The same should hold true when you link
internally.
Dont choose your anchor text to fit your keywords;choose your anchor text to
fit the content around it.
Practically speaking, this means linking internally with a mix of partial match
keyword and related phrases. Dont be scared to link occasionally without good
keywords in the anchor the link can still pass relevancy signals. When it comes
to linking, its safer to under-do it than over-do it.
Spouce: Google's SEO Starter Guide
20. Title Tags - Two Quick Tips
We assume you know how to write a compelling title tag. Even today, keyword
usage in the title tag is one of the most highly correlated on-page ranking
factors that we know.
That said, Google is getting strict about over-optimizing title tags, and
appears to be further cracking down on titles written for SEO. Keep this in mind
when crafting your title tags
I. Avoid boilerplates
It used to be common to tack on your business phrase or main keywords to the
end of every title tag, like so:
Plumbing Supplies Chicago Plumbing and Fixtures
Pipes & Fittings Chicago Plumbing and Fixtures
Toilet Seat Covers Chicago Plumbing and Fixtures
While we dont have much solid data, many SEOs are now asserting that
boilerplate titles tacked on to the end of every tag are no longer a good idea.
Brand names and unique descriptive information is okay, but making every title
as unique as possible is the rule of the day.
II. Avoid unnecessary repetition Google also appears (at least to many SEOs)
on whats considered the lower threshold of keyword stuffing.
In years past it was a common rule of thumb never to repeat your keyword more
than twice in the title. Today, to be on the safe side, you might be best to
consider not repeating your keywords more than once.
21. Over-Optimization: Titles, URLs, and Links
Writing for humans not only gets you more clicks (which can lead to higher
rankings), but hardly ever gets you in trouble with search engines.
As SEOs we're often tempted to get a "perfect score" which means exactly
matching our title tags, URLs, inbound anchor text, and more. unfortunately,
this isn't natural in the real world, and Google recognizes this.
Diversify. Dont over-optimize.
22. Structured Data
Short and simple: Make structured data part of every webpage. While structured
data hasnt yet proven to be a large ranking factor, its future-facing value can
be seen today in rich snippet SERPs and social media sharing. In some verticals,
its an absolute necessity.
Theres no rule of thumb about what structured data to include, but the
essentials are:
Facebook Open Graph tags
Twitter Cards
Authorship
Publisher
Business information
Reviews
Events
To be honest, if youre not creating pages with structured data, youre probably
behind the times.
For an excellent guide about Micro Data and Schema.org, check out this
fantastic resource from SEOGadget.
Building Links
23. The 90/10 Rule of Link Building
This blueprint contains 25 steps to rank your content, but only the last three
address link building. Why so few? Because 90% of your effort should go into
creating great content, and 10% into link building.
If you have a hard time building links, it may be because you have these
numbers reversed.
Creating great content first solves a ton of problems down the line:
Good content makes link building easier
Attracts higher quality links in less time
Builds links on its own even when sleeping or on vacation
If youre new to marketing or relatively unknown, you may need to spend more
than 10% of your time building relationships, but dont let that distract you
from crafting the type of content that folks find so valuable they link to you
without you even asking.
24. All Link Building is Relationships - Good & Bad
This blueprint doesn't go into link building specifics, as there are 100's of
ways to build quality links to every good project. That said, a few of my must
link building resources:
Jon Cooper's Complete List of Link Building Strategies
StumbleUpon Paid Discovery
Citation Labs
Promoted Tweets
Ontolo
eReleases - Press releases not for links, but for exposer
BuzzStream
Paddy Moogan's excellent Link Building Book
These resources give you the basic tools and tactics for a successful link
building campaign, but keep in mind that all good link building is relationship
building.
Successful link builders understand this and foster each relationship and
connection. Even a simple outreach letter can be elevated to an advanced form of
relationship building with a little effort, as this Whiteboard Friday by Rand so
graciously illustrates.
25. Tier Your Link Building... Forever
The truth is, for professionals, link building never ends. Each content and
link building campaign layers on top of previous content, and the web as a whole
like layers of fine Greek baklava.
For example, this post could be considered linkbait for SEOmoz, but it also
links generously to several other content pieces within the Moz family, and
externally as well; spreading both the link love and the relationship building
as far as possible at the same time.
SEOmoz links generously to other sites: the link building experience is not
just about search engines, but the people experience, as well. We link to great
resources, and build links for the best user experience possible. When done
right, the search engines reward exactly this type of experience with higher
rankings.
For an excellent explanation as to why you should link out to external sites
when warranted, read AJ Kohns excellent work, Time to Long Click.
One of my favorite posts on SEOmoz was 10 Ugly SEO Tools that Actually Rock.
Not only was the first link on the page directed to our own SEO tools, but we
linked and praised our competitors as well.
Linkbait at its finest.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/9Oe7VYBoIKU/how-to-rank
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday 13 May 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'How My Mom Thinks Search Engines
Work'
Posted by Rob Toledo
With Mothers Day in many countries having just passed (I learned this week that
the UK celebrates Mothering Sunday earlier in the year), I thought it would be
fun to have a conversation about SEO with one of the most incredible people on
the entire planet: my mom. I asked her about what it is she believes our
industry does on a daily basis as well as how she thinks search engines function
in general.
The conversation was great; sort of similar to rubber duck debugging, except in
this case the rubber duck was my mom, and instead of sitting there silently, she
could comment when I started using terms she did not understand (and who can
blame her; were pretty notorious for inventing words and phrases on whims).
Here are some of my favorite moments from the chat:
What do you think I do at work all day? Work on your computer, fly toy
helicopters, drink lattes etc.
Not going to lie, thats pretty accurate; sorry, Will and Duncan!
What does SEO stand for?Search engine online
Not quite, but at least she didnt say SEO optimization.
Do you know what Bing is? Bing bong? *laughter ensues* "No, I had to look it
up."
I can appreciate the humor. I'm assuming she used Google but missed the irony;
sorry, Duane.
How do search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo decide who to put at the top
of a search result? Dont they base it mostly off of which sites are read the
most?
Not too far off, but how do they establish that list to begin with? Test which
ones people click on the most and then move them around a bunch to see what
works best, right?
Before I worked in SEO, this was how I thought it worked too; and in the grand
scheme of things, this has some loose truth buried in there; partial credit.
How do search engines make money? By putting those little ads all over the
page.
Nailed it.
If you were looking for aveterinarianclose to you, what would you do? Id go to
Google.com and type in best veterinarian in Seattle and look for peoples
reviews. Or maybe ask a neighbor.
Ah yes, the one thing that always thwarts a #1 ranking in the SERPs: a
personalized recommendation from a friend.
If you were looking for advice on how to train a dog to stop barking, what
would you search for? How do I train my dog to stop barking, and then probably
look for a website where people ask questions and then others give answers.
I think shes talking about Yahoo! Answers, the black hole of infinite internet
wisdom
How far down the page on the search results will you look? Not too far, I dont
normally find what I want past the first couple listings.
Besides being at the top of the page, what is the biggest factor on what you
click on in the search results? How many stars it has for reviews or if I
recognize a company that I like.
Ah yes, the trust factor.
If you don't like the results for those searches, what would you do differently
in your second search? Probably give up. No, just kidding. Probably pick some
different words to search for; maybe call someone depending on what I needed.
Bonus question: If you were running a small flower shop, how would you try and
get to the front page of Google for when people searched "fresh flowers"?Id name
it AAA Best Fresh Flowers or something. I don't know, probably call you, isnt
that your job?
Phone book marketing at its finest.
OK that was fun, but why?
While those questions and subsequent answers might seem kind of silly, there is
immense value in removing yourself from the SEO echo chamber and having
occasional, down-to-earth conversations with someone from the 99% of search
engine users who have minimal understanding of under the hood mechanics on
results pages.
For me, working at an agency makes it pretty easy to get wrapped up in the
lingo and terminology that many of us all comprehend without second thought.
Phrases like WMT, dynamic urls, 301 redirects, SERPs, canonicalization, etc. are
tossed around in casual conversation over morning coffee like were talking about
the weather. But ask an outsider to translate, and Im willing to bet we sound
like toddlers speaking gibberish.
This is certainly not exclusive to SEO, as any of us who have friends in
terminology-heavy industries like software, finance or medical fields can easily
get lost listening in during a technical conversation. Or my personal favorite,
ask someone in the US Military to spout off as many acronyms as they can
remember and your head will be left spinning; its impressive.
Point being, it is important to understand that this gap in comprehension
exists. When I was a bank teller in college, I would always find myself using
terms and phrases that quickly earned perplexed looks from my customers. It
looks like the APR on your HELOC isnt up-to-date; lets have a PB take a look.
I learned pretty quickly that in order to communicate effectively to my
customers, it was vitally important that I spoke in a much more common language
that they understood completely. Nobody likes to feel dumb; in my case, being a
college kid trying to talk about personal finance to a partner at a law firm
rarely ends well. Ill have my people take a look, was always one of my favorite
responses as the clarity in my error was bright as day.
For those of you who have been doing this whole SEO thing for a while now,
think back to when you first started pitching the idea to bosses, your client
list or even other marketing folks. Im sure you can distinctly remember the
looks you received during those conversations. One of my favorite responses of
all time was, Dont most people just search for our brand name if they want to
shop on our site?
So, let's simplify
One of most brilliant ads of the late 90s was the Apple Switch campaign.
Instead of focusing on RAM, graphics cards, processing speed and hard drive
space, Apple took an approach that created a common user, the college student,
the non-technical parents, the elderly, and simplified a message specifically
for them:
We would all be doing ourselves a huge favor to make sure that our daily
conversations with people not directly entrenched in the SEO industry use far
less lingo and more conversational language. The VP of Marketing is always going
to understand what more revenue means and probably cares far less about the
specific details behind URL structure or anchor text distribution. Always start
with the big picture then whittle your way down to the finer details only as far
as your audience is willing to pay attention.
The takeaway
So how do we combat this echo chamber a bit? Here are some things that have
really helped me out over the past year:
Take non-SEOs out for coffee
On some recurring frequency, schedule a coffee date with friends who youre
certain have little to no grasp on SEO and get their opinion on how they search.
Bonus points for diversifying the demographics along a wide gradient of
technical and non-technical folks. Ask them how they search for any number of
things (navigational, transactional, and informational).
You will quickly see how differently each person functions when theyre on the
hunt for something. They will likely reveal some great tips to keep in mind for
your future SEO projects. Keeping your ear to the ground on how the common folk
search often offers immense value in preparing a strategy.
Get active in non-SEO communities
One of my favorites is Hacker News, which has a very strong and relatively
negative opinion of SEO. But these are the things that we need to read, because
these are actual peoples opinions. I can hear Mike Pantoliano groaning from
here, but reading through all the misconceptions a lot of these people have
offers insight into what we as an industry need to continually work toward
improving.
All the best work in the world amounts to nothing if the perception of the
industry as a whole is negative. Folks like John Doherty, Rand Fishkin and Ross
Hudgens are doing a great job defending the industry on HN, but there is plenty
of work left. Besides, it's always great to hear an opinion from the other side
of the aisle.
Follow lots and lots of non-SEOs on Twitter
Were all guilty of it; take a look through the people you follow on Twitter. Im
betting the majority of those people are somehow related to SEO as well. I can
appreciate you want to be up on the latest and greatest news when it comes to
search, but try to diversify this list as much as possible. Take your non-search
interests and look for the thought leaders in those spaces; the balance is
invaluable!
What are your thoughts? I would love to hear how you talk about technical
issues to non-technical clients. How do you bridge the gap?
And lastly, a very Happy Mother's Day to all the hard working moms out there.
Without you, we wouldn't all be here!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ka3sE44aLX8/how-my-mom-thinks-search-engines-work
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Work'
Posted by Rob Toledo
With Mothers Day in many countries having just passed (I learned this week that
the UK celebrates Mothering Sunday earlier in the year), I thought it would be
fun to have a conversation about SEO with one of the most incredible people on
the entire planet: my mom. I asked her about what it is she believes our
industry does on a daily basis as well as how she thinks search engines function
in general.
The conversation was great; sort of similar to rubber duck debugging, except in
this case the rubber duck was my mom, and instead of sitting there silently, she
could comment when I started using terms she did not understand (and who can
blame her; were pretty notorious for inventing words and phrases on whims).
Here are some of my favorite moments from the chat:
What do you think I do at work all day? Work on your computer, fly toy
helicopters, drink lattes etc.
Not going to lie, thats pretty accurate; sorry, Will and Duncan!
What does SEO stand for?Search engine online
Not quite, but at least she didnt say SEO optimization.
Do you know what Bing is? Bing bong? *laughter ensues* "No, I had to look it
up."
I can appreciate the humor. I'm assuming she used Google but missed the irony;
sorry, Duane.
How do search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo decide who to put at the top
of a search result? Dont they base it mostly off of which sites are read the
most?
Not too far off, but how do they establish that list to begin with? Test which
ones people click on the most and then move them around a bunch to see what
works best, right?
Before I worked in SEO, this was how I thought it worked too; and in the grand
scheme of things, this has some loose truth buried in there; partial credit.
How do search engines make money? By putting those little ads all over the
page.
Nailed it.
If you were looking for aveterinarianclose to you, what would you do? Id go to
Google.com and type in best veterinarian in Seattle and look for peoples
reviews. Or maybe ask a neighbor.
Ah yes, the one thing that always thwarts a #1 ranking in the SERPs: a
personalized recommendation from a friend.
If you were looking for advice on how to train a dog to stop barking, what
would you search for? How do I train my dog to stop barking, and then probably
look for a website where people ask questions and then others give answers.
I think shes talking about Yahoo! Answers, the black hole of infinite internet
wisdom
How far down the page on the search results will you look? Not too far, I dont
normally find what I want past the first couple listings.
Besides being at the top of the page, what is the biggest factor on what you
click on in the search results? How many stars it has for reviews or if I
recognize a company that I like.
Ah yes, the trust factor.
If you don't like the results for those searches, what would you do differently
in your second search? Probably give up. No, just kidding. Probably pick some
different words to search for; maybe call someone depending on what I needed.
Bonus question: If you were running a small flower shop, how would you try and
get to the front page of Google for when people searched "fresh flowers"?Id name
it AAA Best Fresh Flowers or something. I don't know, probably call you, isnt
that your job?
Phone book marketing at its finest.
OK that was fun, but why?
While those questions and subsequent answers might seem kind of silly, there is
immense value in removing yourself from the SEO echo chamber and having
occasional, down-to-earth conversations with someone from the 99% of search
engine users who have minimal understanding of under the hood mechanics on
results pages.
For me, working at an agency makes it pretty easy to get wrapped up in the
lingo and terminology that many of us all comprehend without second thought.
Phrases like WMT, dynamic urls, 301 redirects, SERPs, canonicalization, etc. are
tossed around in casual conversation over morning coffee like were talking about
the weather. But ask an outsider to translate, and Im willing to bet we sound
like toddlers speaking gibberish.
This is certainly not exclusive to SEO, as any of us who have friends in
terminology-heavy industries like software, finance or medical fields can easily
get lost listening in during a technical conversation. Or my personal favorite,
ask someone in the US Military to spout off as many acronyms as they can
remember and your head will be left spinning; its impressive.
Point being, it is important to understand that this gap in comprehension
exists. When I was a bank teller in college, I would always find myself using
terms and phrases that quickly earned perplexed looks from my customers. It
looks like the APR on your HELOC isnt up-to-date; lets have a PB take a look.
I learned pretty quickly that in order to communicate effectively to my
customers, it was vitally important that I spoke in a much more common language
that they understood completely. Nobody likes to feel dumb; in my case, being a
college kid trying to talk about personal finance to a partner at a law firm
rarely ends well. Ill have my people take a look, was always one of my favorite
responses as the clarity in my error was bright as day.
For those of you who have been doing this whole SEO thing for a while now,
think back to when you first started pitching the idea to bosses, your client
list or even other marketing folks. Im sure you can distinctly remember the
looks you received during those conversations. One of my favorite responses of
all time was, Dont most people just search for our brand name if they want to
shop on our site?
So, let's simplify
One of most brilliant ads of the late 90s was the Apple Switch campaign.
Instead of focusing on RAM, graphics cards, processing speed and hard drive
space, Apple took an approach that created a common user, the college student,
the non-technical parents, the elderly, and simplified a message specifically
for them:
We would all be doing ourselves a huge favor to make sure that our daily
conversations with people not directly entrenched in the SEO industry use far
less lingo and more conversational language. The VP of Marketing is always going
to understand what more revenue means and probably cares far less about the
specific details behind URL structure or anchor text distribution. Always start
with the big picture then whittle your way down to the finer details only as far
as your audience is willing to pay attention.
The takeaway
So how do we combat this echo chamber a bit? Here are some things that have
really helped me out over the past year:
Take non-SEOs out for coffee
On some recurring frequency, schedule a coffee date with friends who youre
certain have little to no grasp on SEO and get their opinion on how they search.
Bonus points for diversifying the demographics along a wide gradient of
technical and non-technical folks. Ask them how they search for any number of
things (navigational, transactional, and informational).
You will quickly see how differently each person functions when theyre on the
hunt for something. They will likely reveal some great tips to keep in mind for
your future SEO projects. Keeping your ear to the ground on how the common folk
search often offers immense value in preparing a strategy.
Get active in non-SEO communities
One of my favorites is Hacker News, which has a very strong and relatively
negative opinion of SEO. But these are the things that we need to read, because
these are actual peoples opinions. I can hear Mike Pantoliano groaning from
here, but reading through all the misconceptions a lot of these people have
offers insight into what we as an industry need to continually work toward
improving.
All the best work in the world amounts to nothing if the perception of the
industry as a whole is negative. Folks like John Doherty, Rand Fishkin and Ross
Hudgens are doing a great job defending the industry on HN, but there is plenty
of work left. Besides, it's always great to hear an opinion from the other side
of the aisle.
Follow lots and lots of non-SEOs on Twitter
Were all guilty of it; take a look through the people you follow on Twitter. Im
betting the majority of those people are somehow related to SEO as well. I can
appreciate you want to be up on the latest and greatest news when it comes to
search, but try to diversify this list as much as possible. Take your non-search
interests and look for the thought leaders in those spaces; the balance is
invaluable!
What are your thoughts? I would love to hear how you talk about technical
issues to non-technical clients. How do you bridge the gap?
And lastly, a very Happy Mother's Day to all the hard working moms out there.
Without you, we wouldn't all be here!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ka3sE44aLX8/how-my-mom-thinks-search-engines-work
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '#MozCon 2013 Agenda'
Posted by Erica McGillivray
Holy cannoli, it's MozCon 2013 Agenda time! July 8th-July 10th here in Seattle
are going to be out-of-this-world.
I know many of you have been asking for the complete MozCon schedule, and we've
been working hard with all our 2013 speakers to find those perfect words to
express how awesome MozCon's going to be. I'm thrilled for the variety of
programming we'll have from local SEO and mobile content strategy to video and
marketing analytics. There will be plenty of amazingess to fill your brain.
You'll see that we have some MozCon favorites returning like Avinash Kaushik,
Wil Reynolds, and Joanna Lord, and we've invited some great new folks like Kyle
Rush, Karen McGrane, and Dana DiTomaso. Those are some insanely smart industry
experts! You'll learn a ton of actionable info to take home and start
implementing on your site(s) right after MozCon.
And for those of you wanting to know about the party... This year we're raising
the roof of the EMP Museum. That's right, we wanted to meet and greet our
community while hiding from Daleks. We've listened to your needs, and the EMP's
amazing space works for those who want to rock out to karaoke as well as those
interested in quieter conversations with a new friend.
Sing your heart out if you choose.
If that hasn't got you purchasing your ticket yet...
MozCon 2013 Agenda
Monday
8:00am - 9:00am Breakfast
9:00 am - 9:30am Intro: The Year in SEO, Marketing, and Moz with Rand Fishkin
9:30am - 10:00am Really Targeted Outreach with Richard Baxter
Weve all sent guest post pitches and "link building requests" and begged for
precious links any way and anywhere we can. But, that simply isnt marketing. We
have all the tools for a better way of finding our audience and determining what
they love. Richard will show you a data-driven approach to marketing your brand
to your target audience. No more guesswork, youll know exactly how to get the
right eyeballs on your content.
10:00am - 10:30am International SEO and the Future of Your ROI with Aleyda
Solis
Take a bold step into the international market. Aleya will walk you through how
to calculate the possible ROI of international sales, how to sell it to your
boss or client, and the practical how-to's of international implementation on
your site.
10:30am - 10:50am Break
10:50am - 11:50am Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas For Higher ROI with
Avinash Kaushik
One of the awesome realities of our existence is that we have to deal with a
lot of complexity. Often the natural response to that is to try and overpower
that with even more complexity. In this session, we'll apply the Occam's Razor
to three user cases and learn practical tips.
11:50am - 1:20pm Lunch
1:20pm - 1:50pm Wordless Wednesdays: How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual
Memes with Lena West
Image-heavy, responsive websites are all the rage, but can be problematic for
SEO, load times, and other inbound marketing concerns. But how does this balance
out with the popularity of images-based memes like "Wordless Wednesday"? Lena
will examine these visual memes and their impact on traffic, and she'll talk
about how you can parlay the power of visual memes into serious search and
traffic results.
1:50pm - 2:20pm Rapid Fire Link Building Tips for Your Content with Ross
Hudgens
You've built your content and made it King. Now what? Ross teaches you how to
take your content and turn it into links for your site. Whether you're just
hunting for backlinks or building up social shares, you'll find all the tips to
get your community engaged and building those links for you.
2:20pm - 3:00pm Hot Off the Press: 2013 Ranking Factors with Matt Peters
Moz's data scientist Dr. Matt walks you through the 2013 Ranking Factors. He'll
be breaking down Google's cutting-edge ways of how they figure out if your pages
are relevant beyond keywords. You'll walk away with an understanding of the data
and the knowledge to craft a sound SEO strategy.
3:00pm - 3:30pm Strings to Things: Entities and SEO with Matthew Brown
In the last year, Google and Bing have both indicated a shift to entity-based
search results as part of their evolution. Google has unscored this point with
rich snippets and Knowledge Graph, and Bing has now upped the ante on personal
search results with Bing Snapshots. Find out how you can adopt strategies to
stay ahead of the curve in the new world of semantic search results.
3:30pm - 3:50pm Break
3:50pm - 4:20pm The Mobile Content Mandate with Karen McGrane
Do you think "no one will ever want to do that on mobile"? Chances are, someone
already wants to. Karen will discuss why you need to deliver content wherever
your customer wants to consume it and the risks of ignoring mobile users.
She'll also explain how to start your mobile content strategy, define what you
want to publish, construct the relationship between your mobile and desktop
site, and evolve your editorial workflow and content management tools.
4:20pm - 4:50pm Building a Better Business with Digital Marketing with
Mackenzie Fogelson
Extraordinary businesses and communities are built with a higher purpose than
just making money. Mack will walk you through how you can achieve bigger
objectives for your clients or for your own business. Using the power of digital
marketing tools (along with passion and hard work), you'll learn how to shape
and foster your company and the community around it.
4:50 - 5:20pm The 7 Heavenly Habits of Inspired Inbound Marketers with Dharmesh
Shah
Curious about how some of the world's best inbound marketers work? How do they
come up with ideas for content? What's their policy on handling Twitter
mentions? How much do they really spend on A/B testing? Dharmesh will walk you
through these habits and more.
Tuesday
8:00am - 9:00am Breakfast
9:00am - 9:30am Building a Winning Video Marketing Strategy with Phil
Nottingham
Phil's going to guide to you through the process of building a video content
strategy from inception to launch. He'll explain the creative and technical
tactics required to win the internet with video. By the end of this session,
you'll know where to host your video, how to optimize it, what kind of content
you should be creating, and how to get professional quality returns without
spending a fortune.
9:30am - 9:45am The Next Generation of Mozscape with Phil Smith
As we crawl the web, collecting data, our Mozscape has run into a few pitfalls
as we've grown. Phil's been working on an incremental indexing for the next
generation of Mozscape, and he'll give you insights on how this faster, fresher,
and scalable index will be useful to you.
9:45am - 10:00am How to Moz Lingo: Cross-Team Communication When Crisis Hits
with Carin Overturf
Mozzy does not alway mean bright and shiny. Sometimes things go south, and it's
these times when good communication across all teams, technical and
not-so-technical, is critical. Carin brings the tactics she's learned about
effective crisis management after surviving a few storms as a technical manager
on the Mozscape team.
10:00am - 10:15am Empower Your Customers to Become Your Evangelists with Aaron
Wheeler
You have the power to turn customers into one of your strongest, most
cost-effective marketing teams. By creating great experiences for customers
during good times and bad, they'll share their successes and demonstrate the
value you've given them to a broader audience, much to the delight of your
marketing and customer service teams.
10:15am - 10:30am Engineer Your Life: Agile for Work and Play with Miranda
Rensch
Agile development, it's not just for software companies anymore. Miranda will
show us how you can use an agile process to plan anything from side-projects,
marketing launches, and personal improvement goals. You'll come away with
templates and processes to try in your own team or at home!
10:30am - 10:50am Break
10:50am - 11:20am Let's Play for Keeps: Building Customer Loyalty with Joanna
Lord
We all know that customer loyalty is a key ingredient in building brands,
hitting revenue goals, and cultivating a community. Joanna will walk you through
how the landscape has changed, and she'll leave you with tools and tips on how
to build customer loyalty that lasts.
11:20am - 11:50pm Ecommerce SEO: Cutting Edge Tactics That Scale with Adam
Audette
Fight Panda and other modern SEO realities by using the best on-page techniques
and content strategies for your ecommerce site. Adam teaches you how to
sustainably improve your click-through-rates as SERPs become noisier and
properly prepare for G+ and Graph Search. Then he'll round things out be giving
practical advice on how to build your ecommerce team and work flows.
11:50pm - 1:20pm Lunch
1:20pm - 1:50pm Building Your Business: Relationship and Other Critical "Soft"
Skills with Brittan Bright
Ever dealt with a difficult client or a boss who just didn't understand?
Brittan teaches you essential relationship building skills and tips and tricks
for making your business interactions smooth and easy. Whether you're always
putting out fires or pitching new ideas, you won't want to miss this.
1:50pm - 2:20pm Win Through Optimization and Testing with Kyle Rush
Kyle shares his knowledge from the front lines of the most intense web campaign
to date: the 2012 US presidential election. His team won big for Obama with a
data-driven approach. Kyle will explore tactics like how they increased
donations by 49% and help you implement these wins for your site.
2:20pm - 2:50pm How Gender and Cultural Differences in Web Psychology Affect
the Customer Experience with Nathalie Nahai
Are you missing half your audience? Your site may be giving off the wrong
psychology signals and causing potential customers to click away. Nathalie
covers how gender and cultural differences impact your business and winning
tactics to change the message and convert more customers.
2:50pm - 3:20pm Breaking Up with Your Keyword-Based KPIs with Annie Cushing
Raise your hand if you hate (not provided)? Annie shows you how to raise your
battle cry by finding your keyword data elsewhere. By changing your focus from
(not provided) to what your landing pages can tell you, you'll be able to audit
your site even better than before.
3:20pm - 3:40pm Break
3:40pm - 4:10pm Next Level Local Tactics: Making Your SEO Stand Out with Dana
DiTomaso
Competing against giant brands in the Local SEO space can be daunting, but
Dana's here to turn your epic battle into an epic win. She'll show you how to
put personality into your local search efforts so that local searchers want to
know who you are. Dana's practical tactics and advice for thinking around the
problem will crank your creativity up to 120%.
4:10pm - 4:40pm End-to-End Local Optimization with David Mihm
The paradox of Local Search has always been that it's one of SEO's most
time-consuming areas, and yet, the businesses who stand to gain the most have
the smallest budgets and limited internal resources. Whether you're an agency
serving SMB clients or a large brand with hundreds of locations, scaling your
efforts is critical. Learn how to increase the efficiency of your Local
optimization process with these tips and tools from David.
4:40pm - 5:10pm Cater to Your Audience via UX with Allison Urban
User experience is critical to making your audience feel your site, services,
or products are for them. Allison will use case studies to show why UX matters
and how it conveys respect for your customers. Then she'll deliver tactics and
advice she learned while working on MailChimp's redesign.
5:10pm - 5:40pm Living in the Future of User Behavior with Will Critchlow
As the technology space constantly changes, users and their behavior adjust
with the tide. But what should we do? Will takes a look at where the trends are
going and gives you the tactics and tips to keep up and maybe get ahead of the
game.
7:30pm - 11:00pm Party at the EMP
Wednesday
08:00am - 9:00am Breakfast
9:00am - 9:40am Beyond 10 Blue Links: The Future of Ranking with Pete Meyers
In the year since we launched MozCast, the face of Google has changed
dramatically. Weve seen the roll-out of 7-result SERPs, the rapid expansion of
Knowledge Graph, mass-adoption of authorship, and dozens of new features, rich
snippets, and widgets. Ranking is no longer just a number, and achieving it is a
moving target. Find out how to think like a brand and carve out a place in the
SERP of the future.
9:40am - 10:10am Using Metrics to Build Social Media Engagement with Carrie
Gouldin
Between Edgerank, noise, and upcoming networks, social metics are daunting.
Carrie will show you what makes interesting content, how to track links, read
metrics, and keep your followers hungry for more. By testing and trying new
things, she's built up a 25-50% engagement rate for ThinkGeek's Facebook and you
can too for your brand.
10:10am - 10:30am Break
10:30am - 11:00am The Search for Company Culture and Why It Matters with Sarah
Bird
Whether you realize it or not, your company has a culture. Is it helping you or
holding you back? Learn how to identify your company culture, foster the culture
you want, and avoid common pitfalls. Sarah will share what she's learned at Moz,
and why what works for one company might not work for yours.
11:00am - 12:00pm Why the Internet Hates Us and Can #RCS Change That
Perception? with Wil Reynolds
Post-MozCon 2012, Wil has been focused on helping you get things done by using
#RCS paired with facts and figures from his own company, his clients, and
insights from 30 members of top US design agencies. He's also been reviewing the
successes, the failures, and the steps his team put into place for change. Wil
wants to get the word out that it's time to stop chasing all the shiny SEO
shortcuts!
12:00pm - 1:30pm Lunch
1:30pm - 2:00pm Building Your Community From the Ground Up with Jen Lopez
What if we had to start over and rebuild the Moz community from scratch? Jen
walks us through the steps, from how to start building an audience all the way
through to how she'd build her team. Learn actionable tactics and deep insights
that you can apply to building your community, both internally and externally,
for your business.
2:00pm - 3:20pm Community Speakers!
This could be you! We're having four community speakers. Have you tossed your
hat in the ring? Applications due Tuesday, May 14th at 5pm PDT.
3:20pm - 3:40pm Break
3:40pm - 4:40pm The Secret Ingredients of Better Marketing with Rand Fishkin
Content bombards our online experience. Ads and salespeople interrupt us. But
every now and then, marketing is truly remarkable and its message transforms
from unwelcome to irresistible What makes it stand out? Why do some companies
inspire us to take action and to share them? The ingredients have been hidden
too long. It's time we discovered the what, why, and how behind crafting better
marketing.
4:40pm - 5:10pm Ultimate Q&A
Get your questions answered by our amazing speakers. Unlike the traditional
give-it-up, Ultimate Q&A gives you the opportunity to pinpoint what amazing tips
you'd like to know and gives you the actionable and inspirational information
you crave.
Wowzers, that's a lot of crazy amazing stuff. See you there!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/BPF3Q-JlYKc/mozcon-2013-agenda
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by Erica McGillivray
Holy cannoli, it's MozCon 2013 Agenda time! July 8th-July 10th here in Seattle
are going to be out-of-this-world.
I know many of you have been asking for the complete MozCon schedule, and we've
been working hard with all our 2013 speakers to find those perfect words to
express how awesome MozCon's going to be. I'm thrilled for the variety of
programming we'll have from local SEO and mobile content strategy to video and
marketing analytics. There will be plenty of amazingess to fill your brain.
You'll see that we have some MozCon favorites returning like Avinash Kaushik,
Wil Reynolds, and Joanna Lord, and we've invited some great new folks like Kyle
Rush, Karen McGrane, and Dana DiTomaso. Those are some insanely smart industry
experts! You'll learn a ton of actionable info to take home and start
implementing on your site(s) right after MozCon.
And for those of you wanting to know about the party... This year we're raising
the roof of the EMP Museum. That's right, we wanted to meet and greet our
community while hiding from Daleks. We've listened to your needs, and the EMP's
amazing space works for those who want to rock out to karaoke as well as those
interested in quieter conversations with a new friend.
Sing your heart out if you choose.
If that hasn't got you purchasing your ticket yet...
MozCon 2013 Agenda
Monday
8:00am - 9:00am Breakfast
9:00 am - 9:30am Intro: The Year in SEO, Marketing, and Moz with Rand Fishkin
9:30am - 10:00am Really Targeted Outreach with Richard Baxter
Weve all sent guest post pitches and "link building requests" and begged for
precious links any way and anywhere we can. But, that simply isnt marketing. We
have all the tools for a better way of finding our audience and determining what
they love. Richard will show you a data-driven approach to marketing your brand
to your target audience. No more guesswork, youll know exactly how to get the
right eyeballs on your content.
10:00am - 10:30am International SEO and the Future of Your ROI with Aleyda
Solis
Take a bold step into the international market. Aleya will walk you through how
to calculate the possible ROI of international sales, how to sell it to your
boss or client, and the practical how-to's of international implementation on
your site.
10:30am - 10:50am Break
10:50am - 11:50am Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas For Higher ROI with
Avinash Kaushik
One of the awesome realities of our existence is that we have to deal with a
lot of complexity. Often the natural response to that is to try and overpower
that with even more complexity. In this session, we'll apply the Occam's Razor
to three user cases and learn practical tips.
11:50am - 1:20pm Lunch
1:20pm - 1:50pm Wordless Wednesdays: How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual
Memes with Lena West
Image-heavy, responsive websites are all the rage, but can be problematic for
SEO, load times, and other inbound marketing concerns. But how does this balance
out with the popularity of images-based memes like "Wordless Wednesday"? Lena
will examine these visual memes and their impact on traffic, and she'll talk
about how you can parlay the power of visual memes into serious search and
traffic results.
1:50pm - 2:20pm Rapid Fire Link Building Tips for Your Content with Ross
Hudgens
You've built your content and made it King. Now what? Ross teaches you how to
take your content and turn it into links for your site. Whether you're just
hunting for backlinks or building up social shares, you'll find all the tips to
get your community engaged and building those links for you.
2:20pm - 3:00pm Hot Off the Press: 2013 Ranking Factors with Matt Peters
Moz's data scientist Dr. Matt walks you through the 2013 Ranking Factors. He'll
be breaking down Google's cutting-edge ways of how they figure out if your pages
are relevant beyond keywords. You'll walk away with an understanding of the data
and the knowledge to craft a sound SEO strategy.
3:00pm - 3:30pm Strings to Things: Entities and SEO with Matthew Brown
In the last year, Google and Bing have both indicated a shift to entity-based
search results as part of their evolution. Google has unscored this point with
rich snippets and Knowledge Graph, and Bing has now upped the ante on personal
search results with Bing Snapshots. Find out how you can adopt strategies to
stay ahead of the curve in the new world of semantic search results.
3:30pm - 3:50pm Break
3:50pm - 4:20pm The Mobile Content Mandate with Karen McGrane
Do you think "no one will ever want to do that on mobile"? Chances are, someone
already wants to. Karen will discuss why you need to deliver content wherever
your customer wants to consume it and the risks of ignoring mobile users.
She'll also explain how to start your mobile content strategy, define what you
want to publish, construct the relationship between your mobile and desktop
site, and evolve your editorial workflow and content management tools.
4:20pm - 4:50pm Building a Better Business with Digital Marketing with
Mackenzie Fogelson
Extraordinary businesses and communities are built with a higher purpose than
just making money. Mack will walk you through how you can achieve bigger
objectives for your clients or for your own business. Using the power of digital
marketing tools (along with passion and hard work), you'll learn how to shape
and foster your company and the community around it.
4:50 - 5:20pm The 7 Heavenly Habits of Inspired Inbound Marketers with Dharmesh
Shah
Curious about how some of the world's best inbound marketers work? How do they
come up with ideas for content? What's their policy on handling Twitter
mentions? How much do they really spend on A/B testing? Dharmesh will walk you
through these habits and more.
Tuesday
8:00am - 9:00am Breakfast
9:00am - 9:30am Building a Winning Video Marketing Strategy with Phil
Nottingham
Phil's going to guide to you through the process of building a video content
strategy from inception to launch. He'll explain the creative and technical
tactics required to win the internet with video. By the end of this session,
you'll know where to host your video, how to optimize it, what kind of content
you should be creating, and how to get professional quality returns without
spending a fortune.
9:30am - 9:45am The Next Generation of Mozscape with Phil Smith
As we crawl the web, collecting data, our Mozscape has run into a few pitfalls
as we've grown. Phil's been working on an incremental indexing for the next
generation of Mozscape, and he'll give you insights on how this faster, fresher,
and scalable index will be useful to you.
9:45am - 10:00am How to Moz Lingo: Cross-Team Communication When Crisis Hits
with Carin Overturf
Mozzy does not alway mean bright and shiny. Sometimes things go south, and it's
these times when good communication across all teams, technical and
not-so-technical, is critical. Carin brings the tactics she's learned about
effective crisis management after surviving a few storms as a technical manager
on the Mozscape team.
10:00am - 10:15am Empower Your Customers to Become Your Evangelists with Aaron
Wheeler
You have the power to turn customers into one of your strongest, most
cost-effective marketing teams. By creating great experiences for customers
during good times and bad, they'll share their successes and demonstrate the
value you've given them to a broader audience, much to the delight of your
marketing and customer service teams.
10:15am - 10:30am Engineer Your Life: Agile for Work and Play with Miranda
Rensch
Agile development, it's not just for software companies anymore. Miranda will
show us how you can use an agile process to plan anything from side-projects,
marketing launches, and personal improvement goals. You'll come away with
templates and processes to try in your own team or at home!
10:30am - 10:50am Break
10:50am - 11:20am Let's Play for Keeps: Building Customer Loyalty with Joanna
Lord
We all know that customer loyalty is a key ingredient in building brands,
hitting revenue goals, and cultivating a community. Joanna will walk you through
how the landscape has changed, and she'll leave you with tools and tips on how
to build customer loyalty that lasts.
11:20am - 11:50pm Ecommerce SEO: Cutting Edge Tactics That Scale with Adam
Audette
Fight Panda and other modern SEO realities by using the best on-page techniques
and content strategies for your ecommerce site. Adam teaches you how to
sustainably improve your click-through-rates as SERPs become noisier and
properly prepare for G+ and Graph Search. Then he'll round things out be giving
practical advice on how to build your ecommerce team and work flows.
11:50pm - 1:20pm Lunch
1:20pm - 1:50pm Building Your Business: Relationship and Other Critical "Soft"
Skills with Brittan Bright
Ever dealt with a difficult client or a boss who just didn't understand?
Brittan teaches you essential relationship building skills and tips and tricks
for making your business interactions smooth and easy. Whether you're always
putting out fires or pitching new ideas, you won't want to miss this.
1:50pm - 2:20pm Win Through Optimization and Testing with Kyle Rush
Kyle shares his knowledge from the front lines of the most intense web campaign
to date: the 2012 US presidential election. His team won big for Obama with a
data-driven approach. Kyle will explore tactics like how they increased
donations by 49% and help you implement these wins for your site.
2:20pm - 2:50pm How Gender and Cultural Differences in Web Psychology Affect
the Customer Experience with Nathalie Nahai
Are you missing half your audience? Your site may be giving off the wrong
psychology signals and causing potential customers to click away. Nathalie
covers how gender and cultural differences impact your business and winning
tactics to change the message and convert more customers.
2:50pm - 3:20pm Breaking Up with Your Keyword-Based KPIs with Annie Cushing
Raise your hand if you hate (not provided)? Annie shows you how to raise your
battle cry by finding your keyword data elsewhere. By changing your focus from
(not provided) to what your landing pages can tell you, you'll be able to audit
your site even better than before.
3:20pm - 3:40pm Break
3:40pm - 4:10pm Next Level Local Tactics: Making Your SEO Stand Out with Dana
DiTomaso
Competing against giant brands in the Local SEO space can be daunting, but
Dana's here to turn your epic battle into an epic win. She'll show you how to
put personality into your local search efforts so that local searchers want to
know who you are. Dana's practical tactics and advice for thinking around the
problem will crank your creativity up to 120%.
4:10pm - 4:40pm End-to-End Local Optimization with David Mihm
The paradox of Local Search has always been that it's one of SEO's most
time-consuming areas, and yet, the businesses who stand to gain the most have
the smallest budgets and limited internal resources. Whether you're an agency
serving SMB clients or a large brand with hundreds of locations, scaling your
efforts is critical. Learn how to increase the efficiency of your Local
optimization process with these tips and tools from David.
4:40pm - 5:10pm Cater to Your Audience via UX with Allison Urban
User experience is critical to making your audience feel your site, services,
or products are for them. Allison will use case studies to show why UX matters
and how it conveys respect for your customers. Then she'll deliver tactics and
advice she learned while working on MailChimp's redesign.
5:10pm - 5:40pm Living in the Future of User Behavior with Will Critchlow
As the technology space constantly changes, users and their behavior adjust
with the tide. But what should we do? Will takes a look at where the trends are
going and gives you the tactics and tips to keep up and maybe get ahead of the
game.
7:30pm - 11:00pm Party at the EMP
Wednesday
08:00am - 9:00am Breakfast
9:00am - 9:40am Beyond 10 Blue Links: The Future of Ranking with Pete Meyers
In the year since we launched MozCast, the face of Google has changed
dramatically. Weve seen the roll-out of 7-result SERPs, the rapid expansion of
Knowledge Graph, mass-adoption of authorship, and dozens of new features, rich
snippets, and widgets. Ranking is no longer just a number, and achieving it is a
moving target. Find out how to think like a brand and carve out a place in the
SERP of the future.
9:40am - 10:10am Using Metrics to Build Social Media Engagement with Carrie
Gouldin
Between Edgerank, noise, and upcoming networks, social metics are daunting.
Carrie will show you what makes interesting content, how to track links, read
metrics, and keep your followers hungry for more. By testing and trying new
things, she's built up a 25-50% engagement rate for ThinkGeek's Facebook and you
can too for your brand.
10:10am - 10:30am Break
10:30am - 11:00am The Search for Company Culture and Why It Matters with Sarah
Bird
Whether you realize it or not, your company has a culture. Is it helping you or
holding you back? Learn how to identify your company culture, foster the culture
you want, and avoid common pitfalls. Sarah will share what she's learned at Moz,
and why what works for one company might not work for yours.
11:00am - 12:00pm Why the Internet Hates Us and Can #RCS Change That
Perception? with Wil Reynolds
Post-MozCon 2012, Wil has been focused on helping you get things done by using
#RCS paired with facts and figures from his own company, his clients, and
insights from 30 members of top US design agencies. He's also been reviewing the
successes, the failures, and the steps his team put into place for change. Wil
wants to get the word out that it's time to stop chasing all the shiny SEO
shortcuts!
12:00pm - 1:30pm Lunch
1:30pm - 2:00pm Building Your Community From the Ground Up with Jen Lopez
What if we had to start over and rebuild the Moz community from scratch? Jen
walks us through the steps, from how to start building an audience all the way
through to how she'd build her team. Learn actionable tactics and deep insights
that you can apply to building your community, both internally and externally,
for your business.
2:00pm - 3:20pm Community Speakers!
This could be you! We're having four community speakers. Have you tossed your
hat in the ring? Applications due Tuesday, May 14th at 5pm PDT.
3:20pm - 3:40pm Break
3:40pm - 4:40pm The Secret Ingredients of Better Marketing with Rand Fishkin
Content bombards our online experience. Ads and salespeople interrupt us. But
every now and then, marketing is truly remarkable and its message transforms
from unwelcome to irresistible What makes it stand out? Why do some companies
inspire us to take action and to share them? The ingredients have been hidden
too long. It's time we discovered the what, why, and how behind crafting better
marketing.
4:40pm - 5:10pm Ultimate Q&A
Get your questions answered by our amazing speakers. Unlike the traditional
give-it-up, Ultimate Q&A gives you the opportunity to pinpoint what amazing tips
you'd like to know and gives you the actionable and inspirational information
you crave.
Wowzers, that's a lot of crazy amazing stuff. See you there!
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of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
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