Saturday, May 24, 2014

Silly Marketer, Title Tags Are for Robots!

Like all good marketers, we think carefully about our title tags before publishing new content. Then we just take that carefully crafted title and plop it into the OG tags for social shares, right?

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Jen Lopez explains why we need to put in a little more effort than that.


                          

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Is eBay A Big Loser In Google’s Panda 4.0 Update? — Winners & Losers Data


Google began rolling out their Panda 4.0 update designed to punch low-quality content. That’s generated both “winners” who have moved up in rankings as “losers” have dropped down — and eBay might be one of the big losers.

Searchmetrics gave us their initial winners and loser charts, based on rankings they continually monitor. These show that one of the biggest losers was eBay. According to the data, eBay lost a tremendous amount of traffic from Google, much of it from the ebay.com/bhp/ area of its site.


                     google-panda-generic-featured

Friday, May 9, 2014

10 Tactics to Improve Blog Readership

If you're looking to increase traffic to your blog, there are many tactics that can significantly boost your progress. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand lays a roadmap for the journey, offering 10 of the best tactics for you to keep in mind along the way.

                                

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Google’s Matt Cutts: Why Google Will Ignore Your Page Title Tag & Write Its Own

Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video answer on the question about why and when Google will ignore your title tag and use something else for the snippet title in the search results.
Matt explains in the video that Google really wants the title of the snippets to match on some level the query of the searcher. This logic often results in a higher click through rate on the URL and thus should be better for both the searcher and the web site owner.
The criteria Google uses when coming up with a new title tag are:
(1) Something that is “relatively” short
(2) Have a good description of the page and “ideally” the site that the page is on.
(3) And that it is relevant to the query.
If your existing title tag fits the criteria, then Google will most likely use your title tag. If not, then Google may use (1) content on your page, (2) anchor text links pointing to the page and/or (3) may also use the Open Directory Project.


Friday, April 25, 2014

The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing

It's probably pretty clear to everyone that content marketing takes time, but there's a common misconception in just how much time. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand warns us of an overly optimistic mindset, and shows us how things really (usually) end up happening.


                                   

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to talk a little bit about content marketing and specifically this giant myth, this misconception that exists in the content marketing field about how the practice really works.
This hurts a lot of people. This hurts people on the SEO side. It hurts people who do social media. It hurts people who invest in actually building the content, and it hurts teams and executives and people who plan and strategize around what content marketing can and can't achieve and how it should work.
You know, I really came to this because I think it's been something that's been bubbling up in the world of content and inbound marketing for a long time. But I was speaking to a number of startups yesterday afternoon here in Seattle. I was talking to them about how we at Moz produce blog posts, video content, like Whiteboard Friday, presentations, and webinars in all of these different mediums.
I got this question, like, "Okay, it must be the case . . . how do you put out a blog post, Rand, that once you launch it, once people read it, they're actually going to go and buy from you?"
I had this moment of, "Oh my God, this happens all the time." People think that the reason you're putting out content is so that someone will consume that content and be inspired from it to go and make a purchase.
This is how the myth works. Step one, oh yeah, you know, ta-dak I created this amazing piece of content. Look, it's got lovely parallax scrolling, and responsive design, and beautiful graphics, and a lovely layout. Fantastic content. Wow. All right. People are going to download that. They're going to share it. They're going to love it.
Step two, thankfully, people are thinking about this at least. All right, I'm going to go tweet and Facebook share and put it on Google+. I'm going to point a bunch of links to it. I'm going to put it on my LinkedIn account. I'll promote that content through all of these platforms.
Then, look at these hordes of people right there. Not the most attractive horde. A little gangly. But, wow, that's really good. We should sign up for whatever these people are selling. They must be amazing, right? The visitors who experience the content, and then some percent of them, like oh maybe 2% are going to go and convert.
This doesn't happen, does it? This is not actually how content marketing works. But it's how a lot of people invest in and think about content marketing. But it almost never happens. With a few rare exceptions, this is not how content marketing really works.
How it actually works is you repeat step one and two many, many times, again and again and again and again until you start to get good at the process, until you start finding the XYZ, the piece of amazing content that really is going to resonate with your audience. That takes a lot of trial and failure. It really does.
Step three is entirely a myth. It is almost never the case, practically never the case that someone goes, experiences a piece of content from a brand they don't know about or haven't heard of, or experiences that content for the first time and then immediately goes, "I wonder what they sell. I should buy whatever that is." Or even sees kind of a plug or a pseudo-plug for their product inside that content and goes, "Yes, you know what, I'm just going to buy that right now." That almost never happens.
What really does happen is that people come many, many times. They essentially grow this memory about your brand, about what you do, and they build up kind of what I'd call a positive bank account with you. But that bank account, there are not coins and money in there. There are experiences and touches with your brand. Those content touches, and those social media touches, and those touches that come through performing a search and seeing you listed there, those build up the capital in the account.

http://moz.com/blog/the-greatest-misconception-in-content-marketing-whiteboard-friday

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Google Introduces Google Trends Email Alerts, Trending Topics and Hot Searches Delivered To Your Inbox

Google announced today they will be rolling out the ability for users to have popular topics from Google Trends and Hot Searches delivered via email.

This new feature will work in a very similar way to how Google Alerts currently works. You will be able to subscribe to a particular topic and receive a notification if there is an increase in search volume around that topic.

Currently, Google allows you to subscribe to any search topic, Hot Searches for any country, or any U.S. monthly Top Chart.

You will also be able to subscribe to notifications about trending topics by location. For example, if you want to stay up to date about trends and popular searches in your local area, you can set up an email notification to tell you about the “hottest” Hot Searches in the location of your choice and get occasional emails about major local trends.

To set up an email subscription, simply visit the Subscriptions section within Google Trends and click on Add subscription.

                         Screen Shot 2014 04 18 at 12.53.31 PM 380x119 Google Introduces Google Trends Email Alerts, Trending Topics and Hot Searches Delivered To Your Inbox
From there, select the topic and country of your choice and indicate how often you would like to receive notifications. Then click the Subscribe button.

                           Screen Shot 2014 04 18 at 12.56.40 PM 380x190 Google Introduces Google Trends Email Alerts, Trending Topics and Hot Searches Delivered To Your Inbox

That’s all it takes to keep your finger on the pulse of trending topics and popular search terms. This is an incredibly useful feature for all the busy professionals out there who don’t have time to manually sift through blogs and websites every day to stay current. Now the information can be sent directly to you.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-introduces-google-trends-email-alerts-trending-topics-hot-searches-delivered-inbox/102207/

Friday, April 18, 2014

6 Changes We Always Thought Google Would Make to SEO that They Haven't Yet

From Google's interpretation of rel="canonical" to the specificity of anchor text within a link, there are several areas where we thought Google would make a move and are still waiting for it to happen. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand details six of those areas. Let us know where you think things are going in the comments!

                             

Number one, a lot of people in the SEO field, and even outside the field, think that it must be the case that if links really matter for SEO, then on-topic links matter more than off-topic links. So, for example, if I'm linking to two websites here about gardening resources, A and B, both about gardening resources, and one of those comes from a botany site and the other one comes from a site about mobile gaming, well, all other things being true, it must be that the one about botany is going to provide a stronger link. That's just got to be the case.
And yet, we cannot seem to prove this. There doesn't seem to be data behind it or to support it. Anyone who's analyzed this problem in-depth, which a number of SEOs have over the years -- a lot of people, who are very advanced, have gone through the process of classifying links and all this kind of stuff -- seem to come to the same conclusion, which is Google seems to really think about links in a more subject/context agnostic perspective.
Number two, I'm actually in this camp. I still think that someday it's coming, that anchor text influence will eventually decline. Yet it seems to be that, yes, while other signals have certainly risen in importance, and there have been lots of other things, it seems that anchor text inside a link is still far more important and better than generic anchor text.
Getting specific, targeting something like "gardening supplies" when I link to A, as opposed to on the same page saying something like, "Oh, this is also a good resource for gardening supplies," but all I linked with was the text "a good resource" over to B, that A is going to get a lot more ranking power. Again, all other things being equal, A will rank much higher than B, because this anchor text is still pretty influential. It has a fairly substantive effect.
I think this is one of those cases where a lot of SEOs said, "Hey, anchor text is where a lot of manipulation and abuse is happening. It's where a lot of Web spam happens. Clearly Google's going to take some action against this."
Number three, 302s. So 302s have been one of these sort of long-standing kind of messes of the Web, where a 302 was originally intended as a temporary redirect, but many, many websites and types of servers default to 302s for all kinds of pages that are moving.
So A301 redirects to B, versus C302 redirecting to D. Is it really the case that the people who run C plan to change where the redirect points in the future, and is it really the case that they do so more than A does with B?
Well, a lot of the time, probably not. But it still is the case, and you can see plenty of examples of this happening out in the search results and out on the Web, that Google interprets this 301 as being a permanent redirect. All the link juice from A is going to pass right over to B.
With C and D, it appears, with big brands, when the redirect's been in place for a long time and they have some trust in it, maybe they see some other signals, some other links pointing over here, that yes, some of this does pass over, but it is not nearly what's happening with a 301. This is like a directive, and this is sort of a nudge or a hint. It just seems to be important to still get those 301s, those right kinds of redirects right.
Number four Speaking of nudges and hints versus directives, rel="canonical" has been an interesting one. So when rel="canonical" first launched, what Google said about rel="canonical" is rel="canonical" is a hint to us, but we won't necessarily take it as gospel.
Yet, every test we saw, even from those early launch days, was, man, they are taking it as gospel. You throw a rel="canonical" on a trusted site accidentally on every page and point it back to the homepage, Google suddenly doesn't index anything but the homepage. It's crazy.
Number five, I think, for a long time, a lot of us have thought, hey, the social web is rising. Social is where a lot of the great content is being shared, a lot of where people are pointing to important things, and where endorsements are happening, more so, potentially, than the link graph. It's sort of the common man's link graph has become the social web and the social graph.
And yet, with the exception of the two years where Google had a very direct partnership with Twitter and those tweets and indexation, all that kind of stuff was heavily influential for Google search results, since that partnership broke up, we haven't seen that again from Google. They've actually sort of backtracked on social, and they've kind of said, "Hey, you know, tweets, Facebook shares, likes, that kind of stuff, it doesn't directly impact rankings for everyone."
Number six, last one. I think a lot of us felt like, as Google was cleaning up web spam, for a long time they talked about cleaning up web spam, from '06, '07 to about 2011, 2012, it was pretty sketchy. It was tough.
When they did start cleaning up web spam, I think a lot of us thought, "Well, eventually they're going to get to PPC too." I don't mean pay-per-click. I mean porn, pills, and casino.
But it turns out, as Matt Brown, from Moz, wisely and recently pointed out in his Search Love presentation in Boston, that, yes, if you look at the search results around these categories, whatever it is -- Buy Cialis online, Texas hold-'em no limit poker, removed for content, because Whiteboard Friday is family-friendly, folks -- whatever the search is that you're performing in these spheres, this is actually kind of the early warning SERPS of the SEO world. 
http://moz.com/blog/6-changes-google-hasnt-made-to-seo-whiteboard-friday
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