Posted by mariahayhow

Verner Panton, a design revolutionary, once said, “You sit more comfortably on colours you like.” A statement that seems to disregard logic, and focus strictly on the intangible relationships which dictate preferences.

So what does this statement say about design, and more importantly, how can YOU apply this to your online marketing strategies?

The answer is an investment in user experience: understanding how design can impact cognitive science and drive decisions. Here are a few stories around Panton’s designs and the insights they lend in creating successful online user experiences today. 

Why invest in UX?

Panton worked during a wonderfully whimsy time for furniture design, helping to shaping the late 1950’s Pop movement by making waves with his neon swimming pool design. Panton’s focus on design that provides function and evokes emotion can be seen across his eccentric pieces and even in current day design practices.

User experience is largely a subjective field, making it difficult to directly correlate qualitative metrics to various UX efforts and initiatives. For online efforts, attribution may prove difficult as it deals with users’ emotions, an increase in conversions and drop in bounce rates are signs in line with the intentions of enhanced user experience.

Analysis by the Design Management Institute shows how design-driven companies outperformed others by 228% through efforts like creating streamlined user experiences. Design-driven companies have effectively sold more product and made more profit, by providing unique experiences, at each touch point of their relationship with customers. Facilitating a stakeholder workshop can effectively gather requirements while increasing alignment among stakeholders. 

How do you validate UX design?

Panton’s Cone chair was a piece he created for his parents’ restaurant. The Cone chair was so admired by a restaurant customer they offered to put it into production. Post-production the Cone chair was briefly on display in a Fifth Avenue shop in New York, where it was removed due to the large crowds it attracted.

User experience is centered on perception. With the proliferation of user interfaces it is of the utmost importance to focus on the individual user’s experience, while considering the collective experiences of the target audience. 

In order to validate your user’s/users’ experience concepts, it is important to take a systematic approach. The following Validation stack, by Cennyd Bowles, shows the close relationship between design theory, user research, and evidence; together, these effectively validate UX concepts.

The validation stack requires you to provide recommendations that build off of one another and are driven by data. Backing up your argument with early buy-in from stakeholders and iterative user testing can both improve your argument for UX and strengthen your concepts.

Ways to improve UX

Panton’s S chair, a single legless piece of cantilevered plastic, graced VOGUE in 1995 with Kate Moss sitting naked atop it. The chair remains an icon of pop movement design, and is rumored to have been inspired by a pile of plastic buckets.

The design was made to maintain consistency, with the choice of one seamless material, and functionality, with its smooth stacking ability.

UX design calls for both consistency and functionality in order to limit distractions and guide users’ decisions.

• Usability: Increase ease of use 
  Examine the full user path by watching them go through the site and conversion funnel. Asking the user how they think about or through the site and its use to them.
  (Tool to use: UserTesting.com) 

• Informational design: Create visual hierarchy 
  Use data to drive design decisions. Track common on-site behaviors to adjust site layout or page layout.
  (Tool to use: Simple Mouse tracking)
•  Content strategy: Incorporate personality
  Track your brand’s tone of voice across all platforms.
  (Tools to use are discussed in Distilled’s Content Guide)

An array of potential users should be observed over time, as users’ experiences and influences continually affect their decision-making process.

How does brand communication improve UX?

Panton’s Living Tower is an impressive 2-meter high structure with unique cut-outs, designed to encourage communication. The oddly amoeba-esque cut outs in the furniture encouraged people to sit in seemingly un-conventional positions, while prompting conversation.

User experience efforts can be amplified by creating a space and prompt for conversation. Brands engaging with users on social and feedback channels should have the goal to meet their target market where they are or host a conversation their user/audience would like to have. Before building or creating a social strategy for a brand it is important to ask the following questions…

• How is the social platform aligned to the brand? 
• Why would users choose to engage in a dialogue with a brand on this platform? 
• What value-add could the social platform provide for users?
• When would it be most helpful for a user to communicate with the brand? 

Researching the types of discussions users are already prompting, about your competitors or industry, can help to uncover potential opportunities for social media strategy and content creation. Then measure social channels’ impact through network referrals, conversions, and landing page visit analytics. 

Why user-centered design for user experience? 

Panton studied under Arne Jacobsen, who worked with him to create the Ant chair. The chair was commissioned specifically for a large Danish pharmaceutical company‘s cafeteria. The chair base was designed to be comfortable, lightweight and stackable. The choice to use only three legs was in an attempt to minimize hitting furniture against people’s legs or other furniture, during their lunch hour.

User experience efforts should be grounded in similar methodologies, giving users additional functionality without compromising on a seamless experience. Striking a balance of trust, motivation and functionality can ultimately drive a greater user experience. Working with and learning from users’ patterns, through both qualitative and quantitative testing and tracking.

How have you incorporated UX elements, principles, and methodologies into your online marketing strategies? Looking forward to hearing from the Moz community!

Here’s a resource for those of you who’d like to read more about Panton’s views on individual colors and color psychology.

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Posted by ben-lloydTo make the most of your content, you need to make sure you’re integrating correctly with social media, using the most effective tools at your disposal, and most importantly, continuing to pay attention to it long after you launch it… Continue reading →

Posted by dan-levy

I’ve got baggage. I call it J-School baggage, and I’m not the only one schlepping it around. Thousands of people have graduated from journalism school in the years since the financial crisis and the collapse of the “old media” model. Many of us have found our way to the content marketing world, and some of us have struggled with trading the noble ideals of informing the public and holding power to account for “key performance indicators” like building brand awareness and driving new trial starts. But while I still consider myself a (lapsed) member of the ink-stained tribe, plying my trade in the content marketing space has been both fulfilling and humbling. That’s because journalists aren’t just bringing tons of value to the businesses now cutting our checks – we have a lot to learn from them as well.

Plenty of so-called journalistic principles and methods have already infiltrated marketing departments and agencies in recent years (whether this is always a good thing is up for debate). Smart content marketers are maintaining editorial calendars, adhering to style guides (Moz’s is a great example) and building out their teams into bonafide brand newsrooms. The problem is that while this enables brands to pump out content more efficiently, it doesn’t necessarily help them do it more effectively.

This post isn’t ultimately for you. It’s for your audience. Every piece of content you create as a marketer exists to serve a business goal, but it’s guaranteed to fail if it doesn’t ultimately serve your audience in the process.

1. Don’t just link, attribute

I know you know how to link. Command-K is one of my favorite Mac shortcuts, and linking is a huge part of what makes online publishing more efficient than the days where every backwater town had multiple papers chasing the same scoop. As media critic Jeff Jarvis says, “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

Thing is, linking isn’t enough. As an editor I love to receive drafts filled with pithy quotes, punchy stats and thoughtful insights. I’d like to assume that unless I’m told otherwise these quotes, stats and insights originated with the author herself. But journalism school taught me me to take a step back before hitting “publish.” Because every idea or fact that has been gleaned from another source has to be properly attributed. Ever notice how every other sentence in a newspaper article includes the phrase “according to so and so” or “so and so said”? That’s attribution. And it’s non-negotiable.

Yet I can’t tell you how often content marketers fail to do this or simply embed a link somewhere in the paragraph without giving any context. Don’t force readers to click away from the page to get a critical piece of information. If you’re citing a study, say who conducted it. If you’re linking to a New York Times article, include that somewhere in the sentence. I appreciate you trying to stick to the word limit but this is the internet. Real estate isn’t that precious. I’d rather you be generous with your words than stingy with the facts.

Speaking of the facts, please try to get them right. I know it’s hard. Journalists get it wrong all the time. But that doesn’t mean content marketers shouldn’t try to do better. Fact-checking can be especially challenging when you’re covering complex stuff like conversion rate optimization, A/B testing and PPC marketing, which is the space I currently work in. Most of us didn’t become content marketers – or journalists for that matter – because we kicked ass in math class.

I once had a blog post queued up and ready to go live first thing the next morning until our eagle-eyed social strategist recognized one of the case studies cited in the post and noticed that the author had completely misinterpreted the results. This is one of the reasons attributions is so important. In a small industry, examples and starts often get recycled from one blog to the next. The result is a case of broken telephone where the facts get muddled in transit. Proper attribution makes it easier to track where the breakdown occurred and to set the record straight. You can quote me on that.

2. Reporting is not just an analytics thing

Content marketers go by many names, including brand journalists, content crafters and content strategists (guilty). But I’ve never heard anyone refer to content marketers as reporting. That’s probably because far too few of us do any actual reporting. Not reporting on KPIs, but good old-fashioned shoe leather reporting.

Because you know what’s even better than pulling a pithy quote from another blog and attributing it to the proper expert? Talking to them yourself. Social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn and online resources like HARO and ProfNet and have made thought leaders and subject matter experts more accessible and approachable than ever. But for some reason many content marketers are allergic to doing any original reporting. This leads to an ouroborian scenario where the same bits of knowledge are circulated over and over under different urls and bylines without any added value. No wonder audiences are experiencing content fatigue. I need a nap just thinking about it.

Quick sidebar: Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of “expert roundup” posts, whereby bloggers collect quotes from industry experts and string them into a post. Often this is more about getting these experts to share the post (you may know this as “ego baiting”) than providing your audience with useful content. If you’re going to do an expert roundup post, a) actually interview the experts (don’t just send them the link to share after the fact), and b) Challenge them with thoughtful questions that will spark genuine insights. Here are a couple examples from the Unbounce blog where we reached out to thought leaders in the pay-per-click and Google+ marketing communities and started some great conversations in the process.

3. Pitching (beyond baseball)

Excuse the rant, but this is a huge pet peeve of mine. Way too many of the guest bloggers I’ve worked with expect to be spoon-fed ideas for what to write about. Journalists would never, ever make this mistake. They know that editors are extremely busy and that it’s their job to make our lives easier (#allaboutme). Seriously though, great journalists aren’t just excellent writers and reporters, they’re masters of the pitch. They know that they have to earn an editor’s trust and attention by consistently delivering amazing content on deadline. Only then might they find plum assignments falling into their laps.

Like my former colleagues in the magazine industry, my team has regular editorial meetings where we brainstorm ideas for the blog and assign them to our stable of writers (though if they’re really good, we keep them for ourselves). However, this only accounts for a fraction of the content we produce. We also rely on both new and established writers to come to us with amazing ideas tailored to our platform and our audience. Unfortunately, many marketers who do pitch us bring ideas to the table that make sense for their business and their audience.

Great journalists know how to calibrate their pitch to suit the editorial voice and mission of the publication they’re pitching. You wouldn’t pitch the same article for BuzzFeed (“13 Most Epic Ways to Up Your Grilled Cheese Game”) as you would for The New Yorker (“Annals of Gastronomy: Grilled Cheese, Goethe and the Making of Modern Europe”). A great pitch demonstrates that you understand what our blog is about and what our audience is looking for. Here’s a real example of a pitch that went into the instant reject pile:

Hi Dan, how are you doing?

I am sending a new Article viz title “Implementing the Right Mix of Customary and Unconventional Content Marketing Ways.” Please review it and let me know when you will publish it.

First off, our blog is all about conversion marketing. What does this have anything to do with that? Second, our editorial guidelines make it clear that top-notch writing chops are a must. What is an article viz? What are Content Marketing Ways? I’ll let you know when I’ll publish it: Never.

On the other hand, here’s a pitch that caught my attention (and led to a successful post) because it instantly communicated to me that the author understood what we’re looking for and could deliver on it:

Hey Dan,

I have a topic that I think may stir some discussion/debate that I haven’t seen anyone actually address, unless I’m just so off-my-rocker that I need to be put away.

Sound interesting?

Here we go.

Now that’s the kind of opening that makes the journalist and the content marketer in me jump with joy. He hasn’t even gotten to the actual pitch but he’s already embraced the sort of cheeky, comedic writing style that’s a hallmark of our blog.

Here’s how he pitched the topic we settled on:

5 Embarrassing Habits That Keep Your Emails From Being Clicked

We celebrate open rates, because that’s our first touch with a reader, but opens aren’t everything. Previews in email program can make open rates artificially high. Plain-text emails aren’t tracked. Several other issues that makes open rates a less-than-stellar metric. Just because your email is opened doesn’t mean your message has been heard.

A much more solid metric to track is click rate.

So, if you’re getting emails opened, but your click through rates are lower than your current savings account interest rate, your email may be guilty of one of these bad habits.

Check out the article that came out of that sweet, sweet pitch.

Okay, content marketers. I’m done lecturing. The truth is, although my J-school baggage still weighs heavy on my shoulders, I’ve spent the last five years working in the agency and startup worlds. And what I’ve discovered is that marketers have plenty to teach even the most experienced journalists about creating content that truly connects.

1. Transparency is the new something

Journalists are notoriously thin-skinned. We thrive on holding power to account but are often reluctant or unwilling to admit our own screw-ups. This is something my friend and fellow journalist cum content marketer  Craig Silverman has written about. When the digital recorder is pointed at us, we often resort to the same tactics of obfuscation and deflection that drive us bonkers.

Journalists are also prone to leaning too heavily on anonymous sources (notwithstanding instances where protecting them is critical – and indeed, an obligation and right) and to withholding information to thwart competition, even when collaboration and disclosure would be in the public interest.

Content marketing, on the other hand, is transparent by its very nature. Our cards are all on the table. Putting aside shady forms of “native advertising” where an article’s branded provenance is intentionally buried, our audience is fully aware that our content exists to drive brand exposure and, ultimately, revenue. Making our content relevant and delightful enough that they consume it anyway is our great challenge and opportunity. Journalists have to make sure to separate church and state. Content marketers are tasked with making theocracy awesome.

In the startup world, transparency has become a badge of honour. SaaS companies like Buffer, Groove, Moz and Unbounce have made a habit of sharing – and creating actionable content out of – their metrics, strategies and even their salaries with the world.

With so many newspapers, magazines and formerly independent blogs being acquired by corporations rife with potential conflicts of interest – and native advertising all the rage in traditional publishing circles – journalists can learn a thing or two about how to transform transparency and disclosure from a burden into an asset.

2. Getting up to code

Journalists have drunk the big data Kool-Aid, with web native “data journalism” sites like Nate Silver’s  FiveThirtyEight (now part of ESPN) and The Upshot (from The New York Times) leading the way, but many journalists I know remain squeamish about getting their hands dirty with basic HTML or inputting content into a simple CMS like WordPress. I knew a “web editor” for a print magazine who would email the dev team whenever she wanted to change a sentence or fix a link in “the back end” (even her chosen euphemism shows how mysterious and icky it seemed to her). The lines are much greyer between editors, designers, writers and project managers in the marketing world. When you’re a small team it’s “all hands on deck” for every campaign; roles are more fluid and people are less precious about what’s “their department.”

A related problem is that many online editors have never logged in to their website or blog’s Google Analytics account, delegating that responsibility to the folks on “the business side.” That means they often have little idea of who their audience actually is. Sometimes this ignorance is willful and convenient since publications (lifestyle magazines in particular) often create content not for any real audience but an aspirational one that they can sell to the most lucrative advertisers. Which leads me to my final point…

3. Know your audience, or the people formerly known as that

I said up top that this piece is about your audience, not you. But even though journalism is ostensibly a public service, many journalists remain wary of their publics. For decades journalism was a broadcast medium, a one-way conversation. Many journos held out on social media for as long as they could and maintained love-hate relationships with comment threads, partly because they weren’t used to having the people formerly known as the audience (as J-school prof Jay Rosen famously put it) talk back to them.

Content marketers – at least the smart ones – know that it’s all about their audience, that every blog post, ebook, webinar and tweet needs to be aimed a particular segment, persona or phase of the customer lifecycle. Even SEO-driven practices like keyword density – when not abused – stem from an audience-first mentality. Headline writers often make the mistake of sacrificing clarity for cleverness; I used to joke with my fellow magazine editors that we essentially made up puns for a living. In marketing, clear and concise always trumps cute. We’ve actually proven this at Unbounce! For an email blast promoting a webinar with our cheeky Scottish co-founder Oli Gardner we A/B tested the following two subject lines:

Variation A: [Webinar] Some Call Him the Scottish Chuck Norris of LPO…

Variation B: [Webinar] The 3 Landing Page Mistakes 98% of Marketers Are Making

Guess which won? Variation B, the clear and descriptive headline, kicked ass with a 3% higher open rate and a 34% higher click-through rate.

Sorry, but your audience probably doesn’t find you as cute as your mother does.

Caveats, conclusions and a personal anecdote

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe the line between editorial and advertorial is sacrosanct. Journalism is journalism, and content marketing is, in the end, just a form of marketing. But I also believe that part of the reason the media industry (like the music, entertainment and book publishing industries before and after it) failed to see the digital disruption coming and adapt accordingly is that they lost sight of whether their content was providing actual value – and not just powering their bottom line. As data-driven marketers, we’re all too aware of our content’s performance. But we do a grave disservice to our audiences when we discard tried-and-true journalistic principles like fairness, accuracy and attribution.

I continue to carry my J-school baggage with pride. But lately my shoulders have been less weighted with guilt about “going to the dark side.” Before leaving my last job, I told my boss about the new opportunity that was beckoning me and admitted that I was conflicted. Was delving deeper into the marketing world and further away from traditional journalism the “right move for my career”? His response, even though it was in his interest to persuade me to stay, was “Screw your career, do what’s best for your craft.” It’s the best advice I’ve ever received, because working in content marketing has made me a better editor, strategist, storyteller and – yes – journalist.

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Posted by akmercog

Last August, we launched the Lead Generation Card to all advertisers on Twitter. Since then, we’ve been impressed with the many small and medium businesses who have integrated the Lead Generation card into their marketing strategy, and seen powerful results.

We thought it would be valuable to share a page from our own playbook and offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the @TwitterSmallBiz team has been using Lead Generation Cards to accomplish our goals. Below, we’ll discuss what a Lead Generation Card is, and the three keys to success that we’ve uncovered through our experience using the product.

What is a Lead Generation Card?

A Lead Generation Card is simply a link that allows you to gather new customer email addresses directly within a Tweet. When you tweet out this link, it pre-populates a user’s full name, @username and email address (previously entered in their Twitter account settings) into the expanded area of your Tweet, replacing the need for a traditional, more cumbersome form.

In addition to a person’s contact information, the expanded Tweet includes other elements as well:

• Short description: A statement that provides context and explains the value people will get from sharing their information with you.
• Image: A visual cue that represents your business and generates interest in your offer.
• Call to action: The action you want people to take, along with the benefits of doing so.

Here is what a Lead Generation Card looks like when included in a Tweet:

For step by step instructions on how to set up a Lead Generation Card, you can visit our dedicated support page. 

Our three keys to success with Lead Generation Cards

Our @TwitterSmallBiz team did a lot of testing and learning before we landed on our current strategy for Lead Generation Cards. Here are three tips for your own Lead Generation Card campaigns:

1. Streamline your campaigns

Twitter Ads enables you to set up multiple campaigns within your account and provides a view into performance at both the aggregate and individual campaign level. 

If you plan to include Lead Generation Cards in your Promoted Tweets, we recommend setting up a separate campaign that includes all of your Tweets aimed at Lead Generation. This allows you to adjust your bid independently from Promoted Tweets that have other goals, such as generating engagement, driving website traffic, etc.

Within each campaign, you can also view performance at the individual Tweet level, which allows you to understand which Tweets are the biggest contributors towards your goals. When you include multiple Promoted Tweets with Lead Generation Cards in the same campaign, you can more easily compare performance across various combinations of Tweet copy and Lead Generation Card creatives.

Once you determine which Lead Generation Cards and types of Tweet copy are driving the best results, you can allocate more of your budget towards those combinations and away from the ones that aren’t performing as well.

2. Less isn’t always more

The goal behind testing and learning is to then optimize your campaigns to be as effective as possible. The more you test, the more quickly you can learn which features and combinations are most effective at helping you reach your goals. The sooner you start the testing process, the better.

When you first start using Lead Generation Cards, try anywhere from five to seven different Cards across 20-30 variations of Tweet copy. A few days into your campaign, your Twitter Ads analytics will provide you with a clear view into which combinations are performing better than others so you can focus your efforts moving forward.

Here’s an example of how we used a similar testing framework for a recent campaign to collect email addresses around a new content offer:

Lead Generation Cards:

Copy for Promoted Tweets:

Option #1: Lead Generation Cards make it easier than ever to generate leads on Twitter – find out how they can help your biz in this guide:

Option #2: Did you know you can capture a lead in a Tweet? Download our free guide to find out how:

Option #3: Have you seen a Lead Generation Card before? Now you have. We’ll teach you how to use them for your business in our new guide:

Option #4: Would 1700 leads in a week look good to your boss? Download our guide to find out how @rockcreek accomplished this w/ Lead Generation Cards

3. Follow up

When someone submits their email address through a Lead Generation Card, that person is expressing interest in your business. This creates an opportunity for you to follow up when potential customers are more likely to be receptive to your message. If you don’t follow up with people after they submit an email address, they may not remain as interested or be as receptive to hearing from you.

For this reason, it’s important to develop a plan for how you will follow up with new leads after they submit their email address. That follow-up plan will often vary depending on the offer used for your Lead Generation Card.

For example, if your offer included a new piece of content, you may want to include the email addresses you collect in an existing newsletter or email campaign list that shares similar types of content. Alternatively, if you offered event registration through your Lead Generation Card, you might want to add those email addresses to an event mailing list so that you can send additional event information or materials that were presented at the event. No matter what type of follow-up plan you choose, it should create opportunities for you to continue communicating with new leads and, ultimately, convert them into paying customers.

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Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

I used to laugh at the idea of Hummingbird optimization.

In a recent poll, Moz asked nearly 300 marketers which Google updated affected their traffic the most. Penguin and Panda were first and second, followed by Hummingbird in a distant third.

Unsurprising, because unlike Panda and Penguin, Hummingbird doesn’t specifically combat webspam. 

Ever wonder why Google named certain algorithms after black and white animals (i.e. black hat vs. white hat?) Hummingbird is a broader algorithm altogether, and Hummingbirds can be any color of the rainbow.

One aspect of Hummingbird is about better understanding of your content, not just specific SEO tactics.

Hummingbird also represents an evolutionary step in entity-based search that Google has worked on for years, and it will continue to evolve. In a way, optimizing for entity search is optimizing for search itself.

Many SEOs limit their understanding of entity search to vague concepts of structured data, Schema.org, and Freebase. They fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to participate in the entity SEO revolution is to mark up your HTML with complex schema.org microdata.

Not true.

Don’t misunderstand; schema.org and structured data are awesome. If you can implement structured data on your website, you should. Structured data is precise, can lead to enhanced search snippets, and helps search engines to understand your content. But Schema.org and classic structured data vocabularies also have key shortcomings:

1. Schema types are limited. Structured data is great for people, products, places, and events, but these cover only a fraction of the entire content of the web. Many of us markup our content using Article schema, but this falls well short of describing the hundreds of possible entity associations within the text itself. 
2. Markup is difficult. Realistically, in a world where it’s sometimes difficult to get authors to write a title tag or get engineers to attach an alt attribute to an image, implementing proper structured data to source HTML can be a daunting task.
3. Adoption is low. A study last year of 2.4 billion web pages showed less than 25% contained structured data markup. A recent SearchMetrics study showed even less adoption, with only 0.3% of websites out of over 50 million domains using Schema.org.

This presents a challenge for search engines, which want to understand entity relationships across the entire web – not simply the parts we choose to mark up. 

In reality, search engines have worked over 10 years – since the early days of Google – at extracting entities from our content without the use of complex markup.

How search engines understand relationships without markup

Here’s a simple explanation of a complex subject. 

Search engines can structure your content using the concept of triples. This means organizing keywords into a framework of subject → predicate → object.

Structured data frameworks like schema.org work great because they automatically classify information into a triple format. Take this example from Schema.org.

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1>
  <span>Director: <span itemprop="director">James Cameron</span> (born August 16, 1954)</span>
  <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
  <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div><br>

Extracting the triples from this code sample would yield:

Avatar (Movie) → Has Director → James Cameron

Subject → Predicate → Object

The challenge is: Can search engines extract this information for the 90%+ of your content that isn’t marked up with structured data? 

Yes, they can.

Triples, triples everywhere

Ask Google a question like who is the president of Harvard or how many astronauts walked on the moon, and Google will often answer from a page with no structured data present.

Consider this query for the ideal length of a title tag.

Google is able to extract the semantic meaning from this page even though the properties of “length” and its value of 50-60 characters are not structured using classic schema.org markup.

Matt Cutts recently revealed that Google uses over 500 algorithms. That means 500 algorithms that layer, filter and interact in different ways. The evidence indicates that Google has many techniques of extracting entity and relationship data that may work independent of each other.

Regardless, whether you are a master of schema.org or not, here are tips for communicating entity and relationship signals within your content.

1. Keywords

Yes, good old fashioned keywords.

Even without structured markup, search engines have the ability to parse keywords into their respective structure. 

But keywords by themselves only go so far. In order for this method to work, your keywords must be accompanied by appropriate predicates and objects. In other words, you sentences provide fuel to search engines when they contain detailed information with clear subjects and organization.

Consider this example of the relationships extracted from our title tag page by AlchemyAPI:

There’s evidence Google has worked on this technology for over 10 years, ever since it acquired the company Applied Semantics in 2003.

For deeper understanding, Bill Slawski wrote an excellent piece on Google’s ability to extract relationship meaning from text, as well as AJ Kohn’s excellent advice on Google’s Knowledge Graph optimization.

2. Tables and HTML elements

This is old school SEO that folks today often forget.

HTML (and HTML5), by default, provide structure to webpages that search engines can extract. By using lists, tables, and proper headings, you organize your content in a way that makes sense to robots. 

In the example below, the technology exists for search engines to easily extract structured relationship about US president John Adams in this Wikipedia table.

The goal isn’t to get in Google’s Knowledge Graph, (which is exclusive to Wikipedia and Freebase). Instead, the objective is to structure your content in a way that makes the most sense and relationships between words and concepts clear. 

For a deeper exploration, Bill Slawski has another excellent write up exploring many different techniques search engines can use to extract structured data from HTML-based content.

3. Entities and synonyms

What do you call the President of the United States? How about:

• Barack Obama
• POTUS (President Of The United States)
• Commander in Chief
• Michelle Obama’s Husband
• First African American President

In truth, all of these apply to the same entity, even though searchers will look for them in different ways. If you wanted to make clear what exactly your content was about (which president?) two common techniques would be to include:

1. Synonyms of the subject: We mean the President of the United States → Barack Obama → Commander in Chief and → Michelle Obama’s Husband
2. Co-occuring phrases: If we’re talking about Barack Obama, we’re more likely to include phrases like Honolulu (his place of birth), Harvard (his college), 44th (he is the 44th president), and even Bo (his dog). This helps specify exactly which president we mean, and goes way beyond the individual keyword itself.

Using synonyms and entity association also has the benefit of appealing to broader searcher intent. A recent case study by Cognitive SEO demonstrated this by showing significant gains after adding semantically related synonyms to their content.

4. Anchor text and links

Links are the original relationship connector of the web.

Bill Slawski (again, because he is an SEO god) writes about one method Google might use to identity synonyms for entities using anchor text. It appears Google also uses anchor text in far more sophisticated ways. 

When looking at Google answer box results, you almost always find related keyword-rich anchor text pointing to the referenced URL. Ask Google “How many people walked on the moon?” and you’ll see these words in the anchor text that points to the URL Google displays as the answer.

Other queries:

In these examples and more that I researched, matching anchor text was present every time in addition to the relevant information and keywords on the page itself.

Additionally, there seems to be an inidication that internal anchor text might also influence these results.

This is another argument to avoid generic anchor text like “click here” and “website.” Descriptive and clear anchor text, without overdoing it, provides a wealth of information for search engines to extract meaning from.

5. Leverage Google Local

For local business owners, the easiest and perhaps most effective way to establish structured relationships is through Google Local. The entire interface is like a structured data dashboard without Schema.org.

When you consider all the data you can upload both in Google+ and even Moz Local, the possibilities to map your business data is fairly complete in the local search sense.

In case you missed it, last week Google introduced My Business which makes maintaining your listings even easier.

6. Google Structured Data Highlighter

Sometimes, structured data is still the way to go.

In times when you have trouble adding markup to your HTML, Google offers its Structured Data Highlighter tool. This allows you to tell Google how your data should be structured, without actually adding any code.

The tool uses a type of machine learning to understand what type of schema applies to your pages, up to thousands at a time. No special skills or coding required.

Although the Structured Data Highlighter is both easy and fun, the downsides are:

1. The data is only available to Google. Other search engines can’t see it.
2. Markup types are limited to a few major top categories (Articles, Events, etc)
3. If your HTML changes even a little, the tool can break.

Even though it’s simple, the Structured Data Highlighter should only be used when it’s impossible to add actual markup to your site. It’s not a substitution for the real thing.

7. Plugins

For pure schema.org markup, depending on the CMS you use, there’s often a multitude of plugins to make the job easier.

If you’re a Wordpress user, your options are many:

• Several of Yoast’s SEO plugins
• All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
• Schema Creator by Raven
• Add Meta Tag

Looking forward

If you have a chance to add Schema.org (or any other structured data to your site), this will help you earn those coveted SERP enhancements that may help with click-through rate, and may help search engines better understand your content.

That said, semantic understanding of the web goes far beyond rich snippets. Helping search engines to better understand all of your content is the job of the SEO. Even without Hummingbird, these are exactly the types of things we want to be doing.

It’s not “create content and let the search engines figure it out.” It’s “create great content with clues and proper signals to help the search engines figure it out.” 

If you do the latter, you’re far ahead in the game.

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