Posted by Eric Enge
It’s hard to foresee a lot of benefit to your hard work creating content when you don’t have much of a following, and even if you do, scaling that content creation is difficult for any marketer. One viable answer is syndicatio… Continue reading →
Posted by MarkTraphagen
Most of us who work in content marketing have felt the strain that scaling puts on our efforts. How on Earth are we supposed to keep coming up with great ideas for new pieces of content? The answer is, in some sense, all around us. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, MozCon community speaker Mark Traphagen shows us how to see the world in a different way—a way that’s chock full of content ideas.
Heads-up! We’re publishing a one-two punch of Whiteboard Fridays from our friends at Stone Temple Consulting today. Be sure to check out “Content Syndication” by Eric Enge, as well!
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Hey, hello. I’m Mark Traphagen from Stone Temple Consulting, and welcome to this week’s Whiteboard Friday. I want to talk to you today, starting out, about a movie that I hope you’ve all seen by now, because this should not be a spoiler alert. I’m not even going to spoil the movie, but it’s “The Sixth Sense.”
Most of you know that movie. You’ve seen it and remember it. The little kid who says that creepy thing: “I see dead people.”
What I want to give to you today, what I want to try to teach you to do and bring to you is that you see, not dead people, but content and see it everywhere. Most of us realize that these days we’ve got to be producing content to be effective on the Web, not only for SEO, but to be effective in our marketing, in our branding and building the reputation and trust authority that we need around our brand. That’s going to be happening by content.
But if you’re the one tasked with coming up with that content and you’ve got to create it, it’s a tough job. Why? Most of us are topically challenged. We come to that moment, “What do I write about? What do I do that video about? What do I make that podcast about? What’s the next thing I’m going to write about?” That’s going to be the hardest thing.
When I talk to people about this, people who do this, like I do every day for a living, producing, inventing content, they’re almost invariably going to put that in the top three and usually number one. What do I do? Where do I get this from?
It’s more important now than ever before. It used to be just most companies that did content at all, websites, would hire an SEO copywriter. They’d actually use that term. We need an SEO copywriter. That usually meant that we’re looking for somebody who’s going to know where to put the keywords in enough times, and we don’t really care what else goes on with the content, what they write or how they say it or how good a writer they are as long as they can know the ways to manipulate the search engines.
Well, I think most of us now, if you watch these Whiteboard Friday videos, you know it, that that just doesn’t work anymore. That’s not going to cut it. Not only does that not really work with the search engines so well anymore, but it’s not really using your content effectively. It’s not using it to build, again, that reputation, that trust, that authority that you need around your brand and that content can be so powerful to do.
So what I’m going to challenge you to do today is to get content eyes. You’ve got to get content eyes. You’ve got to get eyes that see content everywhere. This is what I train myself to do. It’s why I’m never out of ideas for that next blog post or that next video. You start to see it everywhere. You’ve got to get those eyes for it.
You’ve got to be like that professional photographer. Professional photographers are like this. This is what they have. Some of them, maybe they are born with it, but I think a lot of them have just developed it. They train themselves that everywhere they walk, when they’re going down the city street, when they’re out in the country, or wherever they are, they see photographs. The rest of us will walk right by it and say, “That’s just stuff happening.” But they see that old man on the street that has a face that tells a story of long ages. They see the way that shadow falls across the street at that moment, that right time of day. They see that’s a photograph. That’s a photograph. That’s a photograph.
You’ve got to start looking for that with content. You’ve got to be like Michelangelo. According to legend anyway, he said that he could look at a block of granite and see the sculpture that was inside it, waiting for him to chisel it out. That’s what you’ve got to train yourself to do.
So what I want to do today with the rest of this time is to give you some ways of doing that, some ways that you can look at the other content that you’re reading online, or videos you’re watching, conversations that you get into, listening to a conference speaker, wherever you are to start to look for that and get those content eyes. So let’s break into what those are.
By questioning everything here, I mean develop a questioning mind. This is a good thing to do anyway when you’re reading, especially when you’re reading non-fiction content or you’re looking at and evaluating things. But for the content producer, this is a great tool.
When I’m looking at a piece of content, when I’m watching one of Rand’s Whiteboard Friday videos, I don’t just say, “Oh, it’s Rand Fishkin. I’ve got to take everything that he says.” I formulate questions in my mind. Why is that true? He just went past that fact there, but how does he know that?
Wait, I’d like to know this, but I’m looking at a Whiteboard video. I could yell at it all day, and Rand’s not going to answer me. But maybe instead of just putting that question in the comments, maybe that becomes my next piece of content.
So question everything. Get those questions. Related to that — get a question antenna up. Now what I mean by that is look for questions that are already there, but aren’t getting answered. You see a great blog post on something, and then you look in the comments and see somebody has asked this great question, and neither the author of the blog post nor anybody else is really answering it adequately. Chances are, if that’s a really great question, that person doesn’t have it alone. There are a lot of other people out there with that same question.
So that’s an opportunity for you to take that and make a piece of content out of it. We’re talking here about something that’s relevant to the audience that you’re after, obviously. So that’s another thing is looking for those questions, and not just on other pieces of content, but obviously you should be listening to your customers. What are the questions they’re asking? If you don’t have direct access to that, talk to your sales staff. Talk to your customer service people. Whoever interfaces with the customers, collect their questions. Those are great sources of content.
Finally, here, not finally. Second to finally, penultimate, do the mash-up. I love mash-ups. I’m totally obsessed with them. It’s where somebody, an artist goes and takes two or three or sometimes more pieces of pop music —
they could be from different eras — and puts them together in a very creative way. It’s not just playing one after the other, but finds ways that they sonically match up and they can blend over each other. It might be a Beatles song over Gangster’s Paradise. A whole new thing happens when they do that.
Well, you can do mash-ups. When you’re reading content or watching videos or wherever you’re getting your stimulation, look for things that juxtapose in some way, that you could bring that in, in some way that nobody’s done before.
Quickly, there are four kinds of things you should be looking for to do your mash-up. Sometimes you could be writing about things that intersect in some way. You might see two different pieces of content and, because you’ve got your content eyes out there, you say, “Ah, there’s an overlap here that nobody is talking about.” So you talk about it. You write about that.
It might be a total contrast. It might be like over here people are saying this, and over here people are saying that. Why is there such a difference?
Maybe you can either resolve that or even just talk about why that difference is there.
It can be just an actual contradiction. There’s contradiction in this thing. Why is that contradiction there? Or maybe just where they complement each other. That’s supposed to be a bridge between there. Not a very good bridge. The two things, how do they complement each other? The mash-up idea is taking two or more ideas that are out there floating around, that you’ve been thinking about, and bringing them together in a way that nobody else has.
Before I go on to the last one here, I just want to say “Do you see what we’re doing?” We’re synthesizing out of other stimulus that’s out there to produce something that is unique, but birthed out of other ideas. That’s where the best ideas come from. That’s a way that you can be getting those ideas.
Let’s go to the last one here. I call it Clearasil because it’s clearing things up. This is one I use a lot. Maybe it’s because I have a background as a teacher years ago. I’ve got to make this clear. I’ve got to explain this. When you see something out there that is interesting or new, somebody presents some new facts, a test result, whatever it is, but they just kind of presented the facts, you could go, if you understand it, and say, “I think I know what that’s happening. I think I know the implications of that.” You could go and explain that. Now you have cleared that up, and you’ve created a great new piece of useful content.
A quick example of that kind of thing is I had a chat with Jay Baer recently, of Convince & Convert. Something he said just pinged in my mind and I said, “Yes, that’s why some of my content works.” He has this thing that he calls “and therefore” content. He says that he’s trained his staff and himself that when they go out and they see something where somebody has said like, “This happened out there,” kind of reporting of the news, they say, “Let’s write about or do a video about or an audio or whatever, and therefore what this means to you, and therefore the next steps you need to take because of that, and therefore what might happen in the future.” You see the power of that?
So the whole thing here is getting content eyes. Learning to see content everywhere. Train yourself. Begin to ask those questions. Begin to look at the stimulus that comes in around you. Listen, look, and find out what you can put together in a way that nobody else has before, and you’ll never run out of those content ideas. Thanks a lot for joining me today.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Posted by EricaMcGillivray
At the MozPlex, we’re all still coming down from the incredible energy, excitement, and new ideas that MozCon brings every year. Thank you again to all of you who joined us to make this year’s MozCon the best ever. For those of you who couldn’t join us, we wanted to share some of the best slide decks from MozCon (videos coming next month!) and also share downloads for all the decks from MozCon.
Additionally, for those planning ahead, make sure to buy your early bird ticket for MozCon 2015. We expect to sell out again, so grab this great deal now!
Rand’s put on his lab coat, literally, and dived into SEO and social media experiments. He looked at the correlations and causations for everything from how rapid tweeting of photos affects follower gains/losses to how clicks might influence SERPs.
Wil once again brought his A-game and his push that SEO is a growing field and we SEOs must grow with it. He brings us all together in a presentation exploring how with our colleagues in other marketing disciplines, we’re failing to capture business for our brand or clients.
Stephanie taught us how to think about the questions we ask in surveys differently. Are we biasing our audience and leading them to answering our survey in a certain way? Are we collecting the wrong types of data?
Phil brought his video expertise back to the MozCon stage. This year, he tackled YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine, but one often ignored by marketers. Phil puts you on track to stop being befuddled and make a YouTube plan for your brand.
Pete surprised everyone this by talking about not the Google Algo. Instead, he dove into one of his other passions: creating great content. Pete shows you how to be brave and build out your big idea.
Stacey’s presentation followed up Pete by diving into how to make the content process happen, especially if you have multiple clients or work at an agency. She addressed how to find the right audience for your content. And then how to throw all your ideas on the table and sort out the best ones.
Rich believes in the power of communities. He walked the MozCon audience through how to build up a community through shared experiences and rituals. Rich also showed how to make a business case for community building.
Can’t get enough MozCon decks? You can download all of them in the Agenda section on the MozCon page.
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Posted by Laura.Lippay
Six years ago, Yahoo! was called out (on this very blog!) for buying text links. Being the lone SEO at Yahoo! in the US at the time, training, teaching, guiding and policing all of the people involved in over a dozen Yahoo! Media websites, my heart stopped when I saw this post. The thing is, though, I knew the biz dev team at Yahoo! had absolutely no concept of link exchanges for SEO (that said, I have no idea about Great Schools – those were some nice anchor text links).
While most SEOs work on link relationships, most biz dev folks, especially in mid to larger sized online companies, work on business relationships. Every Yahoo! property had biz dev folks who were actively making deals to work with other sites for things like:
Most biz dev at Yahoo! was done horribly wrong in the SEO sense actually, with links in JavaScript or content in iFrames, or linking out to more SEO-savvy partners who were nofollowing their links back. So I set out to educate Yahoo! biz devs with the powerful opportunities they were missing with this guide to retaining SEO value in partnerships (updated for today’s biz devs). I still use it often for the larger companies I work with, and I hope some of you find it useful for your clients or yourselves as well.
Note that it’s very important, whether you’re an SEO working with biz devs or you’re a biz dev working on partnerships, that the things mentioned below are thoroughly considered before writing and signing a contract with a partner, since some of these things will need to be spelled out in the contract, and oftentimes negotiated.
Any additional ideas are gladly welcome in the comments!
Search engines follow links across the web to discover and classify content. The content and context of pages linking to each other is taken into consideration in classifying content and surfacing it in search results.
Consider these factors that contribute to a site and/or page’s ranking:
Links to a site are treated like votes to the site/page. The quality, quantity and context of the links from one page to another are used by search engines in classifying and ranking a page.
Any pages linking to each other are related to each other. This can include links in articles, in footers, in content modules and in comments among others. This can be helpful when related content links to each other (on the same site or across different sites). This can be damaging when receiving links from low-quality, spammy sites (typical in link-building) or linking to low-quality or spammy sites (typical in UGC comments).
Any time the same or very similar content populates the majority of more than one page on the internet, there is a good chance that the duplicates will be hidden from search results. The search engine will attempt to pick/choose the best version of the duplicate for searchers and hide the rest so other content options can appears in the search results.
When there is more than one version of the same content, search engines will try to determine the source and provide that in search results. Oftentimes when content is syndicated, the source does not actually rank first, especially if a small or newer site is syndicating out to larger, older and/or more popular sites with more activity.
This depends on the nature of the partnership & competition. Consider what should be written into the contract ahead of time.
For any inbound links from partners (in articles, content modules, on the site, etc), check how the links will be treated, and make sure the treatment specifications you want are written in the contract. Here are suggested options:
This depends on the nature of the UGC content.
Cross-domain canonical tags:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
Nofollow tags:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
Absolute vs. Relative URLs:
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Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
In the past 2 months Google made big changes to its search results.
Webmasters saw disappearing Google authorship photos, reduced video snippets, changes to local packs and in-depth articles, and more.
Here at Moz, we’ve closely monitored our own URLs to measure the effect of these changes on our actual traffic. The results surprised us.
In the early days of authorship, many webmasters worked hard to get their photo in Google search results. I confess, I doubt anyone worked harder at author snippets than me.
Search results soon became crowded with smiling faces staring back at us. Authors hired professional photographers. Publishers worked to correctly follow Google’s guidelines to set up authorship for thousands of authors.
The race for more clicks was on.
Then on June 28th, Google cleared the page. No more author photos.
To gauge the effect on traffic, we examined eight weeks’ worth of data from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, before and after the change. We then examined our top 15 authorship URLs (where author photos were known to show consistently) compared to non-authorship URLs.
The results broke down like this:
Surprisingly, authorship URLs performed as well as non-authorship URLs in terms of traffic. Even though Moz was highly optimized for authors, traffic didn’t significantly change.
On an individual level, things looked much different. We actually observed big changes in traffic with authorship URLs increasing or decreasing in traffic by as much as 45%. There is no clear pattern: Some went up, some went down—exactly like any URL would over an extended time.
Authorship photos don’t exist in a vacuum; each photo on the page competed for attention with all the other photos on the page. Each search result is as unique as a fingerprint. What worked for one result didn’t work for another.
Consider what happens visually when multiple author photos exist in the same search result:
One hypothesis speculates that more photos has the effect of drawing eyes down the page. In the absence of rich snippets, search click-through rates might follow more closely studied models, which dictate that results closer to the top earn more clicks.
In the absence of author photos, it’s likely click-through rate expectations have once again become more standardized.
Shortly after Google removed author photos, they took aim at video snippets as well. On July 17th, MozCast reported a sharp decline in video thumbnails.
Most sites, Moz included, lost 100% of their video results. Other sites appeared to be “white-listed” as reported by former Mozzer Casey Henry at Wistia.
A few of the sites Casey found where Google continues to show video thumbnails:
Aside from these “giants,” most webmasters, even very large publishers at the top of the industry, saw their video snippets vanish in search results.
How did this loss affect traffic for our URLs with embedded videos? Fortunately, here at Moz we have a large collection of ready-made video URLs we could easily study: our Whiteboard Friday videos, which we produce every, well, Friday.
To our surprise, most URLs actually saw more traffic.
On average, our Whiteboard Friday videos saw a 10% jump in organic traffic after losing video snippets.
A few other with video saw dramatic increases:
The last example, the Learn SEO page, didn’t have an actual video on it, but a bug with Google caused them to display an older video thumbnail. (Several folks we’ve talked to speculate that Google removed video snippets simply to clean up their bugs in the system)
We witnessed a significant increase in traffic after losing video snippets. How did this happen?
It turns out that many of our URLs that contained videos also saw a significant change in the number of search impressions at the exact same time.
According to Google, impressions for the majority of our video URLs shot up dramatically around July 14th.
Impressions for Whiteboard Friday URLs also rose 20% during this time. For Moz, most of the video URLs saw many more impressions, but for others, it appears rankings dropped.
While Moz saw video impressions rise, other publishers saw the opposite effect.
Casey Henry, our friend at video hosting company Wistia, reports seeing rankings drop for many video URLs that had thin or little content.
“…it’s only pages hosting video with thin content… the pages that only had video and a little bit of text went down.”
– Casey Henry
For a broader perspective, we talked to Marshall Simmonds, founder of Define Media Group, who monitors traffic to millions of daily video pageviews for large publishers.
Marshall found that despite the fact that most of the sites they monitor lost video snippets, they observed no visible change in either traffic or pageviews across hundreds of millions of visits.
Define Media Group also recently released its 2014 Mid-Year Digital Traffic Report which sheds fascinating light on current web traffic trends.
While we have anecdotal evidence of ranking and impression changes for video URLs on individual sites, on the grand scale across all Google search results these differences aren’t visible.
If you have video content, the evidence suggests it’s now worth more than ever to follow video SEO best practices: (taken from video SEO expert Phil Nottingham)
For the past several years web marketers competed for image and video snippets, and it’s with a sense of sadness that they’ve been taken away.
The smart strategy follows the data, which suggest that more traditional click-through rate optimization techniques and strategies could now be more effective. This means strong titles, meta descriptions, rich snippets (those that remain), brand building and traditional ranking signals.
What happened to your site when Google removed author photos and video snippets? Let us know in the comments below.
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