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Must-Have Social Media Meta Tag Templates for Improved Sharing and SEO

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

At Moz, we strive to include social media metadata in all new pieces of content that we publish. This allows us to optimize for sharing Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinerest by defining exactly how titles, descriptions, images and more appear in social streams.

Think of it as conversion rate optimization for social exposure.

The implications for SEO are also significant. We know from experience and studies that the right data, including optimized images, helps content to spread, which often leads to increased links and mentions.

Knowing exactly which social meta tags to include can be confusing even to experienced webmasters. This post by Micheal King is a huge help, and Wordpress publishers who use Yoast’s SEO plugin are well ahead of the game. For the rest of us, consider the different structures supported by the major social platforms:
  • Twitter Cards: Summaries, Images, Galleries, Apps, Video, Audio, and Products
  • Pinterest Rich Pins: Products, Recipes, Movies, and Articles
  • Google+: Articles, Blog, Book, Event, Local Business, Organization, Person, Product, and Reviews
  • Facebook: Articles, Photos, Audio, Video, and more

To help ease this problem, I created four social media tag templates that you can fill out, customize for your own use, and share with your team and others.

How to use these templates

Simply copy and paste the template into the text editor of your choice. Make sure to replace any orange or green text with your own data, and customize, eliminate or add any tags you find necessary.

The first three of these templates are optimized using a typical “article” markup and data, ideal for blog posts and most written content. The final template contains markup for product pages.For other post types, such as book or recipes, refer to documentation linked at the end of this post for reference on what to customize.

When you are done, don’t forget to test and apply for approval.

1. The Minimal Template

This slimmed back version runs lean and fast. It contains a bare minimum of data for optimized sharing across Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.

Title tags and meta descriptions are included even though they aren’t technically social media meta tags. This is because they can be used by Google+ and other social media platforms, and it is best practice to include them on every page you publish.

Minimum Social Media Tag Template: Article

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” value=”summary”>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />

2: The Standard Template

The standard template represents a more robust implementation of social tags and is meant to work across all platforms. In addition to all of the features of the mimimal template above, the standard template includes the following:

  • The basic Twitter Summary card
  • Twitter thumbnail image
  • Facebook Page Insights

Standard Social Media Tag Template: Article

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@publisher_handle“>
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Page Title“>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Page description less than 200 characters“>
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@author_handle“>
<– Twitter Summary card images must be at least 200x200px –>
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg“>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Site Name, i.e. Moz” />
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”Facebook numeric ID” />

3: The Full Monty

This is the monster! In addition to all the data contained in the standard template, the full template contains:

  • Google Authorship and Publisher Markup. Although this data doesn’t change your content appearance in Google+, it potentially add links to your Google+ pages in search results.
  • Schema.org article markup
  • Twitter Summary card with large image
  • Expanded Open Graph article data

Full Social Media Tag Template: Article

<!– Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype attributes. –>
<html itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Article”>

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Google Authorship and Publisher Markup –>
<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/[Google+_Profile]/posts”/>
<link rel=”publisher” href=â€�https://plus.google.com/[Google+_Page_Profile]“/>

<!– Schema.org markup for Google+ –>
<meta itemprop=”name” content=”The Name or Title Here“>
<meta itemprop=”description” content=”This is the page description“>
<meta itemprop=”image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg“>

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary_large_image”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@publisher_handle“>
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Page Title“>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Page description less than 200 characters“>
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@author_handle”>
<!– Twitter summary card with large image must be at least 280x150px –>
<meta name=”twitter:image:src” content=”http://www.example.com/image.html“>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Site Name, i.e. Moz” />
<meta property=”article:published_time” content=”2013-09-17T05:59:00+01:00” />
<meta property=”article:modified_time” content=”2013-09-16T19:08:47+01:00” />
<meta property=”article:section” content=”Article Section” />
<meta property=”article:tag” content=”Article Tag” />
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”Facebook numberic ID” />

Bonus: The Product Template

For merchants, product markup is very popular, and usually easy for developers to implement in their shopping cart software. The product template differs from article markup in only a few ways:

  • Modified <html> tag to reflect schema.org product data
  • Twitter Product Card includes required data labels
  • Open Graph data includes price and currency data

Product Social Media Tag Template

<!– Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype attributes. –>
<html itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Product”>

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Schema.org markup for Google+ –>
<meta itemprop=”name” content=”The Name or Title Here“>
<meta itemprop=”description” content=”This is the page description“>
<meta itemprop=”image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg“>

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”product”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@publisher_handle“>
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Page Title“>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Page description less than 200 characters“>
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@author_handle”>
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.html“>
<meta name=”twitter:data1″ content=”$3“>
<meta name=”twitter:label1″ content=”Price“>
<meta name=”twitter:data2″ content=”Black“>
<meta name=”twitter:label2″ content=”Color“>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Site Name, i.e. Moz” />
<meta property=”og:price:amount” content=”15.00” />
<meta property=”og:price:currency” content=”USD” />

Tools for testing and approval

A. Twitter Validation Tool

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator


Before your cards show on Twitter, you must first have your domain approved. Fortunately, it’s a super-easy process. After you implement your cards, simply enter your sample URL into the validation tool. After checking your markup, select the “Submit for Approval” button.

B. Facebook Debugger

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug


You don’t need prior approval for your meta information to show on Facebook, but the debugging tool they offer gives you a wealth of information about all your tags and can also analyze your Twitter tags.

C. Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets


Webmasters traditionally use the structured data testing tool to test authorship markup and preview how snippets will appear in search results, but you can also use see what other types of meta data Google is able to extract from each page.

D. Pinterest Rich Pins Validator

http://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/validator/


Like Twitter, Pinterest requires an approval process to enable Rich Pin functionality. Use the Rich Pin Validator tool to test your data markup and apply for approval at the same time.

Tips and best practices

Optimizing for images

The image you link to in your social data does not actually have to be on the page, but it should represent your content well. The image allows you to controll what people see when they share your content, so it’s important to use quality images.

Every social platform has different standards for sizing. Typically, it’s easier to keep it simple and choose one image size that will work for all services.

  • Twitter thumbnail: 120x120px
  • Twitter large image: 280x150px
  • Facebook: Standards vary, but an image at least 200x200px works best. Facebook recommends large images up to 1200px wide.

In short, larger images offer you the most flexibility. When in doubt, test each page using the appropriate tool below to see exactly how your images will appear in snippits.

The importance of Open Graph data

If you could choose only one type of meta data to include, your best bet is Open Graph. That’s because all the platforms can use it as a fallback, including Twitter to a large degree.

Facebook page insights

The meta property “fb:admins” requires that you enter your numeric Facebook id number, and gives you access to analytics about how your website content is shared on Facebook. Read more about Page Insights, including how to set it up and discover your numeric id.

Further resources

Use these templates as a starting point, but you can customize them in millions of ways. A few valuable resources to aid your journey:

What are your best tips for optimizing your content for sharing? Let us know in the comments below.


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9,000 Uniques in One Day: A Viral Marketing Case Study

Posted by ViperChill

One of the most popularised examples of viral marketing is that of Microsoft’s Hotmail (now Outlook Online) email service. Every single email sent using the site came attached with a small signature which read “Get your free e-mail at Hotmail.” Doug Rushoff was one of the first people to use the phrase viral marketing online, and likened the concept to someone who is susceptible to an idea being infected by another, and then sharing it with others, in turn “infecting” them.

The Hotmail example fits this ideology perfectly, and helped propel the service to a point where it was adding in excess of 270,000 new users every single day.

The concept of something going viral doesn’t just apply to the internet of course. Another phrase associated with the idea—word of mouth—is definitely more relevant to the offline world. It may be watching a TV show and going into work to talk about it, reaching more people who then watch the show and tell even more people. It may be having a great experience at a restaurant and telling a friend, who visits that very restaurant and then tells even more people to go.

The end result is that one person can help something spread to far more people than themselves. The internet has simply made it much easier for one person to reach a huge audience with a message that’s worth sharing. In the last 10 years, the number of people using the Internet has gone from being measured in millions to being measured in billions.

This was a version of the planned introduction for the book Viral Marketing for Dummies which Wiley asked me to publish a little over a year ago.

Though I actually quit my contract and stopped working on the book (long story), I’ve still been involved in various viral marketing campaigns. The one I would like to share with you right now was built purely to show that the ideas I was sharing in the book actually had merit.

Join a story rather than creating a new one

Though it’s certainly not impossible to create your own viral category to get some buzz, it makes your job much, much easier if someone is already talking about a topic that you can leverage for your own gain.

Lyndon Antcliff, most notable for fooling the world’s media into thinking that a teenager stole his Dad’s credit card to play Xbox with a hooker, is very good at this. He often tweets the latest viral trends and helps his clients to capitalise on hot topics of the moment.

Again, you don’t have to only take advantage of what people are saying now. When Monster Slippers wanted their slipper company to go viral, they created an elaborate story to say that a Chinese manufacturing incident left one customer with a size 1,450 shoe, almost as big as a car.

The story was picked up by multiple news outlets, all linking to Monster Slippers as they were the one to break the story. That was until they all figured out the customer who received the unusually large footwear actually looked identical to a staff member of Monster Slippers.

I didn’t have anything I actually wanted to promote in my example, besides a cause that I believed strongly in, so decided to pick up on a news event that a lot of people were talking about: The demise of Google Reader and, potentially, Feedburner too.

Stick to one core theme

“What did the fox say?” just wouldn’t be the same if we also wanted to know what the eagle, walrus, and piranha say too.

The Old Spice videos featuring actor Bruce Cambpell basically ran as an idea that you couldn’t be Bruce with his great physique and confidence, but you could at least smell like him. They didn’t run with this theme just once, but used it in multiple highly successful commercials.

Old Spice is a smell. It doesn’t necessarily make you smell better than any other product. There’s nothing inherently amazing about it. Yet after those commercials ran, you couldn’t walk into a supermarket and find it on shelves very easily. They found one theme and stuck with it, even creating unique videos for Redditors in an AMA format.

Another reason for sticking to one core theme is that you really have to give sharing a purpose (next section). If there’s no clear message that you want to spread, it’s hard for people to get behind the idea and want to share it with others, whatever it may be.

I’ve already mentioned that I wanted my idea to focus on the news events surrounding the demise of Google Reader as well as the potential demise of Google’s Feedburner product. I think it was much better for me to pick one of these rather than try to get the message across about both.

You couldn’t save Google Reader after it was announced to be shut down, but Feedburner still has some legs (for now) and that’s the one I care about the most.

Make it easy to share, and give sharing a purpose (!)

This is possibility the most overused advice when it comes to teaching people how to get ideas to go viral but it is still relevant. Of course, you can’t just stick social media buttons onto a site and expect something to instantly spread across the social stratosphere (that’s what we’re calling it these days, right?).

Not only did I put sharing buttons on my site, but I also decided to actually give people the text they could use on sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Going back to my earlier point about purpose, people had to believe that they would actually get a response and that sharing would do something productive. Whether that’s positioning themselves as someone who is intelligent and in on the latest news (whether it’s movies, the next viral video, etc.) or, like me, they wanted to rally behind a cause.

One of my good blogger friends actually tweeted the story without knowing about it.

Thanks Steve!

Execute properly

Though I had no real idea if the Feedburner minisite would actually take off, it was worth a try. I wasn’t actually promoting anything besides having a case study for the book I was writing, but even still, I wanted to at least make it look semi-professional and not just like a random blog post on a website.

I thought about not only the big details—like why Feedburner might actually shut down—but also the small details, like having an upside-down Feedburner logo as the website favicon. I also decided to take a comic strip style approach and use my limited skills in Photoshop to put together something hopefully, as least slightly, humorous.

There was even a comment that said I ripped off the style of the Oatmeal which I’ll take as a compliment judging by Matt’s huge success after working here at Moz.

Finally, I also enlisted the help of three others to throw in the ever-important cat pictures with the hashtag #pleasedontkillfeedburner. Thanks to Ramsay and Chris for kindly sharing pictures of their cats which I could also use in the comic.

To put together the theme of the site, I simply headed over to my usual design haunt, ThemeForest, and picked up a template. Then I got to work in Photoshop without caring too much for standards or usability. I viewed the project as time-sensitive, so I wanted to get something up as quickly as possible.

Just be careful which font you use…

Funny; that’s not even Comic Sans.

The end result

Just to clarify, the only piece of promotion I did for this was around two personal tweets and I emailed no more than six people about the idea. If you consider that a tweet of mine would only get a few dozen clicks, I was quite surprised by what happened when I woke up the next day: The site made the homepage of Hacker News.

Here are the stats for the first week of the site going live:

To give even more transparency, here’s a list of some of the sources which sent traffic. Notice that a lot of the tweets sent a surprising amount of people to the page:

There are a lot more but that screenshot was getting long enough as it is. Here are a few other results from this campaign:

  • The site has between 300-500 backlinks (!) depending on which link checker you use
  • The domain is now a PR 4
  • It has been shared on social media over 1,400 times
  • The entire website was built in less than one day

Some people might argue that I’m fortunate that the article went viral on Hacker News (I didn’t submit it, and don’t know who did). If you’re one of those people, well I’ll just say that I’m also “fortunate” to have the idea for the site, to register the domain, to contact people for cat photos, to spend a day in Photoshop and to actually execute my idea.

Of course, not everything you create with the idea of ‘going viral’ is going to be a hit. But if you keep focusing on creating content that follows this outline (relevant to hot topics, gives people a reason to share, execute the idea properly) then no doubt that something you create is going to get a lot of attention.

Even with this campaign there were a few mistakes I made:

  • The site looks terrible on mobile devices. Seriously, don’t bother opening it in your iPad
  • I lost the account access to the email used in the graphic so I have no idea if Google responded after the initial buzz (duh!)
  • Ideally this would have been a campaign I could have linked to other web properties after the traffic burst subsided

Though in recent months I’ve been a very public advocate on the ViperChill blog that, quite simply, quality content doesn’t rank as well as it should, I still believe in it. Every time I’ve showed terrible websites ranking highly in Google, I’ve always stated that I would love for the opposite to be the case.

If you would like to hear more about this topic (I wrote 20,000+ words for the book before scrapping the idea) then please let me know in the comments, and I’ll see what I can do. There is a lot more to cover, but hopefully this post gave you a bit of inspiration about taking action on those random ideas I’m sure you have from time to time.

As a final plug, I’ve actually just started a brand new niche site case study (introduction post here) where 3 people will be tackling the same niche from three different angles. One of us is using only SEO, I’m relying purely on creating great content and the third contributor is a total beginner to creating sites who has all options available to him.


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The One Thing I Would Change as the CEO of Moz

Posted by wilreynolds

Editor’s note: This post is Wil’s wrap-up of October’s CEO Swap, where Moz CEO Rand Fishkin and SEER Interactive CEO Wil Reynolds traded jobs for one week. To read the partner post, written by Rand for the team and community at SEER, check out the SEER blog.

What many of you might not know is that this CEO Swap scared me. It didn’t scare me because I would have a hard time letting go, and not because I would be allowing Rand to view every little thing about my life with no filter by managing my inbox and experiencing everything that I experience everyday. What scared me the most was that I wouldn’t add value to Moz. Let’s be honest: Moz is two times the size of SEER, has more money in the bank, and has more senior leadership. So I was scared that I would learn so much personally and would contribute very little back to the team, and I went to bed every single night worried about it.

My belief about worry is this: If you are concerned for one reason or another and can do something about it, stop worrying and start WORKING. If you can’t do anything about it, let it go! Based on this belief, during the CEO swap I started working every night to build something of value for Moz; something that could help Rand make as many millionaires in Seattle as possible.

Every night when I got home, I sketched out what I learned that day and how it might help Moz achieve their organizational goals. To me, Moz Analytics seemed to be the biggest bet that they were making, but I wasn’t sold, so I asked myself: Why not be sold? To be honest, we don’t use it very much at SEER. Instead, we use Open Site Explorer and its toolbar like mad; Moz Analytics is rarely used. I decided that if this was Moz’s big bet, I wanted to help them to win it.

I took an in-depth look into Moz’s goals and core values and made a pitch to Rand that I thought would fit. I started with the problems below:

Problem #1: We get rankings from Google in a way that they don’t like very much, which to me is risky. I feel that the industry would be forced to steer clear of keywords as the major KPI and that rankings will still be important when it comes to direction, but not so much in a functional manner when it comes to day-to-day impact.

Problem #2: The “big bet” on Moz Analytics integrates very nicely with Google Analytics, but kicking the hornet’s nest on rankings was a problem. A big problem. Betting on analytics is the future while betting on rankings is the past, and we’re risking this analytics relationship so that we can focus on the way SEO was done in the past.

Problem #3 – Rand hardly ever talks about tracking rankings anymore, at least not in a positive light. He’s been placing the concept of inbound and content marketing as a theme in every slide deck he creates. I literally went through about 10 of his decks and tried to find him speaking about a positive side of rankings. While it might get a mention here or there, not a single one of his decks are themed around the critical nature of rankings.

Problem #4: Both Rand and Dr. Pete believe that social metrics have a pretty strong correlation to rankings.

So that we can address these problems appropriately, it’s best to develop an understanding of Moz’s mission:

Moz is all about better marketing and not just better rankings. One of their initiatives is to reach a marketing audience that’s a bit more broad:

Rand’s presentations even talk about how having a high ranking doesn’t always mean maximum traffic:

He says it again:

And again:

I have many more examples, but i’m sure you get the point by now. Rand doesn’t believe that our jobs are all about rankings. He knows it and presents that philosophy everywhere he speaks. So why does Moz believe that rankings have to be provided? Let’s start trying to answer that question by taking a look at true love.

Rand likes to talk about building true love with your community:

Even Roger realizes the power of community and true love:

Every day, Rand inspires an entire industry to level-up, to become strong content marketers, and to make their audiences fall in love with them. Yet, Roger goes around the web looking for “rankings”?

Each night I went home (to Rand’s home, that is) and I presented a personal challenge by asking myself: If Rand’s True Love is great marketing (which is a distant second to Geraldine), then why doesn’t Roger tell me when my competitors are starting to achieve “True Love” with their audiences? We both want to help marketers, and I feel that with the tools that Roger has and the team behind him, that he can be deployed in many new ways.

Both Rand and I want to see the industry level-up and we don’t talk about rankings often. This is because we realize that:

And then, eureka! It hit me. More people care about competitors than they do about rankings. A small number of businesses care about rankings, but almost every business wants to know what their competition is up to.

Roger is focused on my analytics and my rankings, and as we have seen, Google has started to meld these things together. This is exactly where I see a major risk to Moz. During one of my meetings at Moz, I got a much-needed reminder from Adam, Moz’s Chief Product Officer on the E-team, that we have to add value over what Google can provide. And it was a GREAT reminder.

The fear within this is that right now I can get:

Adwords + Rankings in Google Analytics

Adwords + Natural Search in Google Webmaster Tools

Rankings in Google Webmaster Tools

In my eyes, the big threat to Moz, to Roger, and to the amazing people I met that week is that Google is bringing together its own data in ways they never did before.

So I decided, what if Roger took a stand and went to a place that Google will NEVER go? I’m talking competitive analysis. Google barely wants to give us our own rankings, much less the rankings of a competitor. (See? I still believe that rankings have a role, just that they shouldn’t be a KPI.)

I believe that more people care about competitors than they do about rankings. To this point, I haven’t checked SEER’s rankings in months, but I check on my competitors regularly.

There are so many businesses out there; hotels, the creators of tablets, potato chip companies, food distributors, and they all have something in common. They all have competitors, and they all want to know what these competitors are doing on the web.

And I think Roger can help with that and it also connects to one of Moz’s goals:

Google’s “True Love” lies within the attempt to rank great content, and it always has been. They might not be able to rank this content well in every instance just yet, but they are working on it:

Think about what happens when your competitor goes and sees this guy at a conference.

After the conference, they decide to change their ways and to work at becoming better marketers who think more broadly about the role of search in marketing. They start to become content marketers, inbound marketers, email marketers, all in addition to already being SEOs. They start working their tails off and their rankings start moving from 50, to 45, to 30, to 17, to 7, and so on.

Roger isn’t so smart (not yet anyway, but some people are working on this. Shh, it’s a secret.) He has the capability, but he isn’t smart enough to find the competitors that you might want to track that are growing their community and their links, producing videos, content, whitepapers, and a whole host more. The issue with what we consider to be “typical” competitor tracking is that we all take a look, see who is ranking highly, and put them into the competitor box.

Roger isn’t saying, “Hey! Someone you ignored for years isn’t on the content marketing bandwagon just yet, but they are building community. So get on it!” When he should be saying just that.

Think of it Scooby Doo-style. ROGER, where are you?

Roger, where are you to warn me when I need you to that someone just read everything that Rand has written over the past three years, has started implementing it, and is moving on. See, Roger, I need your help because by the time I even get the hint that someone is taking me over, it’s too late. What am I supposed to do when they are producing five times more content than me, have grown their community ten times, and 25% of major influencers are following them on Twitter, while I only have a mere 5%?

By then, it’s too late for me to do anything about it. So help me out, Roger. You need to show me not only the people who are ranking in the top spot right now, but those that will be later so I can catch them before it’s too late. I need to know who is developing content that might be relevant to my audience AS they are developing it.

You can do this, Roger. What about your own Followerwonk? You show me a Venn diagram with overlap in audiences. Here I look at SEER and SEOGadget’s common audience- wouldn’t it be great to let me know when their content is getting more shares from our overlapping audiences, with a little Topsy magic?

It all comes down to what both Rand I believe in:

Cyrus Said it:

Rand said it:

Zappos didn’t become Zappos by doing everything for rankings. Instead they cared about their customers, and now they dominate rankings because they combined love for their customers and a love of rankings. Right now I have a client that is dominating their space in a similar way in that their competitors never saw them coming. They climbed from 50, to 40, to 33, to 27, to 15, to 6 in the rankings for major terms, and by then it was too late for their competitors to catch up. Now they are on top of the rankings for thousands of keywords, and their competitors are just beginning to do what they’ve been doing for years.

Could Roger have helped competitors to see us coming?
Can he help me to see the next competitor coming before it’s too late?

Over time, could the correlations above take the place of “rank tracking from a directional sense?” This would help to minimize the strain that Google has with scraping, which is a major risk.

When it comes to specific types of content like videos, I want Roger to tell me when a competitor (tracked or untracked) produces 10 videos that are receiving engagement on a topic relevant to a brand and/or keyword that I am targeting. Ultimately, that competitor knows that video content is a long game, and therefore they are in it for just that, which will eventually reward them with rankings. So naturally I want to know about it.

I don’t care about my rankings. Instead, I care when a competitor is producing more content, getting more visibility with influencers (social authority) to their content, and growing community.

  • “Wil, I’ll tell you when the industry is getting hot with content from competitors named and unnamed (big thanks to David Weiser, Tom McElroy, and Shawn Edwards). I’ll watch your back. I’ll catch people who are creating great content well before they start to outrank you and hurt your business. Moz is all about great content, so we can even point you to Moz blog posts that can help you fight back.”

  • “Wil, your competitor was followed by an influencer with high social authority. I saw it with Followerwonk. That’s ten in the last three months! Eventually, with this growing community of influencers sharing their content, they will outrank you, get more press, more branded search, and beat you in rankings.”

  • “Influencers are tweeting their content seven times more than yours.” (Shout out to Matt Peters for helping me realize this was possible.)

  • “The new Thai joint that opened 5 months ago is still getting rave reviews and at a faster pace than you are. Eventually this will lead to (unless they are fake, of course) them getting: more customers + higher rankings = MONEY!”

  • “Wil, I’ll tell you when videos are going to show up, and if my named competitors are producing that video on critical keywords.”

  • “I got your back, Wil. I’ll monitor the velocity in your competitors’ Linkedin, YouTube, local reviews, Slideshare, blogs, and more. I’ll keep an eye out anywhere they are producing great content, and if that velocity of content marketing is greater than yours, I’ll point you to our content, slideshare, video, or whatever I can that can help you keep from getting beat.”

In this scenario, Roger’s got me covered so that no company can come out of the blue and take rankings. Roger also knows that great content often drives conversions and not just rankings, so as such, this will also alert you to when your competitor might be getting more conversions from great content marketing.

I know that something like this will take time, but with the many things that I saw on the back end of Moz’s business, I know that people are already working on a lot of these things in many different ways.

Going back a little bit to my first day and first meeting at the Moz offices, I was in a (not provided) discussion. I was joined by Senior Product Manager Miranda, Dr. Pete, Adam, and a few others. The objective was simple in that parts of the Moz toolset would show zeros and (–)’s given that keywords were no longer provided.

I listened for the first part of the meeting and then started to ask questions. A big one was if people really use keyword rankings as a major KPI. As SEER expects to no longer have rankings be a major KPI by the end of 2014, we believe our work can have a much larger impact while also boosting rankings.

So to the Moz community, employees, and leadership, the CEO swap pushed me to develop something for you that could at least spark internal conversations at Moz, and I hope this write-up does. Rand inspires me to do great content marketing, get better at building community, and be better to my customers. He inspires me to find True Love. This may very well be on your roadmap, so maybe all I am doing is validating what you already know, but Roger needs a “True Love” meter for me and my competitors both named and unnamed. We all know that the time is now. Every single day, Google is integrating more and more data from their tools, which does present a threat. But Google jumping into the competitive tool business is highly unlikely, so maybe the team at Moz can get there first.

–Wil Reynolds
CEO
Moz


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Be the Result that Google Wants to Rank

Posted by Kristina Kledzik

As SEOs, we’re the only type of online marketers who pay little to no attention to the people who actually visit our websites. PPC’ers watch visitors’ responses to ads via click through rates, social media managers converse with users directly, writers write for readers, and designers design for visitors. But SEOs give advice based on Google.

Google, like the rest of online marketers, is primarily concerned with the opinions of visitors to Google.com. Its goals is to deliver the most satisfying webpages as results to searchers (and possibly charge for those results through ever-more-subtle paid ads). Thus, we SEOs eventually have our effect on actual visitors, as our techniques to attract search engines allow our sites to rank well and get visits from actual humans.

Why don’t we just make changes for visitors so that Google will want to rank us well?

In the dawn of SEO, Google was stupid

When Google was first created, it couldn’t see nearly as much as it can now, and focusing on user experience alone could leave your site virtually unreadable to Google. I only started in this industry in 2010, and even then, SEOs had to focus on specific keyword usage, tagging, link building, and anchor text—all things that are virtually meaningless to visitors. But over the past few years, Google’s near-daily algorithm updates have made its crawler interpret webpages more and more like a human would.

Still, we continue to panic about every change Google makes. What are their next steps? Are they going to do something that will crush your site?

Here’s a hint: If we’re optimizing our sites for visitors, there’s little to no chance that a Google algorithm update will penalize us. That means that we’re on Google’s side: We’re trying to make our site better for visitors, which makes Google look good when visitors click through to our sites. Help them help us.

The good news is, if you’re a white hat SEO who keeps up on search engine trends, Google has probably led you into doing some good online marketing without even realizing it. To explain this a little more clearly, here’s a comparison of some of the top white-hat SEO strategies from 2010, when I started, and how you should handle them in 2013:

On-page keyword usage → content strategy

2010: The best way to rank #1 for a keyword was to use it in the <title>, the <h1>, maybe an <h2>, and a few times in the text (but no keyword stuffing! Google had figured that out, at least.)

2013: Google understands synonyms now, so you can use a keyword once and show that it’s highly relevant with other similar terms. Experts recommend using keyword groups (an idea that I had been hinting at for ages but didn’t think of concretely until I read Cyrus’s awesome post): Use a number of keywords that all mean approximately the same thing, so you can be relevant for all of them.

How to be even better with content strategy

Don’t focus so much on keywords with the most local searches a month, on average (Google Keyword Planner is so vague). Instead, use phrases that your current and potential customers use.

There are hundreds of easy, reliable, cheap online survey tools, so take your pick. Reach out to your email list and ask them to complete a survey that asks:

  • How they describe your products/services
  • What emotions they attribute to your products/services
  • Why they want/need your products/services
  • The ideal brand personality that would sell your products/services

Allow survey takers to write in the responses free-form, so they won’t be restricted to the words you think they’ll use.

Once you have the right keywords, work them into the copy in a way that speaks to them. This will take a great content strategy, something that I can’t describe to you briefly here. But these blog posts will get you on the right path:

How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy

Kill it in Content Creation by Knowing Your Customer Conversion Funnel

Avoiding Disaster: How to Prevent the 3 Most Common Content Marketing #Fails

On-page structure/tagging → design

2010: You had to mark up the important parts of a webpage with HTML tags: <h#>, <strong>, and <em>.

2013: Google can see where text will show up on a page, and how prominent it will be to visitors. You can’t just tag text to make it relevant to search engines, it has to be integrated into the design.

Design isn’t just a “nice to have.” It’s a necessary part of the online marketing world now, and it absolutely pays off. If you didn’t come to MozCon 2012, Jenny Lam’s presentation discusses how people are much more likely to trust attractive things. Google knows that design builds trust: Remember how Panda slapped websites covered in ads? As Google begins to understand how people interpret design better and better, having a good design will become a necessary part of both online marketing and SEO.

How to be even better with good design

PAY FOR GOOD DESIGN.

Many of you reading this blog are technical, possibly able to build a very solid HTML website. That does not make you a good web designer.

Go out there and find a good web designer. Your input will be to remind the designer you hired that good web design does include a lot of text, both for search engines and for visitors.

Resources:

9 Principles for Great Branding by Design

Designing for SEO

Link building → online public relations

2010: Google was already getting pretty good at devaluing links from crappy sites, but a good link network could still work, and it certainly hadn’t started penalizing you yet!

2013: Many sites have gone down because of Penguin alone, and others are still reeling from it. We can’t buy links anymore, yet almost all bloggers understand the value of a link and want to be paid for it.

At Distilled, we now do what we like to call “online PR,” where we focus on building relationships with bloggers and sites. The important thing is to focus on building a partnership where they rely on us as much as we rely on them. With a one-sided relationship, site owners are bound to take your link down or forget about you eventually, but when they look to you as a source of knowledge, and valuable to their readers, they’ll keep reaching out to you.

And that’s very much like—gasp—real PR!

How to get better with online PR

Don’t look for a link with DA [blank]. Look for a site that is genuinely a good match for what you or your client has to offer. Pitch the link or mention to the other site the way you would explain it if you weren’t you and just thought it was a good match. Be flexible, so you can build a long-term relationship and keep sharing things through that channel in the future.

Here are a few great resources to point you in the right direction for great outreach:

The Blogger Outreach Equation

8 Tips for Blogger Outreach

Why Link Building Strategies Fail

Anchor text manipulation → branding

2010: The strongest way to rank for a keyword was to get a link with that keyword in the anchor text. Ecommerce sites across the nation paid for links with their target keyword in it and slipped those links in unrelated articles.

2013: It occurred to Google that if you have a million links to your site for “slinkies” but no links to your site about your brand name, no one knew who you were. There’s just too much information out there, and too many scams. People feel more comfortable with brands, and are more likely to click on links to recognizable brands.

At the same time, Google realized that link profiles full of unbranded links were probably paid for, and that contributed to penalties.

Now, it’s better to focus on brand awareness than the specific anchor text to your page. The more people are talking about your brand, the more likely they’ll be to search for you specifically, and then you won’t even have to worry about competing for #1 position in SERPs, you’ll just be there!

How to get better with more brand awareness and loyalty

I think we’ve always known the value of branding. After all, why do so many Americans pay $2.50 for $0.05 worth of water, carbonation, sugar, and a bit of caffeine?

It’s just been easier to match your content with search terms than to get people to actually search for you. Building brand awareness and loyalty involves building relationships with people you don’t know yet, which is absolutely terrifying. It means you can try your hardest but fail, and have no idea why.

But, let’s look at this a different way. Competing in the world of online marketing without a brand means that you’re relying 100% on Google to continue to send you visitors. This is a very one-sided relationship. If Google changes things, or if your competitors get slightly better and edge you out of the first page of results, your business will collapse completely, and Google won’t even notice. No company should rely so heavily on another, especially not one that barely knows you exist. Building a brand is planning for the future, and protecting you against the whims of Google.

Instead, make your company into something you’re excited about, so it can excite your customers too. Put as much money into building your brand as you do other online marketing activities; it’ll pay off. Joanna Lord gave one of the best “how to” speeches on building brand loyalty at SearchLove this year: slideshare or video.

So, all this means SEO is dead, right?

NO.

For one thing, as smart as Google will get, it will always have its quirks, so technical SEO is here to stay.

For another, a big part of SEO is identifying and understanding your competitors for certain search terms, since that can be very different from your competitors in real life.

But, SEO alone can’t make your business. Even if, for some reason, it does right now, it won’t in the future. SEO is one aspect of good online marketing, but you have to be a great marketer overall to make it in the long run.


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Using Google+ to Appear in the Top Results Every Time – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Many marketers are wondering about the effects of Google+ on search results, and for anyone with a Google+ profile, a few personalized searches make those effects quite apparent. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Marshall Lee the vampire king (don’t be afraid, it’s just Rand) explains how having the right circlers on Google+ can lead to top-ranked results for even the broadest of queries in their SERPs.

Whiteboard Friday – Using Google+ to Appear in the Top Results Every Time

In case you’re unfamiliar, Rand is Marshall Lee the Vampire King.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard:

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a spooooky Halloween edition of Whiteboard Friday! I’m wearing some fangs this week, so if you have some trouble understanding me, don’t worry, all the text is right down there below.

I wanted to talk a little about using Google+ to appear in Google’s top results. It’s really interesting what we’ve been observing over the last few weeks and months of Google’s development, so check this out. If I do a search for “data science,” and I’m logged into my Google+ account (which is “randfish,” right—randfish@gmail), I see under data science “How Moz’s Data Science Team Works.” Which is pretty weird, actually—I think that’s very strange, because this was just posted on our Dev Blog, which isn’t on our main site. It’s a subdomain, and it doesn’t rank very well. If you search and you’re not logged in, you won’t find it in the first 100 results at all. It’s showing up here because it’s been shared by an account that I follow. It’ll say, “Moz shared this.” And that’s happening because of the Google+ integration.

You might say, “Okay, that’s moderately interesting.” I can search for very broad things, too, like “industry survey,” and get—yes, the S&P Industry Survey of the Americas, the Standard & Poors—but then I get “Take the 2013 Moz Industry Survey.” Whoa! Suddenly Moz is ranking all over the place. Again, this is happening because Jonathon Colman, Dharmesh Shah, Pete Meyers, and one other person I follow on Google+ +1’d it. Google+ biasing again.

And there’s more. I tried some queries for “happy Halloween.” Happy Halloween—think how broad a search query that is. There was a post by Gianluca that he had shared today with a photo, and that showed up in my results. Consumer purchasing power—a Google+ post by Avinash Kaushik showed up because it was shared and I follow him. Patrick Stewart! Patrick Stewart, I mean it’s a celebrity query that gets millions of searches a month (well, probably hundreds of thousands because Star Trek TNG hasn’t been on for a while, but in our hearts it’s always been on). A post by George Takei, right? I follow George Takei on Google+ so a post from him about Patrick Stewart is in there (it was a delightful post, by the way).

What this means for marketers, particularly SEOs who are using search and social and content together in their marketing, is the audience on Google+ is becoming more and more valuable to us. These are search-savvy, tech-savvy folks who are potentially reachable, and reachable without the classic kinds of ranking signals. I don’t have to do one tenth of the work that I had to do to rank for these types of queries before. All I have to do is get you to follow me on Google+.

Even if these people aren’t using Google+ as a social network—even if they’re not visiting plus.google.com, and they’re not sharing things and following people and +1’ing—it doesn’t matter, because they’re still being biased so long as they follow your account. So long as you’re encircled by those individuals, it’s valuable. And by the way, this is not just happening to people who have set up Google+ and are actually following you. It happens to anyone who is logged into a Google account, and has connected with you over email. Meaning, they’ve exchanged one or a few emails back and forth—it can’t just be you spamming them, it’s got to be that you’re actually receiving email from them as well.

Gmail is another way to get this same sort of bias. You can see it in there if you’re logged into your Gmail account, and you can see “Hey, I’m not following this person on Google+. Oh, we’ve exchanged emails, so they’re showing me these results higher that they’ve +1’d.”

Google+ sharing obviously is critical because of these influential factors, to SEOs in particular. But, be very careful, because think about this—if I shared every single page that I wanted to rank on just so that anyone who followed me on Google+ would be biased to seeing it? I would soon lose subscribers. In fact, I’m sure I would lose them very fast. People would be like, “What the hell is Rand doing filling up my stream? None of these have +1s.” It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Google is using some indication of metrics around usage to actually determine, “Hey, wait a minute, this is getting no +1s, no shares, no comments; why would I show this to anybody? I’m pushing it down in the results. I’m not going to show it.”

These are all things that did receive quite a lot of activity. Well, actually, Gianluca’s post hadn’t received any activity yet, but it was very recent and lots of his posts do receive activity. So, if you overshare, you have to be careful—I like to say I think discretion is key here. Also, even if you don’t have a Google+ audience, it doesn’t matter because influencers—people who do have audiences on Google+—might be sharing your stuff.

That’s fascinating to imagine. It’s almost like “Hey, I don’t use Twitter, but if I can just get someone to tweet some of this stuff for me, I know I’ll get traffic.” Well, on Google+, it’s not just the traffic you’ll get—you’ll also get high rankings from all of their audience. It’s really remarkable.

By the way—one thing of warning. There is a time decay on this stuff. I don’t see all of the posts that George Takei has historically made (historically, I can barely say “historically” with these teeth)—that he’s historically made about Patrick Stewart, I only see the ones from just recently. So, there’s a time decay factor, it looks like between a week and a month, depending on which accounts you’re following and what types of queries you’re doing—at least that’s what I’m seeing in my accounts. Being aware of that time decay means that if there’s a topic that’s very valuable, and you know you have a potential social audience to reach that’s either following you on Google+ or connecting with you through email, that might mean that publishing on a regular basis—I might say “Hey, if ranking for consumer purchasing power is really important to me, maybe I want to put up a blog post every month or two about consumer purchasing power.”

What’s crazy is you don’t need exact keyword matching. The post about Patrick Stewart here did not have exact keyword matching, so this is a very broad algorithm that’s currently biasing to show these Google+ results. This is an incredibly powerful tool for search marketers and social marketers, and I think it’s something that is going to get a lot more attention in the year to come.

With that, everyone, happy Halloween!


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