seo

Posted by David Mihm

I’m pleased to announce the full results of this year’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey were published earlier this morning. (The pie chart below is just a teaser.)

Those of you who attended MozCon a couple weeks ago got a sneak preview of these results, but I’m guessing that few of you had a chance to fully digest them in the 14.2 seconds I spent on the slides in which I presented them. Let’s dive in!

If this is the first time you’ve heard of the Local Search Ranking Factors, most of the background can be found on the results page itself. I’ll highlight a couple of changes for this year:

• As I was putting the survey together this year, I thought to myself, “You know, there’s really no single ‘local algorithm’ at Google anymore” — if, indeed, there ever was one. This year is our group’s first effort to help readers distinguish between the thematic signals that have more or less prevalence depending on the result type Google is showing (localized organic, pack/carousel, or maps).
• Given that a large chunk of the audience for this survey over the years has been agency owners and agency representatives — at least judging by the emails I’ve received — I decided to try to cater to this audience a bit more this year. Guessing that most of you have already read previous surveys and understand the basics, I also asked the 35 experts to score the same factors according to what they felt made the most difference in competitive markets. So for those of you who already have the basics covered, pay attention to that second column of results.
• I added personalization as a thematic signal to ask about this year. Frankly, I was surprised it wasn’t considered a larger factor on mobile results. Of all the factors on the list, I think this one will be the most interesting to revisit in 2014, as searchers and experts alike become more and more familiar with the new Google Maps.

By and large, the primary factors seem to have stayed largely the same for the past couple of years:

• Proper category associations
• A physical address in the city being searched
• Consistent, high-quality citations from sources that are:
  
  • Authoritative
  • Trustworthy
  • Industry-relevant
• Your NAP information featured clearly on your website
• Your location as a keyword in title tags and headlines
• A smattering of reviews on both Google and third-party sites
• A handful of high-quality inbound links

Though I wanted to give the other 34 experts “the floor” on the survey page itself, I do want to comment about a couple of responses I found particularly interesting:

• Despite Google’s massively-hyped integration of its Google Plus and Google Places platforms just over a year ago (a process that is far from complete, by the way), social signals still seem to play a relatively small role in rankings — just 6.3% overall. But the consensus seems to be that the place to begin would be rel=author tag implementation. This was suggested as the #22 priority in competitive markets, versus #34 as a foundational priority, and several experts mentioned it in their comments.
• Perhaps the most surprising factor was that reviews from authority reviewers were rated the #3 competitive difference-maker. If you’re in a competitive market, I’d encourage you to pay special attention to Google’s City Experts program, and think about checking out this Twitter/Followerwonk strategy I detailed in January.
• As we move into a world where maps are becoming the local search paradigm, it’s remarkable to me just how little effect (less than 25%) the primary factors in traditional SEO — on-page optimization and inbound links — are judged to have on rankings.
• Meanwhile, Google continues to emphasize these factors in its localized organic results (judged by the experts to be right around 50%), which should give businesses without a physical location some measure of consolation.
• As far as negative factors go, call-tracking numbers and business name keyword-stuffing continue to be some of the most egregious offenses you can make in local search.

A couple of quick closing remarks:

Huge thanks to Derric Wise from UX/Design and Devin Ellis on our Inbound Engineering team for putting this beautiful-looking page together.

And, if you want to know more about this year’s survey, I would encourage you to sign up for Local University Advanced at SMX East coming up in just a few weeks. I’ll be speaking much more about tactics you can use to win on these factors in New York!

OK, that’s enough out of me for this year’s survey, anyway. As I do every year, I’m eagerly anticipating the discussion of the results in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Posted by gfiorelli1

Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto.
–Blade Runner

Those who had not heard of storytelling cast the first stone.

And those who are not thinking of it, or maybe have already begun to speak in-house or with their customers that it is necessary to give a voice to their brands, cast the second.

The question is, do we really know what “brand storytelling” means?

Do we really know why it is important for increasing brand recognition, optimizing customer retention, and (hopefully) attain that status of thought leaders in our niche that we all aspire to achieve?

Do we really understand why it is also important from an SEO point of view?

Finally, do we really know the rhetoric of storytelling — the laws behind a good narrative?

The truth is that everyone can tell a story, but only a few know how to tell it well and naturally. Fortunately, it is an art that can be learned.

Storytelling

Stories and irrational impulses are what change behavior. Not facts or bullet points.
–Seth Godin

One of the things that surprises me most when it comes to us, the internet marketers, is that we still often tend to think analogically:

Having A, doing B, performing C, I will obtain D.

I have a product, I write some “great content,” I promote it, and people will come like bees attracted to a field of flowers.

Unfortunately, things are not so anymore. To tell the truth, they were never so.

Our mistake, paraphrasing Seth Godin, is that we tend to create nothing but bullet points and present nothing but facts. We forget that our audience reacts to everything specifically because of its emotions, so we don’t really work on those emotions, which are rationalized in just a moment.

The secret of storytelling is not in its final expressions (so many in a digital era) but in the act itself of telling a story.

Telling stories is what helps human beings rationalize and understand emotions, and thus accept or refuse a statement.

For this reason, humankind has told stories since it was living in the caves of Altamira or Lascaux. Culture was transmitted though stories, legends, and myths; religions and states have been founded on stories.

The 300 Spartans fought against the immense Persian army at Thermopylae not just because Leonidas guided them or because they were the bravest warriors of ancient Greece, but especially because a mythology composed by hundreds of stories assured them they were the descendants of Heracles.

Citing the Big Fish character of Wil Bloom, “a man tells so many stories that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.”

For this reason we love family stories, and for this reason we relate to brands with stories we lived while using and enjoying them.

Think for a moment about your youth, and you will notice how you can write down a never-ending list of brands you remember because of the emotions they helped you feel. Personally, if I think to when I was a teenager in the ’80s, I cannot help but remember brands like Commodore, Atari, Saba (the first color television my family bought) and many others.

Neuroscience explains quite well how evolution has wired us for storytelling, as Leo Widrich of Buffer explained so well on LifeHacker.

But the most interesting conclusion neuroscience offers to us is that the brain of the storyteller and the brain of their listeners start acting in synchronization when a story is told, as the same areas of their brain start being used.

There are other interesting theories, including Jung’s conclusions about archetypes and myths, and if you want to dig into how to use literary modes for internet marketing you can read this post I wrote a few months ago.

Brand storytelling

Storytelling, then, is possibly the best way to convince a person of something, whether it be voting for a candidate for president, choosing one religion over another, adhering to certain moral conduct, or buying one product rather than another.

I can already hear the distant murmur of a thousand voices saying, “But the product that I have to sell is a bolt!”

Once again, that’s the shortsighted mistake of seeing only the end result and forgetting everything that led to its creation. We stop ourselves at the what and forget the why and the how.

What do you think of when I mention Red Bull? I am sure that you think about adventure, extreme sport, and a crazy guy who skydived from the stratosphere. And what if I mention Lucozade? Maybe if you are into energy drinks you know of it, but I am quite sure that many of you, as was my case, have just now heard its name for the first time.

The products are practically the same: bottles and cans of energy drinks. Red Bull, though, has been able to create stories around its brand while Lucozade has not. And people love stories that respond to their needs, desires, and dreams.

As reported by Ty Montague on Medium, Dietrich Mateschitz, the founder of Red Bull, explained the reasoning behind the tagline Red Bull gives you wings: “[it] means that it provides skills, abilities, power, etc., to achieve whatever you want to. It is an invitation as well as a request to be active, performance-oriented, alert and to take challenges. When you work or study, do your very best. When you do sports, go for your limits. When you have fun or just relax, be aware of it and appreciate it.”

Red Bull, hence, proposes itself as a lifestyle and not just an energy drink. For that reason, its Brand is far more memorable than Lucozade.

Where to start

There is a world of stories hidden in the About Us and Mission pages (it’s a shame that those are usually hidden in the footer menu).

The biggest mistake a marketer can make is not understanding that brands are the final expression of a company, and that a company is just something real people created in order to achieve something (which usually isn’t “making money”).

Let’s check out a few examples:

• Moz was founded because Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig had the vision of helping people doing better marketing.
• People, who were convinced there are ideas worth spreading, have created TED Talks.
• Patagonia has as its mission to “build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
• Betabrand’s mission is to “design, manufacture, and sell a stylish array of anti-nudity equipment known as “clothing.”
• REI’s mission is to “inspire, educate, and outfit for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship.”
• ZenDesk’s is to “help you deliver exceptional customer service.”
• Fitbit’s mission is “to empower and inspire you to live a healthier, more active life.”
• Nike wants “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” And, one of its mottos is, “If you have a body, you are an athlete.”

Missions are an expression of the values that guide a company and are the ethical basis of its stories (the how). The protagonists of those stories are not only the company’s products, but also (and especially) the people who use, live with, and make those products their own.

The Blues Brothers had a mission. What about you?

The schema of brand storytelling

Even the simplest story has very sophisticated mechanisms working behind the scenes. The listeners don’t always see them, but they know them and expect them to be present. If they aren’t present, they won’t laugh when they are meant to laugh or cry when they are meant to cry.

In his essay Ars Poetica, the Greek philosopher Aristotle described the six elements of every story:

1. Plot
2. Character
3. Thought
4. Diction
5. Song
6. Spectacle

In more modern terms, we can translate “thought” as “theme,” and “song” as “rhythm.”

Plot

It is thanks to Aristotle that we usually say a plot must have a beginning, middle, and an end, and that events of the plot must causally relate to one another as being either necessary or probable. Most importantly, a plot must arouse emotion in the psyche of the audience.

In this simple scheme, the middle is especially important, because after the status quo is introduced in the beginning, during this phase we have:

• The accident, which is what imperils or upsets the status quo;
• The anticlimax, which is the lowest point of the story, when everything seems as if it won’t be solved;
• The climax, when someone or something happens that turns things around, helping the hero find a solution

After those events, the end usually represents the establishment of a new, better status quo.

From a brand storytelling point of view, the plot is the how, as in how the values of the brand (its why) responds to the needs of its audience.

For instance, using Moz as an example, the mission of helping people do better marketing is fulfilled by the creation of tools built under the spirit of the mission tenets (the TAGFEE principles), which respond to the needs of every kind of internet marketer. The community, whose knowledge encompasses every discipline of inbound marketing, responds by using those tools. This is the main plot line of Moz.

Characters and theme

Intrinsically related to the plot are the characters and the theme.

The main characters are the heroes of the stories, whose actions determine the plot of the story. The secondary ones are those who provide the main characters with information, materials, goods, services, or whatever is needed to advance the plot.

Using Moz as an example again, the main character is the user — maybe someone who has just started her adventure in internet marketing — while the secondary characters are the products and (this being the characteristic of every business with a strong, active community) the Mozzers.

Users and brands, therefore, are the characters of every brand story, with the users being the main characters.

With the users as the main characters, it is then easy to understand how important is to know them as well as possible before, during, and after the release of a product. Hence the strategic importance of personas, audience targeting, the continuous feedback from the users, and the post-sale follow-ups and growth hacking.

The theme is the universe where the plot takes place, and the laws governing that universe in brand storytelling are the tenets (for instance, the TAGFEE tenets), which make the rules with which the mission will be achieved explicit.

This universe is usually an ideal world the users would love to live in, because it offers the answers to their needs, and it is a universe that only the brand can offer them.

The brand universe can be totally mythical — a representation of reality as we want it.

Diction, rhythm, and spectacle

Once the plot, the characters, and the theme are set up, we can start thinking about the diction, rhythm, and spectacle.

Diction is the expression of meaning in words, and it is a consequence of the tone and style.

In brand storytelling, and here SEOs may play a great role, diction is not just how the brand talks to the users, but also the creation of brand language where the language spoken by users is enriched by those that Dan Shure brilliantly defined as Propwords.

MozCon, MozBot, Roger, Whiteboard Friday, Mozinar, Mozzers, and many others are the propwords of Moz, which are immediately understood and appropriated by the users.

Diction is what helps create a indissoluble relationship between keywords and the brand, creating the so-called branded keywords.

Rhythm is usability. When we narrate a story we always use an underlying rhythm, which helps the story flow so the listeners won’t notice the rhetorical mechanisms behind the story itself.

Finally, spectacle is the organization of appearances that are simultaneously enticing, deceptive, and superficial.

The web expression of spectacle is graphic design.

Examples of brand storytelling

Dumb Ways to Die

The Metro Trains public company of Melbourne (Australia) had one thing clear: people don’t pay attention to signs and recorded messages.

So, in order to ensure its message about how we all must pay attention when in the metro station was heard, and thereby diminish the cases of accidents due to distraction, Metro Trains decided to produce a song — Dumb Ways to Die — and launch it on YouTube.

What happened after is the story of maybe the best case of transmedia brand storytelling ever created until now.

Spread the TEDx, Buenos Aires

We all know about TED Talks, and maybe many of you have attended one of the community-generated events called TEDx.

Well, TED Talks had a problem in Buenos Aires: Not many people there knew what the heck a TEDx was, simply because no one had the ability to explain it to them.

So, consistent with its mission that there are ideas worth spreading, TEDx decided to use what could have been its best brand ambassadors, the taxi drivers:

NIKE — Find Your Greatness

NIKE has done brand storytelling since before the existence of the internet, but its “Find Your Greatness” campaign was the first held entirely without buying classic television ad spaces. Instead, it used all the possible digital channels could to make its story, based on its “if you have a body, you are an athlete” principle, touch its audience.

Oreo Daily Twist

Oreo is the classic brand that we tend to associate with little memorable moments of our daily lives. It reminds us of when we were kids and having breakfast, and the simple emotions attached to those memories is able — because of the way our brain works — to make us remember other unrelated events.

Based on this simple idea, Oreo created the Daily Twist campaign.

Conclusions

When doing brand storytelling, if we follow the principle of narrative described above, we will be able to design an ongoing conversation with our users, who — and this is the great difference between analogical brand storytelling and digital one — will start creating new stories related to the brand.

Here is where inbound marketing, in its core meaning of creating brand stories and presenting them to the right audience in the right place and at the right time, gains a bigger meaning.

And here is where branding and SEO collide, because all the stories we tell will compose our story, and all the stories we tell will help us create our unavoidable existence as an online entity (and you should already know what that means in the eyes of Google, both right now and in the future).

As Tracey Halvorsen put very well: “Today, more than ever before in the history of modern civilization, individuals [and brands — my annotation] are empowered with the tools to be storytellers and the technology to see their stories spread far and wide in the blink of an eye.”

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Posted by randfish

How do I build the perfectly optimized page?

This is a challenging question for many in the SEO and web marketing fields. There are hundreds of “best practices” lists for where to place keywords and how to do “on-page optimization,” but as search engines have evolved and as other sources of traffic — social networks, referring links, email, blogs, etc. — have become more important and interconnected, the very nature of what’s “optimal” is up for debate.

My perspective is certainly not gospel, but it’s informed by years of experience, testing, failure, and learning alongside a lot of metrics from Moz’s phenomenal data science team. I don’t think there’s one absolute right way to optimize a page, but I do think I can share a lot about the architecture of how to target content and increase the likelihood that it will:

• A) Have the best opportunity to rank highly in Google and Bing
• B) Earn traffic from social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.
• C) Be worthy of links and shares from across the web
• D) Build your brand’s perception, trust, and potential to convert visitors

With the help of some graphics from CreativeMarket (which I highly recommend), I created a number of visualizations to explain how I think about modern on-page optimization and keyword targeting. Let’s start with a graphical overview of what makes a page optimized:

_{larger version}

In the old days of SEO, “on-page optimization” referred merely to keyword placement. Search engines liked to see keywords in certain locations of the HTML code to help indicate a page’s relevance for that query. But today, this simple approach won’t cut it for two key reasons:

Below is a pie-chart breakdown of how the 128 SEO professionals surveyed for Moz’s annual ranking factors project rated broad algorithmic elements’ impact in Google:

_{larger version}

If <15% of the rankings equation is wrapped up in keyword targeting, no wonder smart SEOs in the modern era have evolved to think more holistically. Personally, I’m happy to sacrifice “perfect” keyword placement in the title element or a URL for better user experience, a higher chance of having my content shared on social networks, or a better click-through rate in the search results.

But, for the purposes of this post, let’s put some of those caveats aside and dive into the best practices for each element of a page. It may be unwise to optimize all of these purely towards search engine-based best practices, but we can temper the advice with notes on usability and user experience for visitors, too. Below, I’ve attempted to go tag by tag, and element by element through the keyword targeting and on-page optimization canon to expand on the more basic advice in the “Elements of an Optimized Page” graphic above.

Uniquely valuable

An optimized page doesn’t just provide unique content, but unique value. What’s the difference?

• Unique content simply means that those words, in that order, don’t appear anywhere else on the web.
• Unique value refers to the usefulness and takeaways derived by visitors to the page. Many pages can be “valuable,” but few provide a truly unique kind of value — one that can’t be discovered on other pages targeting that keyword phrase.

Whenever I advise marketers on crafting pages, I ask them to put themselves in the minds of their potential visitors, and imagine a page that provides something so different and functional that it rises above everything else in its field. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

• The Baby Name Wizard — a terrific page that provides clear value above and beyond its competition for searches around baby names.
• How Much Does a Website Cost — Folyo surveyed their designers to create a distribution of prices that accurate, credible, and massively valuable to those seeking data on pricing.
• Scale of the Universe — this interactive feature will take you from the tiniest parts of an atom all the way to universe-scale. No wonder it ranks for such abstract queries as “the size of things.”
• The Best Instant Noodles of All Time — The Ramen Rater has tried literally thousands of packets of instant noodles and determined these ten to be the outstanding few. I’m actually excited to try them 🙂
• Top Social Networks by Users — Craig Smith puts together an update to this list every month or two, and has compiled this invaluable resource to help those of us wondering just how big all the networks are these days. I’ve personally used this for numerous posts and presentations — it’s an excellent example of creating unique value by aggregating data from varied sources (and it, deservedly, outranks stalwarts like Nielsen as a result).

Unique value is much more than unique content, and when you have a page that rises to the level that these do, social shares, links, and all the other positive associations, branding, and ranking signals are apt to follow.

Provides phenomenal UX

A user’s experience is made up of a vast array of elements, not unlike the search engines’ ranking algorithms. Satisfying all of these perfectly may not be possible, but reaching for a high level will not only provide value in rankings, but through second-order impacts like shares, links, and word-of-mouth.

At the most basic level, a great UX means the page/site is:

• Easy to understand
• Providing intuitive navigation and content consumption
• Loading quickly, even on slower connections (like mobile)
• Rendering properly in any browser size and on any device
• Designed to be visually attractive/pleasing/compelling

Smashing Magazine has my favorite article on the subject: What is User Experience Design? Overview, Tools, and Resources.

Crawler/bot accessible

Search engines still crawl the web using automated bots, and probably will for at least the next decade or more. While there have been plenty of leaps in the sophistication level of these crawlers, the best practice is not to take chances and follow some important guidelines when building pages you want engines to crawl, index, and rank reliably:

• Make sure the page is the only URL on which the content appears, and if it’s not, all other URLs canonicalize back to the original (using redirects or the rel=canonical protocol)
• URLs should follow best practices around length, being static vs. dynamic, and being included in any appropriate RSS feeds or XML Sitemaps files
• Don’t block bots! Robots.txt and meta robots can be used to intelligently limit what engines see, but be cautious not to make errors that prevent them from crawling and indexing your content.
• If the page is temporarily down, use a status code 503 (not a 404), and if you’re redirecting a page to a new location, don’t go through multiple redirect chains if possible, and use 301s (permanent redirects), not other kinds of 30x status codes.

Geoff Kenyon’s Technical Site Audit Checklist is still one of the best resources for those seeking more in-depth information about crawler-based accessibility.

Keyword-targeted

As I mentioned in the opening of this post, it may be the case that perfectly optimized keyword targeting conflicts with goals around usability, user experience, or the natural flow of how you write. That’s OK, and frequently, I’d suggest leaning in those more user-centric directions. However, when it’s possible to optimize keyword usage, you’ll need some ammunition. Here’s a look at the most important elements as we’ve observed them through time, testing, correlation, and listening to the engine’s recommendations, too.

7 important keyword targeting elements (and 1 not-so-important element)

#1: Page title

Using the primary keyword phrase at least once in the page’s title, and preferably as close to the start of the title tag/element as possible is highly recommended. Not only are titles key to how engines weigh relevance, they also dramatically impact a searcher’s propensity to click.

Above is an example comparing some title elements for the search query “lip balm.” The tag for allure.com is more compelling from the perspective of fulfilling the searcher’s intent (which is likely to compare multiple blams vs. find a specific one), but it also puts the keyword in prime, eye-catching real estate on the results page. We have seen evidence and heard the engines themselves discuss the value/importance of earning clicks and preventing “pogo-sticking” (the bouncing of a visitor back to a search page after clicking a result). Optimizing for both keyword prominence AND user intent/visibility is an excellent idea.

#2: Headline

While we’ve seen mixed results over the years with using the H1 tag specifically for keyword placement, it’s almost certainly the case that a searcher who’s just clicked on a results expects to see a matching headline on the page they visit. Failure to do so may increase the odds of pogo-sticking, and our most recent rank correlations suggest that a topically relevant H1 is associated with higher rankings.

I wouldn’t always require a match between the title and the H1 precisely, but they shouldn’t be so dissimilar as to drive anyone who’s clicked away from the result.

#3: Body text

It should come as no surprise that using your primary (and secondary, if relevant) keyword phrase(s) in the content of the page are important. Our research suggests that it’s not just about raw keyword use or repetition, though. Search engines are almost certainly using advanced topic modeling algorithms to assess relevance and perhaps quality, too.

This means it’s wise to make your content comprehensive, useful, and relevant as possible, not just filled with instance of a keyword. In fact, we’ve observed plenty of cases where the overuse of keywords resulted in a negative impact on rankings, so be judicious. If you asked a non-marketing friend to read the page, would they get the sense that a term or phrase was suspiciously prominent, sometimes needlessly so? If that’s the case, you’re probably overdoing it.

#4: URL

A good URL has a few key aspects, but one of those is keyword use. Not only does it help with search engine relevancy directly, but URLs often get used as anchor text around the web (mostly through copying and pasting). For example, if I link to this post using its URL, e.g. http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization, the phrases “keyword targeting” and “onpage optimization” appear right in the text.

For more best practices on URLs, check out our learn article on the topic.

#5: Images and image alt attributes

Having images on a keyword-targeted page is wise for many, many reasons, not least among them is that these can help directly and indirectly with rankings. Most directly, your image has an opportunity to show up in an image search result. Granted, Google’s new interface has dramatically lowered the traffic from image search, but I still find great value in having your brand name/site associated with production of useful graphics, photos, and visual elements.

For search engines, the image’s title, filename, surrounding text, and alt attribute all matter from a ranking perspective. In particular, those doing SEO should know that when an image is linked, the alt attribute is treated similarly to anchor text in a text link.

#6: Internal and external links

A good page should be accessible through no more than four clicks from any other page on a site (three for smaller sites), and it should, likewise, provide useful links to relevant information on any topics that are discussed.

Some SEOs have, in the past, questioned whether linking externally, especially to sites/pages that might compete for a visitor’s time/attention or a search engine’s rankings is wise. I believe the nail in that coffin was delivered by Marshall Simmonds in his Whiteboard Friday Interview noting the value the NYTimes saw from their implementation of external links. Since then, search engine representatives have subtly hinted on multiple occasions that there are elements in the algorithm which reward external links to quality sites/pages.

#7: Meta description

A page’s meta description isn’t used directly in search engine ranking algorithms (according to representatives from Google and Bing), but that doesn’t mean they’re not critical. The meta description tag, if it employs the keyword query, usually shows up in the search results, and is part of what searchers consider when deciding whether to click.

As you can see from the snippet above, when keywords appear in the meta description, they also get bolded, which can help with visibility. The primary goal of a meta description should be to earn the searcher’s click. Think of them like ad copy, and work to make searchers care about your page.

#8: Meta keywords

Notably absent from this list is the Meta Keywords tag, which Google does not use in rankings, and we, along with many others (including SearchEngineLand) recommend against employing on your pages.

———–

The reason it’s so important to balance these keyword-targeting demands with other attributes of on-page optimization is illustrated below:

_{larger version}

As you can see, while on-page features like keyword use in titles, keywords, and body text (even when measured via a more sophisticated and higher correlating model than just raw usage like our data science team did in the ranking factors) have reasonable correlations given the complexity of Google’s rankings, other elements are found much more often in higher- vs. lower-ranking pages.

If social shares, brand mentions, links, and domain authority all potentially trump keyword-based factors as differentiators, marketers need to make sure we’re hitting the basics of on-page, but never extending in such a way that interferes with our ability to succeed in these other avenues.

Built to be shared through social networks

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, and dozens more social networks that are niche-focused can help earn signals that help rankings directly and/or indirectly (often through exposure to folks who might link to them).

A well-optimized page should help to make social sharing as easy and seamless as possible, including:

• Using obvious social sharing buttons that are targeted to the page’s audience. Don’t just list every network on the web — be empathetic and predictive of what your visitors are likely to employ.
• Craft URLs that are short and descriptive so that copying/pasting (for those who prefer) is painless, and whenever/wherever those links appear they provide a good UX for those seeing them. This is particularly important across more niche social sites, forums, and Facebook/Google+ (which use full URLs if the length is short rather than the condensed versions that Twitter uses).
• Make content that has inherent viral value. Think about a social influencer and ask yourself, “would I share this page if I came across it?” Find ways to make that answer yes. One of the best is to build pages that will make social sharers themselves look good to their audiences (either because the page helps promote them directly/indirectly or because the unique value is so compelling, their followers/fans will be indebted to them for finding it).
• If possible and relevant, employ features like Twitter Cards and Facebook’s OpenGraph markup to get the additional benefits on those networks.

Given how the reach of social networks have grown, how well social shares correlate positively to higher search rankings, and how those correlations have risen over time, there’s a lot of value in making sure your pages have an opportunity to perform socially.

Multi-device ready

Although it was called out in the UX section, this principle is worthy of its own headline due to the increasing diversity of devices, browsers, and screen sizes. Mobile use isn’t just critical for users “on the go.” Many are using mobile or tablets to browse at home, at work, and as a replacement for laptop/desktop. And they’re not just consuming — they’re sharing! Social sharing in particular is a huge part of mobile & tablet functions, which means that if you’re not optimized for all devices, you’re missing critical opportunities for amplification to a broader audience.

Inclusive of authorship, metadata, schema, and rich snippets

There are a vast array of options that provide additional markup that engines may employ in their listings. Rather than try to list all of them, I’ll link to resources with more information on each:

• Google offers the rel=author and rel=publisher options to display a profile/brand image and details alongside results.
• Bing has a similar service called “linked pages” to show profiles with results.
• Google also provides a vast array of options for rich snippets, many of those come via schema.org markup, which show in various ways alongside, above, or below search results. They provide a nice tool for testing those snippets here.
• Several options also exist directly through a page’s meta data that Google & Bing employ.

Moz’s marketing scientist, Dr. Pete, recently put together a slide deck showing 90+ unique forms of search results, many of which leverage rich forms of markup (though only a few of these are in the control of the marketer/creator).

My recommendation is to apply those that both match the opportunities provided by the engines and the techniques that will give value to your potential visitors. Be cautious of going overboard — there’s a bit of rich snippet spam that serves only to leave a bad taste in searchers’ mouths and may hurt your reputation or rankings with the engines themselves, too.

---

Choosing how to optimize

One important takeaway from this post should be that modern on-page SEO is about juggling competing priorities. In general, my recommended ordering of those priorities is as follows:

1. Create a page that is uniquely valuable to your targeted searchers.
2. If at all possible, make the page likely to earn links and shares naturally (without needing to build links or prod people).
3. Balance keyword targeting with usability and user experience, but never ignore the critical elements like page titles, headlines, and body content at the least.

There’s no such thing as a “perfectly optimized” page, but I took a stab at drawing up the mythical beast anyway:

Over time, what’s “perfect” might change, and new services, platforms, and areas of optimizational opportunity could arise. But for the past few years (notwithstanding some newer tactics like Google’s rel=author), the model described in this post has held relatively stable. The “O” in SEO is getting broader, and I think that’s a wonderful thing for marketers of all stripes. Targeting an algorithm instead of people is far worse than hitting both birds with the same handful of optimization stones.

p.s.: If you have feedback or suggestions on items to include, please feel free to suggest them in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Posted by james.harrison

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

This post is dedicated to those hard-working white-hat SEOs helping websites obtain top search engine rankings the right way. Sometimes we have to remind the client that slow and steady wins the race. However, the majority of the time the client doesn’t want to hear that, especially if they are paying for SEO services month after month.

Yes, SEO is an investment; however, showing them that they are investing in your services and skills requires a little more than just performing SEO services. Due to the search share click distribution, the client can’t really expect major increases in traffic until they reach the first page of the SERPs. Sometimes they can see instant increases in traffic via long-tailed terms after completion of thorough on-page optimization. But, for the most part we have to educate them so that they will be patient. Remember, they hired you because they are not experts in SEO, it’s important to teach them the benefits as well as the slow process of organic SEO.

Below are five things you can do to help your client rest assured that you are doing an effective job, and with time, traffic will come.

#1 – Rankings reports and keyword improvements

This is kind of a given, because traditionally all we could do is show the client that we helped them go from the 100th position to 50th position. That almost never reflects more traffic, but it does show improvement. It also shows effort, and if you get two consistent upward movements, you can show that there’s a trend in their favor.

Another keyword improvement you can show them is total keywords bringing traffic to their website in Google Analytics. If you go to Sources > Search > Organic, then scroll down to bottom right, you can see how many total keywords have brought traffic to their site in the current date range. If you change the date range to a range pre-SEO work and that number is smaller than the most recent, you can say that you are increasing their overall visibility. So, if you can show improvement in rankings and that they are getting more organic traffic via more keywords on the SERPs; you are showing them that they are making progress. For most clients, this is enough.

#2 – Working logs

Every once in a while, a client may want some updates on how the SEO is going because they aren’t seeing an increase in traffic or conversions. In other words, they want to know what you have been doing.

I recommend recording all work you’ve done for the client regardless of the complexity and time it took. Create events in Google Analytics or your SEO tool software. These are easy ways to document your work while showing correlations with traffic. Another way I’ve satisfied my clients is having something like BaseCamp or a time tracker that they can sign in to and see what has been accomplished.

Behind the scenes, we know things are going good and we know that we are doing work to get those rankings up, however the client doesn’t. Anything you can do to allow the client to check on what you’ve done for them, whenever they want, can sometimes prevent emails or phones calls questioning your efforts.

#3 – Summary reports and updates

Sometimes, emailing the client or getting on the phone with them weekly or bimonthly is all they need. When you reach out to the client before they reach out to you, you are squashing embers before the fire starts. It shows them that you are proactive and more importantly that you haven’t forgot about them. Emailing or calling them just to let them know that you’ve accomplished something or that you were thinking about them while working on their account can go a long way.

I believe this is arguably the most important thing you can do to build long term relationships with your clients. It can be something as simple as “Hey, I just wanted to let you know that we wrote up some content, emailed a few webmasters and been working on your rankings. Just an FYI, give you more details in the monthly report.” This communication can make a client’s day and maintain their trust for you and your services.

#4 – Other metrics to report

Assuming that you are doing your job, you can report other metrics to the client if rankings and traffic have not kicked in yet. Metrics such as total links contacted out of total link goals, total tweets, fans, +1s, shares, pages per site visited, site bounce rate, conversion rate, total live links, subscribers, etc. Anything that will show them that the website is doing better than when you started. However, in order to provide these types of stats, you have to create a benchmark to show how where they are now is better than where they started.

#5 – Resources vouching that SEO takes time

In the case that the client is still skeptical and the results are not yet able to prove your work, the best thing you can do is show them that even the authorities such as Search Engine Watch, Moz, Search Engine Journal, Google, etc., all confirmed that rankings don’t happen overnight. Perhaps you can do a better job educating them about the fact that it’s a campaign to catch up with the competition; that the competitors who are ranking high have performed a long list of tasks over years to get to where they are, and you are emulating them in the most efficient way possible.

So…

…there you have it, five ways to let the clients know that you are doing what needs to be done in order to obtain top rankings. Just don’t forget that the client may still need to trust that the tasks you are accomplishing actually works. So you may have to prove to them that your strategies have helped other clients, or that you are doing what the algorithm, case studies and the competition proves needs to be done.

I hope this helps my fellow white-hat SEOs performing legit services keep good relationships with their clients.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Posted by tallen1985

SEOs can occasionally find ourselves guilty of focusing on just the following few things:

Quite often we are heard muttering that user experience isn’t really our problem. We are all about the above three points. However, as the job of SEOs continues to become broader, requiring a greater number of skill sets, I think user experience is something we can all work on. Besides, surely if we focus some of our energy on this, we are going to end up with much happier users, which in turn will result in higher conversions.

There are various ways to work on improving user experience, and of course, conversion rate optimization also plays a part. Today, I want to focus on one specific part of user experience — CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) — and why I think they suck.

CAPTCHAs ask frustrating questions

When you encounter a CAPTCHA, you are being asked the question,”Are you a robot?” It’s like asking a customer who is about to enter a physical store, “Are you a thief?” before you allow them to walk through the door. So we used to flood our users with these “questions:”

And from there we have now moved to this:

Literally every time I see one of the above it makes me wish that this was on a nearby wall:

CAPTCHAs act as a barrier between you and your customers

Back in 2009, Casey Henry wrote a great post on CAPTCHA’s effect on conversion rates. He highlighted the fact that with CAPTCHA turned off, a company’s conversion rate would increase by up to 3.2%. It’s worth noting that the CAPTCHA type used in this test was based on the more traditional word format. That 3.2% is a pretty big potential gain for a whole lot of companies.

Traditional Word Format CAPTCHA

CAPTCHAs are not a solution, they are a problem

At the beginning of 2013 it was announced that Ticketmaster was finally ditching its traditional CAPTCHAs. Ticketmaster proceeded with an alternative system by SolveMedia. The system presents users with an image or video, the user then has to type a phrase associated with that image. In the video version of the product, a descriptive phrase will appear which the user then has to copy into a box below. If they are not willing to do this, they need to watch the video for a certain amount of time (similar to YouTube advertising) before continuing.

Right now, companies are producing variations of novelty products aimed at helping us to stop spam from landing in our inboxes. Many products claim they are aimed at improving the user experience by making this easier for humans. They come in a variety of styles, ranging from completing a simple sum to those that are image-based or even gamifying CAPTCHAs (such as Are You Human).

Yet all of these “solutions” create the same problem. I, the user, am trying to complete a purchase, fill in a form, or even just submit a comment. And you, the website, keep putting this frustrating technological barrier between myself and my goal, just so you don’t have to sort through a few items of spam.

Another major concern is that these products aren’t particularly user-friendly for those who are blind or partially sighted. Some simply offer the same audio CAPTCHAs (and problems) that we have been experiencing for as long as we remember.

CAPTCHA is built for advertising, not users

The key difference for me with image-based products such as SolveMedia and Minteye is that they seem to act as another opportunity to push an advert in front of users. In some cases they force you to watch an advert just to progress to the next page.

Users don’t want to see adverts even when they are “subtly” placed around a beautifully designed page. Yet, more and more we are moving away from giving the user a choice about viewing an advert to the point where adverts are forced upon them (ahem…YouTube).

So people must be ditching CAPTCHA, right?

Despite statistics like those shared by Casey Henry, the fact is that the use of CAPTCHA is actually on the increase. Perhaps for many webmasters this is just becoming common practice, almost the norm. After all, it’s a quick fix that means we, as webmasters, no longer have to worry about dealing with spam.

Figures from Drupal’s usage statistics show that they alone have nearly 200,000 people using one of their variants of CAPTCHA. This is a barrier to a more fulfilled user experience that doesn’t seem to be going away.

https://drupal.org/project/usage/captcha

“CAPTCHAs are designed to be easy for humans but hard for machines”

…according to a study carried out by Stanford University into the use of CAPTCHA by humans. Yet, by testing more than 1,100 people, gathering 11,800 completed surveys, and studying 14,000,000 samples from a week’s worth of data from eBay, they revealed just how difficult CAPTCHA has become for humans.

The study showed that, on average:

With around 1% of the audience currently using audio CAPTCHA, this is potentially a huge market to lose.

So what is the solution?

There is a time and a place for CAPTCHA. For some sites, it may be unavoidable. However, any solution that is extremely effective rapidly becomes widely used, and as such, becomes a target for hackers.

There are some really simple solutions already out there that will help to reduce the amount of spam you receive but won’t interfere with your user experience.

Akismet

Akismet provides an effective defence that has no impact upon your users. It comes as a variety of plugins and is generally easy to implement on your site. Akismet monitors millions of sites, constantly learning new methods to beat comment spam.

The honeypot technique

Essentially, the honeypot technique is used to hide a field on a form from the user. If this field is then filled in, the chances are pretty high it was by a machine. The major downside to this method is that the form could be accidentally completed by a visually impaired user. Therefore, it might be useful to also label the field with something such as, “If you are human, don’t fill in this field”.

We still ultimately have the problem that whatever we do to ensure a user doesn’t fill in the form, a malicious script could perform its own interpretations by learning which labels mean that a field should be left alone.

However, the key benefit to this method is that the user isn’t getting punished by being asked to complete something that is irrelevant to their actions.

Is it time you ditched your CAPTCHA?

I think we need to focus on what creates a better experience for users by asking ourselves the following questions:

What do you think?

Image credits

http://gizmodo.com/5980361/ticketmaster-is-dumping-awful-captchas

http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha.pdf

http://www.maggiesnotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Bang_Head_Here_25.jpg

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →