seo

Posted by Aleyda Solis

In less than two weeks I will have the pleasure to speak at MozCon about international SEO, in a session called “International SEO and the Future of your ROI.” Before I do, I wanted to compile a checklist of the most fundamental aspects to consider when developing an international SEO process — something to which we can quickly refer that can facilitate our everyday work, and something that would also be easy to digest for our clients at some point.

As a result, I’ve created this International SEO Checklist, with a step-by-step guide to everything from assessing the international SEO potential to targeting our international audience and the development of an internationally targeted site:

I’ve also uploaded a higher resolution version of the checklist image, in case you want to download and print it.

I hope the checklist is useful, and if you’re looking to learn more about international SEO or ask me anything about it, I look forward to seeing you at MozCon! If for some reason you’re not going to MozCon and have a question, please let me know in the comments. 🙂

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Posted by Matthew Brown Earlier this month, I attended the SemTechBiz2013 conference in San Francisco. This is a gathering of creators and designers of the semantic tech stack, folks who work on semantic web standards, and representatives from th… Continue reading →

Posted by Erica McGillivray

We all want to influence our customers and our clients to follow the path to conversion. But what if that path fails to draw them in? That’s where Nathalie Nahai, the web psychologist, comes into play. She helps nudge your audience toward the right path and make your goals in Google Analytics happy, not to mention your boss or clients.

Nathalie recently authored the new book Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. We were so impressed with Nathalie that we invited her to speak at this year’s MozCon, July 8th-10th in Seattle. Get your ticket today because you don’t want to miss this:

How’d you get your start working in inbound marketing as a psychologist?

I have a mixed background in psychology, the arts, and web design, and it wasn’t until I met some of the digi/tech entrepreneurs in East London that I even considered applying my psychology to online interaction. I became curious about how we’re influenced online and started looking for books on the subject. When I realised that there was a huge gap in the market, I decided to write the book myself. That was the real launching point.

Those of us working with data sometimes have to fight “common wisdom.” What web psychology optimization tip always shocks people?

I think the most obvious one is based around a comfortable assumption regarding website visitors, to which my response is always, “If you think you know your target audience, you’re wrong. Where’s your research?” No matter how well you think you know your audience, you should always research them, and never assume that the knowledge you have about them is carved in stone. People change — so must your strategy.

What’s your favorite social media medium to engage in?

I’d have to say Twitter, or Instagram when I’m travelling. Though recently there have been so many genuinely fascinating updates running through my Facebook feed, including my favourite, I Fucking Love Science, that a lot of my productivity has been lost to that particular black hole.

You recently wrote a post about why people troll online. How do you recommend dealing with trolls?

Honestly? I usually write a polite, reasoned response back, and if they retort with something obnoxious (which thankfully happens fairly rarely), then I ignore the thread. There’s no point fuelling the fire.

” …given that a great proportion of our communication is non-verbal [8], and that we rely heavily on facial recognition to connect with and understand one another, it may be that losing eye-contact online actually cuts out our main avenue for empathetic communication – without which we become emotionally disconnected and more predisposed towards hostile behaviour.”

Now for some fun stuff, what’s inspired you lately?

I went to an incredible gig by Susheela Raman, an extraordinary Tamil-London musician whose skill and smouldering charisma make for spellbinding, trance-inducing performances. I’ve loved her music for years, and every time I go to one of her shows, I end up on a high for days. If you ever get the chance to see her live, grab all your friends and go. She’ll blow your mind.

Susheela Raman performs “Kamakshi.”

Okay, since I know you’re a Trekkie (I’m one too), what was your favorite non-spoilery part of Star Trek Into Darkness?

I LOVED the new Star Trek!

My favourite bit was the tribble cameo. It was a cheeky nod to one of my favourite episodes, “The Trouble With Tribbles,” where someone sneaks a tribble onto the Enterprise and they multiply so fast they clog up the whole ship.

Thank you so much, Nathalie, for sharing a bit about web psychology, some beautiful music, and a couple types of geekiness with us. 🙂

If you’re interested in seeing more from Nathalie, she’ll be at this year’s MozCon, July 8th-10th, talking about “How Gender and Cultural Differences in Web Psychology Affect the Customer Experience.” You can also follow her on Twitter @TheWebPsych and read her book, Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion.

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Posted by MikeTek

We have a bit of a complicated relationship with Google In the SEO/inbound community. We are often the first, and loudest, to call them out when they get their priorities messed up or hoard data for questionable reasons.

But on the whole, we use more of Google’s wares than probably any other industry.

At Distilled, we use Google Apps for email, calendars, document collaboration, reporting, Google+ for internal sharing discussions, Hangouts for live video, chat, and webinars. Most of our clients use Google Analytics (as we do for our own websites). Our PPC specialists have core expertise in AdWords. Our keyword research work invariably turns to the AdWords Keywords Tool for search volume estimates.

While working with our Creative team to plan a data visualization project recently, I learned about a relatively new service from Google (Consumer Surveys — see below), and it got me thinking about other Google projects that have proven to be useful for our work and those that promise to be in the future.

This guide is intended for those SEOs/inbound marketers who are familiar the fundamental Google resources (Google Analytics, Apps, the AdWords Keywords Tool) but may not be aware of what else is out there and what is coming soon.

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Analytics & Tagging

1. Universal Analytics

This is not particular to inbound at all, but it affects all disciplines of web marketing. Most online marketers have some familiarity with Google Analytics. It’s the most widely-adopted analytics platform on the web, and it’s about to evolve.

Universal Analytics (in beta) is apt to change the way we use and think about marketing analytics. This successor of the Google Analytics we know will bring improved performance and, most importantly, new functionality and flexibility to your reporting.

Uses & benefits of Universal Analytics:

• Cross device tracking of individual users: We live in a multi-device world. To date, Google Analytics has not had core functionality that allowed for tracking users across all of their devices (one user is tracked as multiple “unique visits,” one for each device). Universal Analytics creates a User ID for the individual and allows you to track their interactions with your site/app across their devices allowing for cross-device optimization.
• The ability to push “offline” data into the system: Using the same User ID functionality, you can tie this data to a single user — across devices and interactions — over the lifetime of their relationship with your business. While passing any “Personally Identifiable Information” into GA is strictly a violation of the Terms of Service, this doesn’t mean you can’t securely keep that information together on your end and (respectfully) use it to manage your customer relationships and otherwise learn who your best customers are.
• Performance enhancements: The current iteration of GA passes a lot of data to GA servers from multiple cookies. Universal Analytics (UA) uses a single, simple cookie and stores most data on GA servers. Faster pages = happier users.
• 20 custom dimensions, 20 custom metrics: You can do a lot with GA’s customer variables, but this is really going to open things up. If you want to push offline and other data into your reports, these are going to come in handy.
• Set your own session and campaign expirations: Sessions can be set up to 4 hours, campaigns up to 2 years.

Justin Cutroni, one of the most well-informed analytics gurus you’ll find publishing online, wrote a nice post about the potential of UA, using his local gardening supply store as a case study of sorts. It is highly recommended reading.

There is so much here that even if you don’t start implementing for live campaigns yet, getting your head around the possibilities of UA (if not the measurement protocol itself) is only going to benefit you as this next iteration bridges the chasm to wide adoption.

Note: before you dive in and start using Universal Analytics on your website, keep in mind there are some things still missing: AdSense, DoubleClick, Content Experiments, and Remarketing are not yet integrated. You’ll probably want to run UA tracking concurrently with your existing GA tracking. The next resource in the list will help with that.

2. Tag Manager

Again, not particular to inbound, but big enough to matter to everyone. Google Tag Manager was released in late 2012 and has seen strong growth, but many marketers are still unaware of its benefits. Google is certainly not the first entrant into the tag management space, but they may well (and quickly) become the most popular.

Mike Pantoliano wrote a solid technical overview of Tag Manager (and tag management in general) here on the Moz blog that is well worth a read.

Essentially, Tag Manager gives you central control of tracking tags firing in the <head> of any given page, without having to touch the page code itself once you’ve added the main container. The rules to trigger tag firing are flexible enough that the possibilities here are broad and powerful.

Uses & benefits of Tag Manager:

• Central, organized management of your tags/scripts: Targeting a given page with a rule is a lot faster than adding it via a CMS or to the source code directly.
• Cuts dev cycle bottlenecks out of the equation: No more waiting a week for your colleagues in dev to update your tracking snippets: Tag Manager takes the work off the dev team’s plate, so everybody wins.
• Improved performance: Flexible firing rules allow you to load resources only on the pages that require them, cleaning up code on other pages and optimizing page loads.

While Tag Manager’s benefits will be greatest for organizations with significant web operations and drawn-out dev cycles, it’ll save most web marketers some time and headache, and signup/setup is relatively painless. There’s a lot of flexibility here, and I expect more clever uses will emerge as the community gets comfortable with this tool.

3. Tag Assistant

If you are using (or intend to use) Tag Manager, Tag Assistant is a Google Chrome extension that will make double-checking your tag/rule configurations a lot easier.

Here’s how it looks:

As above, you can quickly see the details of any tag by clicking the blue arrow to the right of its status.

Uses & benefits of Tag Assistant:

• In short, it makes checking your Tag Manager configuration a lot easier.

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Market Research

4. Think Insights

Think Insights has been around for a couple of years and recently updated their site. While there is a lot of self-serving promotional material here, there is also a great deal of value.

Organized by industry, marketing objectives, and ad types, this resource includes a wealth of research studies, most of which were co-conducted with Google and partners (often research firms) to come to some data-driven conclusions on the way specific markets and demographics use the web. It also serves as an inspiration center for digital marketing campaigns, linking out to some compelling and innovative pieces.

Uses & benefits of Think Insights:

• Free, searchable access to market research studies, organized by industry, marketing objectives, and ad type
• Visualization of the most common multi-touch paths by industry with “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase“
• Inspiration for your next data visualization project with Chrome Experiments. The “500” home page alone is worth the time to click.
• There’s also the Creative Sandbox gallery, showcasing creative online campaigns that “blend creative genius and digital innovation.” This is skewed toward paid channels, but there are a lot of creative approaches here from which we can learn.

5. Consumer Surveys

Consumer Surveys is the only paid service in this post, but research with surveys, if you want to step outside of your customer email list, will always require an investment. Google’s offering is relatively affordable at $.10 a response ($.50 if you need to target a specific demographic).

We are using Google Consumer Surveys for a client project currently at Distilled, and so far the straightforward pricing model and predictable timelines for turnaround are promising.

Matt Cutts ran a playful survey with this service to determine how many people have heard of “search engine optimization.” The answer: about one out of five.

Uses & benefits of Google Consumer Surveys:

• Relatively fast turnaround
• Accurate data
• Affordable cost

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Search History & Data

6. Trends

Trends is a relatively well-known but often overlooked source of historical search volume data.

Search behavior is fluid. If you work in SEO you probably rely heavily on the AdWords Keywords Tool for volume estimates. But if your campaigns are planned for the long term, Trends provides data that tells you something about how users will search in the future.

For example, here’s an interesting comparison:

Note: “News headlines” (at top right) can be useful for identifying the cause behind spikes/drops in search traffic. I’d take the “Forecast” option with a sizable grain of salt.

Trends is also useful for measuring client brand recognition over time (vs. competitors), and for discovering the seasonal pattern for a given keyword throughout the year.

The new Top Charts section provides an engaging visual navigation through current trending searches. Perfect for brainstorming content angles.

Also check out the new live visualization of Hot Searches. Useful? Maybe. Entertaining? Yep.

Uses & benefits of Trends:

• View historical data for a single keyword, or compare two or more
• Discover seasonality in search volume
• Browse current trending searches
• Export to CSV for your Excel/other reports

7. Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist isn’t exactly a tool or a data set but more of an interactive recap of the year in search. You select the year (and/or country), and Google walks you through the biggest search trends and the related events around the world.

The most recent Zeitgeist for the year 2012 included a well-produced video recapping what the world searched for (and therefore experienced) in 2012:

At 15 million views, not a bad example of content done well in itself

If you’re looking for a large data source for a rich visualization, this is not the place. But Zeitgeist can be useful for brainstorming historical context and content angles.

Uses & benefits of Zeitgeist:

• Rich visual “story” experience of historical data
• Helpful for brainstorming historical content angles
• General nostalgia/inspiration (What? That counts.)

8. Public Data Explorer

Public Data Explorer is Google’s portal into government and institutional data sets. While you won’t find anything uniquely available here data-wise, the ability to search and browse data sets from one tool can make your research and brainstorming around data visualization concepts far more efficient.

This tool will also allow you to upload your own data sets and visualize them, which might not give you much of a share-worthy result for publishing purposes, but it is a handy way to play with the different ways to present a given data set before the dev team goes to work building the beautiful version.

Uses & benefits of Public Data Explorer:

• Search/browse many public data sets from one interface
• Upload your own data set
• Quickly switch between different chart/visualization approaches for a given data set

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This is not an exhaustive list; there are no doubt some other Google applications and features you use for marketing (Related Searches, Ngram Viewer, etc). I am sure I have also missed some uses and benefits of the resources included here. Please share your favorites in the comments!

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Posted by randfish

Web marketers are increasingly turning to social media as a great source of high-quality links. Deciding to utilize social is a good first step, but earning the attention of others is easier said than done.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers four of his favorite tactics for squeezing the most link juice out of social media.

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

Video Transcription

“Howdy Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about social media and using social to earn links. Now link building is still an important process, an important part of SEO, and it also drives traffic. Because links are so critical and yet link building classic link building stuff, like directories or comment spam or buying links, a lot of those old-school link methodologies and black hat link methodologies are out of there, social is actually one of the big focus areas for link builders. But it’s a tough thing to do, and so I want to try and walk you through some tactics to get started with this.

These are four of my favorites, and I use them all the time. This is in fact one of the primary methodologies that I use and that Moz uses to earn a great majority of the links that we’ve earned over the last five years. First off, number one, interactions that are in links. This is kind of the classic, “I’m going to engage with a community, with a person, with a brand, and I’m going to hope that through those interactions I can earn links back.” If you do this right, you almost always can.

First off, I highly recommend interacting early and often. Early because a lot of times, especially if you’re trying to get links from a popular site or a popular brand that’s got a strong social presence, being in the first five or ten comments, interactions, engagements when they post to their Facebook page, when they make a Google+ post, when they launch a new blog post, when they put up a new video, really helps you to be seen by the editors who are almost always watching. Whoever is producing the content is keeping a careful eye on those.

Although I know I don’t always respond directly to Whiteboard Friday comments, for example, I’m almost always reading or someone else here at Moz is, and you can almost always see us in the comments engaging and interacting.

When you do that interaction, make sure you’re adding value. Please. What I mean by this is you might think it’s great to say, “Hey. If I say, ‘That was a really great post. I learned a lot. Thank you so much for publishing it. You’re an inspiration to me.” You haven’t added any value. It’s not that I don’t love seeing comments like that, trust me. It makes me feel great. Makes me feel like a million bucks, but it doesn’t add value. It’s not memorable. It doesn’t strike a person as, “Oh wait. Who is that? I need to learn more about them. I want to figure out their point of view,” all those kinds of things.

By adding value to the conversation, you make yourself stand out in the comments. This person, if they add value by doing a little bit of detailed research, by referencing some other content, by making the conversation more interesting, when you see a post that has great comments, you look at who made those great comments. You often click to that person’s profile. Those will latently earn you some links. I’ll talk about those in a sec, but it’s also a great way to get on the radar of those editors.

Once you’re on people’s radar, that’s when you should offer to help. Offer to help out. Oftentimes, the people that I’ve seen have the most success with this tactic are those who help without being asked to do anything. For example, I write a blog post with some statistics labeling some stuff, and someone else goes and does additional research and produces a new graphic based on it and says, “Hey, Rand, would you like to use this in your post too? I think this is a great visual representation of the data you collected here.”

Oh my god. Not only am I going to put that in my post, I’m going to want to high five that person, and I’m definitely going to want to give them link credit back to their site. Those offers to help without being asked are a great way to use the interactions in a community to drive links back to your own site, and you can do this, not just on blog posts, but on Facebook pages, on Google+ posts, on YouTube comments, all that kind of stuff.

Number two, searching for link likely outreach targets. Chances are that if you’re doing any kind of link building campaign specifically, you’re looking for the right kinds of people who will be likely to link to you if you ask them or if you engage with them, if you offer them something, if you guest post for them, if you do some work for them, whatever it is.

Using some tools, find people on Plus, Followerwonk, Google site colon searches, particularly helpful for sites like Pinterest or YouTube or Tumblr, those kinds of things where you can do a site colon query and you can add lots of parameters in there. For example, I only want bio pages. So I’m going to do a site colon, LinkedIn/in to find people who have this particular characteristic. Actually LinkedIn’s own site search and people search works pretty darn well. I’d add them in here, LinkedIn as well.

Fresh Web Explorer, by they way, also very handy for this, particularly for the blogosphere and finding blogs. Google blog search is pretty good, but it’s a little random at times. I’m not quite sure I get the relevancy. Fresh Web Explorer is nice because you can order by feed authority, which generally correlates very well to the number of readers that a particular feed has. So that’s great for finding popular blogs.

Using a service like Followerwonk or any of these, you can also do more advanced things. With Wonk in particular, I can find the intersection of, for example, people who follow me and also follow Moz. Then I can say, “Boy, these people in here who follow both of us on Twitter, oh my god, they’re fantastic link targets.” Now I can take that list, I can export it directly, and I can start going through and saying, “Hey, now give me the domain authority of these sites and let me order this.” Wil Reynolds from SEER Interactive uses this tactic and blogged about it. I think he was one of the first to do that. This type of stuff is excellent for that identification process. Who is going to be a link likely target?

Number three, post content that will capture a target’s attention and then ping them or cc them. For example, let’s say I have a travel blog or a travel website and I tweet something. I analyze @Hipmunk and @Kayak in my latest blog post, here’s the URL. You know what’s going to happen as soon as I do this, right? The people who are monitoring, who are doing the social monitoring for Hipmunk and Kayak, they are going to go to this URL. They’re going to check it out, and they’re going to want to see who does better in the rankings.

If one of them wins and one of them is clearly better for certain kinds of things, they’re likely to put that on their press page. They’re likely to tweet that. They’re likely to endorse it. They might even reach out and ask, “Hey, here’s some methodology stuff. Did you consider doing it this way or that way,” blah, blah, blah. It’s starting that conversation, getting the engagement and potentially getting that endorsement to give you a link right back to your site, which is fantastic. That’s exactly what you’re looking for.

Don’t pander. Do not just go outright and say, “Oh, I’m going to go gush about this brand.” It’s very transparent, and it doesn’t work well. It’s inauthentic. It’s easy to spot that.

Do make content that the target won’t just want to retweet or repost through social, but might actually want to reference and link to. This is why endorsements and recommendations work very well, particularly if you have a brand or if you happen to be someone that they want an endorsement from. Do any type of research, data, studies, graphics, videos, content that they would want to post on their site, that they would want to reference when they create content. That type of stuff can be invaluable.

Number four, finally, when you’re doing social engagements and you have built up a big community, a big following, you’re posting lots of stuff that’s getting lots of interactions, retweets, plus ones, shares, likes, etc., what happens is that you actually earn latent links, and many people in the SEO field believe that this is actually what’s causing Google to have such a high correlation between things that rank well and social metrics. This is what happens.

I post a graphic to Pinterest. It takes off. Lots of people repin it. People on Tumblr pick it up and reblog it. It gets a lot of automated republishing. There are services like Topsy that pick up popular content from all over the social web, Pinterest included, and then republish that, and that is often what you’ll see if you go to Open Site Explorer and look at Just Discovered Links. You’ll see all these kind of republishers who are linking to social stuff, anything that’s been posted socially. You get included in people’s blog posts editorially, and that leads to links. No surprise.

So this process, just doing this social stuff gets you these latent links, and that’s one of the reasons that social is such a powerful channel, because it can be used in all of these direct ways. But even indirectly it’s earning you links through the content and the interactions that you’re posting.

This week you might notice I’m using this fancy new Moz pen which apparently has my signature on it. Please no one forge me handing over my mortgage. I don’t actually have a mortgage, and I hope that they’ll be making these available for some folks because they’re super cool. I just found them in the Whiteboard room.

With that, everyone, I look forward to your comments. We’ll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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