SEO

It's time to revisit your SEO strategies and think like a mobile user, think about how you evolve your SEO to optimize for smartphones, and look at the pages that get high degrees of "direct" traffic.

Posted by randfish The phrase "look before you leap" has never been more true! Before you start investing in tactics, it's important to do your market research. Many businesses are tempted to dive into the details before answering the bigger questions, like who their customers are, how those customers make purchase decisions, where their potential users are on the web, and how customers may choose between similar companies and offerings. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why building out a research-based roadmap before you start you building your tactics (like SEO, content, and social campaigns) will help boost your chance of success. Leave your thoughts in the comments below! Conducting Market Research Before Investing in Tactical Execution - Whiteboard Friday For your viewing pleasure, here's a screenshot of the whiteboard used in today's video: Video Transcription "Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk a little bit about doing your market research before you start jumping in and investing in tactics. Shout out to @Andrew_Isidoro on Twitter for suggesting this topic. I really appreciate it Andrew. The reason this is so important and why I was so passionate and why I was excited when Andrew suggested it, is because I've seen us here at Moz and many, many other companies back when we use to do consulting, even with the folks that I try and help today, lots of people I talk to all over the industry, making this mistake of wanting to dive right into the details and start sending their tweets and building their content, tweaking their website, set up their conversion tests, optimizing their pages for search engines, all that stuff, before they have answers to the big questions. Who's our customer target? Where on the web are they? How do they make their purchase decisions? What are their influencers? What are the things that influence them to make a purchase or not, and how do they choose between different companies and different offerings? If we answer these questions, we can build something really beautiful, a research based roadmap. We know things like the personas of who we're targeting. What types of customers are we trying to reach? For example, when we launch SEOmoz Pro years ago, we thought we were just trying to target primarily, at least, in-house marketers, people who worked in-house at companies, not consultants and agencies. So we hadn't built things like white labeling and custom reports and the ability to add your logo and all that kind of stuff, branding. Those personas were critical to getting the product right. About 40%, in fact, of our customers are agencies and consultants. Channels, what are the channels that we're going to reach people at? Is it social networks? Is it things like YouTube, where there's a lot of video going on and obviously a lot of search activity? Is it Google and Bing, where the searches are taking place? Is it content? Are they only at events? Is there a very, very small set of these folks and we need to reach them initially through events or direct outreach? Do we need to build a sales pipeline and then have introductions being made? Are we going to use LinkedIn? Those channels are critical to knowing what marketing things we're going to do. The tactics to pursue on a per channel basis. So it could be the case that the same tactic I'm using again and again on a certain channel is going to work very well. You could see, for example, that content marketing for Moz, at least, works pretty well across all of our social channels. But it's not exactly what we do in person. We try and have a very educational bent to a lot of our content, and that might change up a little bit depending on which forum we're in and what kind of folks we're trying to reach or who we're talking to at the time. So t

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Penguin 4, With Penguin 2.0 Generation Spam-Fighting, Is Now Live The fourth release of Google’s spam-fighting “Penguin Update” is now live. But, Penguin 4 has a twist. It contains Penguin 2.0 technology under the hood, which Google says is a new generation of tech that should better stop spam. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team, announced the new Penguin 2.0 update during [...] Penguin 2.0 Losers: Porn Sites, Game Sites, & Big Brands Like Dish.com & The Salvation Army Google’s fourth Penguin update — what the company is calling Penguin 2.0 — hit last night, and less than 24 hours later we’re already getting a first chance to look at what sites might be considered “losers” in terms of search visibility. In a nutshell, the list includes: porn sites, game sites and big brands [...] “My Photos” — Google Now Lets Find Your Google+ Photos Within Search Google now lets you search your private photos and the photos your friends on Google+ share with you. All you need to do is search on Google for keywords such as [my photos] or [my photos sunset] to bring up matching photos. You can even search for your friend’s photos such as [danny's photos sunset] or [...] Yahoo Testing New Search Results Page I’m not sure anyone would notice in all of the Google Penguin news and discussion, but Yahoo appears to be testing a new search results page. I’m able to see the new interface when logged in and using Firefox, but I still see the old/current interface when using Safari and logged in to a different [...] Don’t miss out on learning from the pros. Attend an SMX Advanced workshop! Sharpen your marketing skill set by attending one of six post-conference workshops at SMX Advanced, June 13th in Seattle. Choose from SEO, international search, social media community management, AdWords, local search or in-house SEO. Secure your spot – register now! Bing News Adds Visual Carousel & Searches Years Back (Not Just Two Weeks) Bing announced they have added a new visual way to consume news on Bing News. Now, for searches on notable people, Bing will return an image carousel at the top. Plus, you will also see on the right-hand side of the page related people to the person you searched for. Here is an example of [...] Still Seeing Post-Penguin Web Spam In Google Results? Let Google Know Google’s next generation Penguin update is now live, and webmasters and SEOs are carefully assessing how this update has impacted their websites. Google is assessing things as well — how this has impacted the search results, search quality and searcher satisfaction. Google’s head of search spam tweeted, asking that if you still see spammy websites [...] Programming Data Collection For SEO Research Last month, I showed you three tricks I use when gathering data on websites. I used these techniques to download webpages into a local folder. In and of themselves, these procedures are not SEO; however, a search engine optimization professional working on a large or enterprise website ought to know how to do this. In this [...] Google’s Hunger For Structured Markup Google is keen for structured markup — to put it mildly. In the not-too-distant past, I wrote about Google’s Data Highlighter for event data, a tool which allows webmasters to indicate structured data for events without having to actually mark up the site’s HTML code. It has the charming feature that the resultant extracted data is [...] Welcome To The Mobile Era Of Search It’s rare when you can pinpoint the moment of a major game changer for an industry to a single day. Usually, these shifts happen over time; and then one day, you look back and realize how momentous a particular event really was. For paid s

Google conversational search rolled out on the new version of Chrome this week. While the “OK Google” search prompt we heard about at the I/O event is not yet available, Google is attempting to have relevant conversations with users.

Posted by SteKenwrightThis 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 SEOmoz, Inc. This kind of thing might happen to Rand all the time, but it’s not often that a digital marketing company based in Leeds gets 100,000+ people reading anything it does (at least on its own site). That’s what unexpectedly happened to us on www.branded3.com a few weeks ago – what essentially started as a rant from some guy having a bad day blew up and now has 1,184 votes on Hacker News (and incoming links from some of the biggest sites in the world). I think it’s likely I’ll never replicate this, and I didn’t intend this either – so I’ll not preach: “this is how you get 100,000 page views.” Everyone else is just as qualified as I am to write a post that’s read all around the world, and that’s exactly what I want to happen. I’d like to tell you what I’m taking away from this, and how I’ll use it when I’m creating content for my clients in the future. Commonly known as sharking. Google it. 1. [citation needed]...but not always. Google only wants you to list the links that are most relevant to and most important to your content – Eric Enge likened this to a research paper around a month ago on Search Engine Watch. The difference between your content and a research paper, though, is that your content doesn’t get discredited if there is nobody to link to that backs up the point you’re trying to make. In a Webmaster Help Video earlier in the year, Google Engineer Matt Cutts said don’t link out to low quality sites – this is pretty much the equivalent of quoting from Wikipedia in an essay. You don’t have to get peer approved before people will read your post, though, so if there’s nobody to link to that’s talking about whatever you are then that could actually be a good thing. If someone else is covering the same subject as you there’s no real reason why you should get all the links, so you should definitely write about things that no one else is covering if you can. NB: Not having anyone to back up your point doesn’t excuse you from not having a point in the first place. 2. Content needs to solve people’s problems…or highlight them. I had a problem with Path and as of the time I started writing the post, nobody had solved it, though a few people had tweeted about experiencing similar problems. I tweeted @path at roughly 7am and the first person to reply was someone else who was (very) actively looking for an answer to the same problem. I embedded Design33’s tweet in the post and linked to him; let my cohort know; and instantly a problem shared is a problem…erm, doubled. Whether your content is solving someone’s problem, or you’re just empathising with them; if you know where to find them…let them know it’s there and get your influencers on board. 3. Find out what people are looking for. The principles behind content marketing are gaining real traction in the SEO community, and more and more companies are getting on board with long-term content strategies. There’s plenty to say about planning your content out for months in advance, but as Simon points out in this fantastic YouMoz post from last year, it’s not all about Google Keyword Tool anymore. There are some great tools out there to find hot topics (Bottlenose is particularly useful), but the best way to find what your audience is looking for is by using the same tools as they are. Wil Reynolds is a great advocate of using Google Complete to find content topics (check out Wil’s LinkLove 2013 presentation, around slide 90) – start typing questions, don’t

comScore released their April Video Metrix and the ad boom continues, as we saw yet another record amount of ads last month. Virtually everything stays the same from March in total videos viewed, unique viewers, and so on.

When Microsoft reveals a new media-streaming app for its Xbox 360, it is usually only available in a few countries. This time however, the Machinima app that was launched in April earlier this year, went live in all of the countries that sold the console.

SEO Newsletter May 2013: Rolling out the Red Carpet Edition was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.This month’s  SEO Newsletter: The Red Carpet Edition celebrates some of the top performers in the category of Internet marketing optimization. Among the stars were quality content creation and keyword research. Quality Content In the feature article, Quality Content Delivers Stellar Performance, I take a look at the role quality content plays in all the genres of internet marketing. Advertising, public relations, communications, brand voice, social media and web pages have all cast content. Content anchors all internet marketing efforts, and harnessing quality content can send your business to the top of the charts. In this article, review: The hallmarks of quality content Tips for content on varying platforms Best practices for blogging Keywords In the back to basics article, What Are Keywords, and Why Do They Matter?, Chelsea focuses on the fundamentals of keyword research. Keyword research has proven its chops again and again; properly leveraged, it can cause SERP rankings to soar and businesses to better understand consumers’ needs. Chelsea looks at: What keywords are What keywords are not The benefit of long-tail keywords Google I/O The Red Carpet Edition also recaps this year’s Google I/O conference, rounding up the need-to-know information for SEOs, including Desktop search, Knowledge Graph updates, Google Maps updates and more. SEMPO Blog SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) started a blog in March, and board members and industry leaders have been using the SEMPO blog as a platform to share information and promote the search marketing industry. In the SEO Newsletter, we share some takeaways from the newly minted blog and examine the many benefits of SEMPO membership. But Wait, There’s More In addition to our spotlight on quality content, our close-up on keyword research and our look at Google I/O and the SEMPO blog, we also have our monthly roundup of all the industry news that made headlines in May. Make sure you never miss out on an SEO Newsletter by signing up. Exclusive SEO news and tips will be delivered directly to your inbox once a month!

Google has added a new visual feature in Google Trends that allows users to explore trending people, places, and things over time, back to 2004. Interactive charts are sharable, allowing users to highlights data that’s interesting to them.