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Saturday, July 2, 2011

Google +1: NOT the internet marketing messiah

In the last few weeks, Google’s been hyping their new +1 voting feature. Click the little +1 and tell everyone you liked a particular search result.

Then they announced the +1 button. Click that and tell your network about a page you like, right from that page. You don’t have to be on Google.com. Note that I even have it on this post, over on the right >>

But now, the internet marketing world has gone insane. Even more insane than usual. I’m starting to get messages like this one:

I’ve also seen notes in forums: “I’ll trade +1 votes”, sell votes for cash, blah blah blah. Even worse, I’m seeing headlines like “Google +1 changes the game”.

Everyone’s treating Google +1 like huge news. The hype around +1 is now officially greater than the hype around the Panda Update:

Seriously? People that excited about this? Um. It’s a button. That you click. To vote on a page.

It’s not a magic ‘get me to the top’ button.

It’s a social media voting button. It’s Google’s Facebook Like, only not as good, because Google can’t hit anything approaching the critical mass of Facebook. Or even Twitter, for that matter.

Think like Google for a second

Come on, people. SEO and internet marketing require a brain. Just for a second, think like Google. Would they create a button that so profoundly impacts rankings? Something so easy to game that you can spam a few Twitter followers into voting for you and bam, up you go in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages)?

No.

They might use +1 as a check against algorithmic results.

They’ll use it to suggest other content to you in personalized results (if you’re logged in).

They’ll certainly use it as a signal for spammy sites—if you acquire 10 +1 votes for a page full of dreck one day, and 10000 votes for the same dreck the next, they’re going to take a careful look at your site.

And I bet they’ll use it as a long-term signal of overall site quality: Consistent +1 votes, in natural patterns, across an entire site might imply quality. But you’ll still need all the other signals in place. This is not a game changer.

Yet a lot of ‘SEOs’ and ‘marketers’ (deliberately in quotes) seem to think this is the next Sekrit Formoola Fer Rankings Sukssess.

Are they all dumb?

Actually, let me reorder that sentence: They are all dumb, if they think that they’re going to +1-spam their way to higher rankings.

Yes, it’s interesting…

Is Google +1 interesting? Hell yes, it’s interesting. It’s Google’s 3rd or 4th attempt to break into social media. It may eclipse such previous successes as Google Buzz and Sidewiki. It may become a beacon of greatness outshining even Google Wave.

Ahem.

In all seriousness, it’s well worth putting a +1 button on your site. Why not get the votes? Lots of people have Google accounts. Lots of people will click that little button if given the chance. And it could help, a little, with your search results. It’ll certainly help with your social profile, if this latest social media venture by Google actually succeeds.

Yes, I’m going to have a +1 button on my site. I like it, and the votes mean something. I’m not saying you should ignore +1. Just give it the attention it deserves. No more. No less.

...but don’t fall victim to shiny thing syndrome

The buzz over Google +1 is one of the worst cases of shiny thing syndrome I’ve seen. If you want to help your business, sharpen your SEO skills or otherwise succeed online, you’ve got higher priorities:

Google Panda, which is still rolling out, still largely a mystery and represents one of the biggest algorithm shakeups in years;
All of those canonicalization problems on your site;
The dozens of broken inlinks you’ve got;
Your 200-link navigation that sucks away authority from every page on your site;
The 500kb, 250×250-pixel image that slows your site to a crawl;
Twitter’s integrated follow functionality;
Facebook’s continued efforts to improve their search functionality—they’re about as successful as Google’s continued efforts to break into social media;
The real, measurable impact of established social media on SEO.

Or, you could even think about ways to come up with content people actually want to see. Whatever you do, don’t fall for the +1 hype. Treat it as one more small tool.

Not a jackhammer. Or a Marketing Messiah.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/conversationmarketing/MRJI/~3/M7XvynOhpOM/google-plus-one-no.htm

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25 cringe- or shrug-worth headlines

I tell you to write clear headlines, and you don’t listen. I tell you to try the blank sheet of paper test, and you ignore me. I suggest that you write fully descriptive headlines, and you snort. Well, now you can see what happens. 25 truly screwed up, hideous headlines written by folks who didn’t consider the consequences:

Royals to get a taste of Angels’ Colon. Ewwwwwwwwwww.
Colon pounded. They just couldn’t get enough of this one.
Supreme Court Tries Sodomy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but do we all need to know?
Deer kill 17,000. Wow. I know they’re justified being a little ticked, but man.
Stud tires out. I’m a 42 year old nerd. I feel no sympathy.
Air Head Fired. About damned time.
Eye drops off of shelf. …
War dims hope for peace. I’m sorry, what? Which war? Peace where? Your lame headline dims hope for peace.
UN to remove Taliban from blacklist: Karzai. Er what? We made peace with the Taliban?
Come on in, the water is fine. Nothing funny, but this headline is so utterly uninformative I found it intrinsically giggle-inducing.
Tits bouncing back in warmer weather. The bird. Not the… Never mind. They’re actually called ‘Blue Tits’. Which might not help… Now I’m just embarrassed.
Get it free!! This was an e-mail subject line. Nothing else to tell me what’s going on. Nice.
A new business model. And…?
Hard wait. Buh…?
Bishops agree sex abuse rules. I wish this was funny.
Microsoft User Research is looking for Seattle area parents with kids. Can you narrow that down just a little?
Why it failed. Maybe ‘it’ needed more focus?
April 6, 2011. The next time I see someone using a date as a headline I’ll… I’ll… probably just cry.
SEO services SEO. This one just pisses me off. It got onto Hacker News? Really?
Photo. This is more a case of not writing a headline at all, I suspect. I find 10-20 of these every week.
No good to great. Dammit. That was my other business plan.
Fired up! That’s great! About what?
What does it all mean? I dunno.
Cameron attacks ‘annoying’ Balls. Is it just me, or do most vague headlines end up being double entendres. Use the guy’s first name next time, K?
Man Fatally Slain. OK, this one is actually fully descriptive. It’s too fully descriptive.

You have been warned.

If you’ve got any other dreadful headlines, feel free to post 'em in the comments.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/conversationmarketing/MRJI/~3/5K005KpkS6A/25-cringeworthy-headlines.htm

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Friday, July 1, 2011

SEO Interview Questions - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

We've all been in difficult interview situations - you get a hard question and go on and on and on without giving a solid answer. In our realm, though, there are some SEO best practices that are so well established that everyone should know and be able to describe them to other people. If you're a business looking to hire an SEO (in-house, contractor, or otherwise), there's no better way to gauge an SEO's abilities than to ask them about basic SEO definitions and strategies. Similarly, SEOs looking for work should be prepared for a comprehensive interview that tests both their knowledge and their creative abilities. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about some of the questions that might come up in interviews for SEO positions and how to answer them (as well as discussing why interviewees should ask these questions). Have a good question for interviewers? Let us know in the comments!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about SEO interview questions, how there are a lot of times in your professional life when you're going to be either interviewing someone who might be working with you on an SEO team inside your company, who might be contracting for you, perhaps a consultant, you're interview someone, you're the CMO or the VP of marketing and you want to know who all these SEO people know their stuff. It can actually be kind of tough to know what questions to ask unless you've got some background experience. Likewise if you are someone who might be interviewing for an SEO position, if you're someone who is a consultant and might be talking to some clients and you want to be prepared for the questions that they're going to throw at you, this Whiteboard Friday is for you.

So in the SEO interview process, the questions that I would ask, these are very SEO specific ones. So in every interview, particularly when you're bringing someone on to your team, you're going to asking questions about cultural fit and background and their biography, like what have they done in their past. Are they going to be a good fit for your team? Are they going to be able to handle the responsibilities? Does their work/life balance work with sort of organization you've got? I'm not going to talk about that stuff. I am going to talk about the very specific knowledge kinds of things that you want to use with an SEO or that you want to be prepared for as an SEO when you're going into these types of discussions.

So the first general section, the section that I start with is general knowledge. This is a great way to feel out whether someone is comfortable and capable. I would use these, honestly if we were doing this, I would be using these on phone screens or maybe even in the interview process, like right in the form field just to get a sense, like, "Does this person have a good sense of SEO? Do they know things like, what's a rel=canonical? What does it do? How does it work? How do search engines treat the meta refresh? What's an image title versus an alt attribute?" So you've got different properties of a particular graphic or an image, and you want to know that the SEO person understands. "Yeah, I know that image title describes the image, but it isn't necessarily being used by search engines to the same degree that the alt attribute is. It doesn't show up when you hover in Firefox. It's not going to become the image label in Google image search, those kinds of things, versus the alt attribute that gets used as anchor text when the image links off to somewhere. So those kinds of things.

You might even have a question like, "How do you remove personalization from search results?" What you want to see is somebody goes, "Oh, yeah, yeah, it's google.com/search?Q=whatever the search term is &pws=0." You find someone who can write off search strings and tell you, "How do I change the country language code?" "Well, you just add in &gl=uk. To get the UK or 'us' to get the US." You want to see that sort of knowledge that indicates that they're really deep into the process of doing SEO. They live and breathe this stuff. They know it like the back of their hand. That's what you want to see from an SEO, and this general knowledge section is a great way to get a sense of that.

Now next up, I like to get a little deeper and understand a person's thought process and be able to explain your thought process to somebody else. That's why we have a section on strategy and tactics. So this is asking questions that will elicit a response that indicates to you how well this person can really do the functions of SEO. A lot of this general knowledge stuff they should have a good background, but if they miss a few of these questions, it's fine. They can always go learn them. They can go look them up. They'll figure it out, it's okay. But you really want to know things like, "Do they understand how to run a keyword research campaign? Do they understand how to run link building? Do they understand what's involved in a content strategy? What does that mean? It doesn't just mean a blog, does it?" It's all sorts of different things.

So I like asking broad questions like, "How would you create a site to rank for give them a keyword or a set of keywords?" Like, "I am getting into the men's fashion industry. Just imagine for me, brainstorm with me a site that's going to perform really well in men's fashion." And if you hear things like, "Well, I would like to build a site that naturally incents lots of creators, lots of designers of clothing, and lots of brands to put their stuff on our site. So it will be a big important site where lots of people will come to. They'll put their stuff up and they'll essentially promote it for us, but we have a lot of unique form fields and unique content that they have to fill out so that the content itself is unique and it doesn't just look like the manufacturer's suggested description across everything else, because we don't want to have duplicate content problems." That's shows some level of depth in terms of thinking. It gives you a sense of how they'll tackle problems.

You can ask questions like, "What are some of your favorite scalable link building tactics?" And if they say something like, "Well, I really like contacting webmasters." No, like, "Nope, you're clearly missing this word scalable and also probably favorite, because nobody really likes contacting webmasters." That's the least fun part the SEO's link building job. But if they say things like, "Well, I really like building up popular social accounts," or, "I like running a blog and building up content to attract a community," those are pretty good answers. If they say things like, "I really think that content syndication or image licensing or badges and embeddable widgets is a great link building strategy that's scalable," those are great answers. You want to hear that kind of stuff.

"How would you get video content into Google?" More of a tactical question, but it gives you a sense of some of the knowledge and then how they do it. So if you hear a question like that and the person gives you a response and they say, "Well, Google has this video protocol." All right, they do, Google does have a video protocol. But what you really want to hear is, "Oh, it's great! What I like to do is make content using YouTube or Wistia or Vimeo," or whatever it is, whatever their preferred video hosting service of choice is and let them tell you why that is, "and then embed it on our pages and we use the video XML sitemaps feed to send to Google so that appears as rich snippets in the search results." Perfect, this person clearly understands the tactical knowledge, and maybe they don't even know how to craft it. I don't know how to write a video XML sitemap. I couldn't start writing you the protocols from scratch, but I can go find it online and copy what Google suggests it needs to be. I just need to have the knowledge of how to do that.

So that strategy and tactics section, also really important.

Last up. I do like to ask about some tools and metrics because this can give you a great sense of both an SEO's depth as well as they way they think about a lot of problems. Because the field of SEO, granted, is some art, some science, and a lot of research and learning and trying new things, the tools and metrics, the statistics that we use, the correlation data kinds of things, the link data that comes out of Yahoo Site Explorer, or Bing Webmaster tools, or the Google link command, or Exalead, or Majestic SEO, or SEOmoz, you want to know that they've got a good grasp on, "Oh, here's all the ways that I could potentially get that data and here's why I like this one and I don't like this one. I like the Bing or the MSN Ad Center or the keyword tool. I don't like the Google keyword tool. I really don't like some keyword tool here, but I think Keyword Spy's great or SpyFu is awesome," or whatever it is. And you want to know, not just what those tools are, but how do they evaluate them.

That gives you a really good sense for how that person thinks about problems, how they're going to attack things, whether they're a critical thinker or whether they just take things on face value, which in the SEO world is not a great idea. Like even the things that I might be telling you on Whiteboard Fridays, you probably want to verify for yourself. So things like, "What data would you use to use to judge the value of a link?" And you want to hear things like, "Well, I'd try and gets some metrics around how important the domain is, how important that specific page is. I'd try and get some metrics about where is that link going to be placed, what sort anchor text will it use, how many other links are on that page, where do they point to, or they spammy or manipulative, or are they good and authentic?" Those kinds of things. "What tools do you use to measure competitors' keywords and traffic?" And if they tell you, "Well, I really like this SpyFu or KeyCompete, or some of these other ones, Compete.com has a competitive intelligence tool. Hitwise has one, very enterprise level." Hey, yeah, those are good ways to measure keywords.

On the traffic question, if they say, "Well, I really like, Alexa." I'd be like, "You do? Why do you like Alexa? What do you find useful about it?" There are good answers, which is, "Well, for the top 1,000 or 5,000 sites on the Web, Alexa's pretty good at saying what the relative difference is between them." Which is relatively true, most of the time at least. But for those sites in the tail, sites in the midrange, Alexa's terrible. You kind of want to hear, "Well, none of the data sources are particularly excellent, but I like to look at Google Trends for websites, or Compete.com, or I like to look at Quantcast. I like to compare across the set. But I really like to look at maybe how many people are subscribing to their blog through Google Reader. That's a great signal." It's let's you know that person is thinking more deeply about these questions.

"How do you measure social activity on a site?" That's more of a broad based question. Like, "Do you just track tweets? Do you have some sort of an analytics tracking? What do you set up for that? Are you using something simple like a shared count? Do you have a statistics dashboard? Would you be using a Twitter client to be measuring that?" Whatever they've got.

If you ask these questions or you can answer these questions, I think you're going to do a lot to cement a good relationship between things. If you're in SEO right now and you're thinking to yourself, "Boy, I'm not sure I can answer all those questions that Rand had on the board," I mean, these aren't the toughest things that'll get tossed at you at an interview. They shouldn't be definitely. So you might want to spend some time having good answers to these questions, thinking hard about these things, researching them. And likewise, if you're an employer or a contractor and you're trying to find SEO people to work for you, do consulting work, you definitely want to amass a good set of these. I would actually recommend trying to ask relatively consistently again and again with the same people because having that consistency between questions let's you really grade people on the same level. If you change up your questions every time, it can get tough to remember how well a candidate might have done against another one.

All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this addition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you're going to find some great jobs and some great SEOs, and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/lWGWRGtmpVM/seo-interview-questions-whiteboard-friday

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Analytics plus SEO equals content: My Wappow presentation

Everyone's bleating about content marketing.

Content marketing this.

Content marketing that.

For some of us, though, content's been around since we, well, since we learned to read.

Here's the process I've put together over the last ten years. I presented this at Wappow Search & Social last week.

Shockingly, it involves content. And marketing. With some analytics and SEO thrown in.

Analytics + SEO = Content

View more presentations from Ian Lurie

Download PDF version

If you like this kind of resource, subscribe to my blog update, and you'll know the moment I add stuff like this:

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/conversationmarketing/MRJI/~3/t0H8wW7dWEY/analytics-seo-content-2011.htm

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The secret to internet marketing success? 'Because I said so'

I’m going to let you in a secret. It’s the One Big Thing you have to know if you’re going to run an internet marketing campaign.

Sometimes, you have to say ‘Because I said so’.

Part of leadership is willingness to go out on a limb—to make a decision that isn’t supported by consensus or reams of data.

There are times when you just know, in your gut, that you’re right. If you’re the copywriter in the fourth cubicle to the left and happy with that, you don’t have to do anything about it. If you’re heading up a marketing team, though, you have to follow your gut and take your team with you.

That’s how you take your company in a direction that no one else thought would work, and turn that into a huge, market-changing event. It’s how you give clients a competitive advantage. It’s how you fix bayonets and charge at the worst possible moment, and win the battle.

You can go with the group. Or you can say ‘Because I said so’.

Is it risky? Hell yes. When it goes wrong it’s damned embarrassing, too. You might get fired. It’s scary.

Scary

Deal with it. Internet marketing isn’t about the data—if it was, then we could have computers do it all.

Internet marketing is about creativity. Data helps only because it can guide creativity. You won’t always have reports that tell you exactly what to do. Sometimes the survey data is contradictory; the traffic report is incomplete; or the rest of your team interprets the numbers differently.

That’s really scary. That means you have to take responsibility for whatever you decide. If you flush an entire internet marketing strategy down the toilet, it’s on your head.

Hopefully, that’s why you wanted to be in charge—you want to take the risk, because you know something really cool can come of it.

Because you said so.

Assumptions

Couple of final notes:

I’m assuming, of course, that you’re in charge because you’ve got the expertise. You’ve put in the 10,000+ hours to really know what you’re doing. If you don’t, then saying ‘Because I said so’ may feel good right now, but you’re probably leading your whole team down a rat hole. You’re just guessing and hoping you’re right. That’s not leadership—that’s arrogant stupidity.

I’m also assuming that you heard everyone out before you made your decision. Most people can take rejection, if they had their say. If they can’t handle it, this is a good chance for them to learn. If you just punt them out the door without listening to their ideas, though, all you’re teaching them is that you’re a jerk.

And now, I’m off to bed. To lie awake for awhile, scared poopless over whatever I did today based on my own ‘Because I said so’.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/conversationmarketing/MRJI/~3/FbzGCp_DPYw/because-i-said-so.htm

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Internet marketing and sailing have a lot in common

On my vacation last week, I got to go sailing. I’ve sailed since I was 12. In the last 15 years, I’ve only gotten to do it every 2-3 years, at best, but I at least know my port from starboard.

I sailed a boat called a Hobie Wave:

(image from hobiecat.com)

We nearly ended up having a major disagreement, the Wave and I.

“Ready About!… Dammit!!!”

When you’re sailing, you do this thing called tacking. The simple version: You can’t sail straight into the wind. You can, however, zig-zag into the wind. The zigs and zags are called tacks.

Normally, you tack by turning the boat towards the wind until the wind crosses the front of the boat (the bow). You yell “Ready about!!!” and then “Hard a-lee!!!”. The boat whips around, the wind starts blowing into the other side of the boat’s sail, and you’re zipping happily along. All is right with the world:

OR, the boat steers into the wind, slows down, stops, starts going backwards while the sail flaps around like a flag and any waves make you bob up and down like a cork. Then the boat decides, in spite of your pleas, curses and attempts to keep turning, to go back on the original tack:

That’s what the Hobie Wave just loooves to do. You try a normal tack and it mocks you.

And no, for you sailors out there, the boat did not have a jib, or any other headsail. Just a mainsail.

I fought with the boat for at least 2 full sailing runs around Sandpiper Bay. I considered cutting it in half and sailing back in one hull, like a canoe. I pondered bouncing it off solid objects. And I considered leaving it and walking back (the bay is pretty shallow).

We reach an agreement

But the Wave and I finally reached an agreement. It doesn’t like the wind crossing the bow. But it’s just fine with the wind crossing the back (stern) of the boat. That’s called jibing.

I was raised as a sailor to believe that jibing a sailboat can create a space-time rift that would devour the very fabric of reality. Or that it would smash your boat to smithereens. Regardless, it was A Very Bad Thing. In the 95-degree heat of Sandpiper Bay, I stubbornly refused to believe sailboats could’ve changed in the last 30 years, or that jibing is sometimes a good tactic.

But the Wave, with its teeny sail, light weight and lack of rigging, loves jibing. It jibes with flair. With panache. With enthusiasm.

Jibing changed our relationship.

That sounds so... wrong... when I read it.

Why this relates to internet marketing

Sometimes, customers are like Hobie Waves. You know they ought to approach your product a certain way. Then they do things that make zero sense. You want to hit them with 2×4′s:

On Google, they use the ‘wrong’ phrase to find your services. They might use ‘bike tires’ to find you, when you feel you produce ‘bicycle racing tires’;
You want them to use your online form to buy from you, but they keep calling, instead;
You want to sell them your newest coolest product, but they keep breaking sales records buying the old one;
They all watch the online video, but you want them to order the DVD.

When that happens, they’re refusing to tack. You steer one way, they go another.

Then you have three choices. You can:

Start cursing, and keep trying the same thing, again and again, while everyone else laughs; or
Abandon ship. Give up. Swim to shore; or
Try something else.

I vote for number 3.

The customer isn’t always right. But, if all your efforts to do things the ‘right’ way bring you to a standstill, you’ve got no choice. Find how your customers want to do things. Consider the ‘wrong’ way. Will it really smash your ship to smithereens? No? Then give it a try.

The goal remains the same. The perspective is what changes.

Even when the Hobie Wave refused to point into the wind, we still had the same goal: Get from point A to point B. Preferably with a cool little wake proving our speediness. I just had a very different way to accomplish that goal.

When I changed to jibing, instead, I tried the ‘wrong’ way to achieve the same goal. To the Hobie Wave, my ‘wrong’ way was the ‘right’ way. It worked. We both got what we wanted.

Your customers still want a nice pair of shoes, or SEO services, or a cloud computing solution. They still want great service and value. They just picture going about it differently. Solve that puzzle—match your common goal with their desired path to that goal—and you become:

Zappos, who lets people return shoes, no questions asked;
Apple, who has conquered the smartphone market with a phone that doesn’t work that well as a phone;
Toyota, who delivered the Prius years ahead of everyone else;
Or even Hobie, who created an inexpensive, durable sailboat that, while somewhat cranky, is lots of fun for the typical wannabe sailor.

Or, you find a way to connect your vacation to your business, and then use that to ease your way back to reality.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/conversationmarketing/MRJI/~3/ZYwaygpnhLo/internet-marketing-sailing-62111.htm

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Google+ outlook, in a nutshell

I just tried to sign up for the Google+ notification list. This is what I got:

In case you didn't know, Google+ is Google's latest attempt to break into social media. Judging by the result, I think it'll easily eclipse... Google Buzz.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/conversationmarketing/MRJI/~3/o6bKoi5yes4/google-plus-outlook.htm

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