vineri, 29 octombrie 2010

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

ProSEO London: The Untold Session

Posted: 29 Oct 2010 06:42 AM PDT

Posted by gfiorelli1

The ultimate SEO factor: the human factor.

I was lucky to attend the ProSEO Training Days by Distilled/SEOmoz in London on the 25th/26th of October. It was a wonderful occasion to see so many things recapped, that I have read in blogs, forum and chats; to learn some new things about SEO and to finally meet the people I talk with (too much?) online.

When Jen asked in a tweet if anybody was going to write a YOUmoz post about the event, I literally felt her eyes looking at me: being one of the biggest contributors to the long tail of SEOmoz maybe it was my obligation to write something about the London event.

So here I am. BUT I won’t write anything about the sessions themselves (all interesting for one reason or another). Therefore, if you are looking to read something about what Rand said regarding the Overcoming Twitter cannibalization of the Link Graph, or the Will’s tips about Sexing up your reports, better you skip this post and go elsewhere (you have just to Google "ProSEO Distilled").

Nope, I am going to write about what I firmly believe it was the biggest - even not officially affirmed - best rule for us SEOs preached at ProSEO: be human.

The Human Factor – 1: None is an Island

Wiep Knol reminded us how networking is one of three keys for obtaining links. And networking essentially means, “act like a human being”.

John Donne said once that none is an island, therefore none is unreachable and Webmasters and Influencers are human like you, which means that for sure there is something you both like and are enthusiast about.

Human factor – 2: Be enthusiastically genuine

Again, the human factor came out in the session by Caitlin Krumdieck (“Lessons from Sales”). One of her slides was urging us to be genuine, to be good listeners and passionate. Isn’t this again a call to be human? Be yourself with your clients and make them passionate about your ideas, make them believe yours ideas, as they were theirs; pick up the phone and talk to them.

And do the same with all the people who work with you: the web designers, because they can make beautiful art and be SEO respectful at the same, and the devs, because SEO can be the perfect excuse to experiment with the most interesting trends in programming (as said by Leonie Wharton and Andy Davies in “Top 10 tips Design for SEO”).

Human factor – 3: Be Overly Curious

“Humanity” as an essential factor for SEO was then evident in many of the speakers.

Let’s take Ben Hendrickson. What can make someone wanting to understand how the search engines work the way Ben does want? Human curiosity. The same curiosity that makes kids breaking things to see how they are done and - after - try to rebuild them. The same curiosity that made Newton asking why that apple fall on his head and Einstein wondering why a person sitting on a running train is perceiving things differently than another man looking at him from the station.

Curiosity killed the cat, someone between you is maybe thinking, but is curiosity what made us advance in knowledge. I know that I don’t know, Socrates said: this is the reason why we struggle to understand and to experiment, as Richard Baxter with his keyword tool (still in beta) or Martin MacDonald with his experiment about the Mayday Update.

Be human and let your curiosity free, this way you will be better SEOs and offer better solutions to you clients (or to your boss).

Human factor – 4: Creativity

You can Create demand (Rand Fishkin).

This phrase Rand said almost in a rush during his turn in the face-off against Will Chrichlow touched a sensible chord in me, and made me understand that what we were finally talking about for two days was essentially the Human Factor.

The ability to create things is probably what really distinguishes us as Humans, and to stand out in marketing it is what makes a product dominate over all the others .

And to stand out is essentially an art, in the sense of creation of beautiful or significant things. Aren’t beautiful or significant things what we as SEO call content? Content that will be the base of our inbound marketing?

The conclusion: SEO is not about Search Engines, SEO is about human beings.

Yes! It may seem a contraddiction to say that SEO is all about humans; but it is not.

In order to be better SEOs we must be able to copernically revert the way we think. When we do SEO, actually we work on how people search, wander, desire, and learn on the Internet. And that can also explain why the trend is now over the Social Signs.

Only if we SEOs will be able to think out of the box and to be outstanding, then we will be able to be those Linchpins businesses are looking for.

And this is the most important lesson I've learnt at ProSEO.


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Scary SEO Mishaps - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 28 Oct 2010 02:00 PM PDT

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 Happy Halloween mozzerati! Oh, Roger wants me to tell you: "Trick or treat!" Actually, this week we've got a lot more treats than tricks for you. Our treats will even help you overcome some of the nasty trixes of the SEO world! Jen Lopez, our Community Manager at SEOmoz, is here to tell you about some of the scary SEO mishaps that could happen to you if you're not careful. You're going to want to watch this one all the way through; I hear there's a wiked Halloween mozzter mash at the end! Roger may even go trick or treating after the credits...

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Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. As you can tell, both Rand and Danny are out of town and they have left me, Jen Lopez, the Community Manager here at SEOmoz, with the reins. [sinister laugh]

Today we're going to do something a little fun. We're going to talk about making sure to not let these scary SEO mishaps happen to you. Some of you may have noticed I actually sent a Tweet out last night asking for everyone to let me know some of the scariest things that have happened to their site. These are really the top three things that people talked about and things that I have personally seen both here at SEOmoz and at previous jobs.

The first one is to fear the agony of sitewide de-indexing. [eerie wail in background] This can happen a number of different ways. A rogue developer or a developer that doesn't understand what a major impact something can make. It could be a host. It could be a number of different things, but there are various ways to do this.

The first one is robots in the robots.txt disallowing all. I've also seen this where we did major rewrites of a ton of URLs, a bunch of redirects, and the developer thought, "Oh, well, since we're redirecting these URLs, we should disallow all of these thousands and thousands of pages from the robots.txt because we don't want them crawled anymore.' It essentially completely killed weeks and weeks' worth of 301 redirects because all those pages were poof, no longer being served in the index.

The next one is canonicalize all pages to the home page. Last week, Dr. Pete did a great post, a very scary post, about how he added the rel=canonical tag to every page on his home page and it always redirected them all back to the home page. I'll let you take a look, but it was essentially catastrophic. He was lucky enough to get some of the pages back, and he wrote a very funny reinclusion request. But I don't think most people would have gotten the same results. So, don't do that.

The next thing is adding the no index tag to every page. I've seen this happen. Sometimes a developer goes in and they want to set it up so that the no index tag shows up on certain pages, paginated pages for example. But the code that they wrote isn't quite right, and actually the no index tag is showing up on every page. I specifically had this happen. It took about two weeks for all of the pages to be de-indexed and for the hair to start coming out, people are freaking out, running around, where are all of my pages, to find out that one simple little tag at the top of the page on every page removed all the pages from the index.

So just be sure to watch those three things. Sometimes it is not always you who is updating it. Like I said, it's a developer, it's a development team, it's something else. Just be sure to watch it. Make sure that you are going through and checking those out now and then.

The next one is, don't let your CMS kill your rankings. [sinister laugh in background] That's scary. There are a number of things that your CMS (content management system) can do to your site that will actually kill your rankings. We've seen this several times. I worked on a site once where it was builtin.net and we used something called DotNetNuke, maybe many of you have used this before, and it created tons of duplicate content. Every single page on the site had at least three URLs that you could get to. You had to use plug-ins and various things in order to do redirects and that sort of thing. It was very, very difficult to set up.

The other one are theme or design issues. Michelle Robbins actually sent me a message today and said, "Okay, I have a doozy here. It's much more than 140 characters." She sent me a message about a friend of hers who went through a site redesign. They set her up in WordPress. They picked a great theme and did some modifications to it, redesigned it and all this stuff. The site goes up, and two or three weeks later they are wondering, "Why aren't any of our pages indexed? I don't even rank for the actual site name. What in the heck is going on?" They realized that the theme that they had chosen didn't allow title tags on the page. She also had a number of widgets and various things so the internal linking was broken. Essentially, it was the theme that killed her website. She had to go in and do a bunch of modifications. So just make sure that when you pick that amazing theme for your website that it is not hurting your ranking.

Another big issue is, oftentimes, if you have a big huge CMS sometimes maybe a homegrown one that's five, six, ten years old, it doesn't allow for 301 redirects or even easily set up the canonical tag. Just be sure, be aware of some of those things when you're setting up your CMS, you're changing to a new one, whatever the case may be.

The third one, the third one is really horrible. Beware of those gruesome backlinks. [eerie roar in background] Yikes, that one gave me shivers. Watch out. These are some black cat, really scary tactics. But I actually had several people come to me and say that they've seen this happen, which for the life of me I can't imagine doing, but, you know, there are people out there. So watch out for competitors, revengeful employees, bad agencies, whatever the case may be. They can go out and whether it's hijack your backlinks, they buy a bunch of spammy backlinks from bad neighborhoods and whatnot, and all of a sudden your pages are getting de- indexed. You're noticing you have a penalty, you have no idea why. You think everything is happy and chipper. And then you go to Open Site explorer, put in your site, and you see all these ridiculous links. Another tactic people can take is to sort of brand-jack you, right. Okay, that sounded really bad. But I think you know what I mean. They go in and they start ranking for your name in those tops SERPs.

I know that is a completely separate topic but it is rather scary. It's just something that when you are, we all obsess over rankings, so every day you're checking your analytics, you're checking to see if your rankings are still in place, you're checking on all these things, but don't forget these three things. Don't forget that these can happen and don't forget to double check. Maybe it is a weekly or a monthly process of going in and having a checklist of, "Let's make sure that these nasty things aren't happening to me." You'll be on your merry way.

I hope everyone has a great Halloween. As you can see, Roger over here is going trick-or-treating. Here at the SEOmoz office, we are having a big Halloween party today. I hope you guys have an absolutely great weekend. Next week, I promise, Rand or Danny, the really cool guys, they'll be back. See you next week. Bye.

[Awesome dance party]

[Roger Trick-or-Treating]

Boo!

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Follow SEOmoz on Twitter! I'd love it if you'd follow me too: Aaron Wheeler.

If you have any tricks or treats that you've learned along the way, we'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard! Happy Halloween!


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