SEO Isn't Magic - So Stop Doing SEO Tricks |
| SEO Isn't Magic - So Stop Doing SEO Tricks Posted: 29 May 2012 01:47 PM PDT Posted by RuthBurr Hi everybody! My name is Ruth Burr and I’m the new Lead SEO here at SEOmoz. I’m super excited to be here! I’ll be posting on SEO here regularly going forward, but for my first post I wanted to tell you guys that when it comes to SEO, this is how I roll: I know a woman who’s recently lost about 30 pounds. She looks great, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone compliment her on her new look and then ask, “What’s your secret?” “Just eating right and exercising,” she replies – and their faces invariably fall. Eating right and exercising? BO-RING! Sounds hard!  The truth is, we’re all looking for shortcuts to help us get the results we want without putting in the work we need to do to achieve them (think about the “1 Weird Old Trick” ads you see everywhere). We step on the scale, think about the hard low-cal high-cardio road ahead, and think, “Surely there’s a better/faster/easier way to do this.” SEOs do this all the time. We want that magic bullet to get our sites to the top of the SERPs, the one “secret trick” to get the edge on our competitors. And just like fad diets, a lot of secret/sneaky SEO tricks do work for a while. When I started doing SEO in 2006, one of my tasks was to go into our older blog posts and bold or un-bold various keywords, so the content would update and be seen as “fresh.” And you know what? It worked for a while. Remember Page Rank sculpting? TOTALLY worked for a while. Remember directory submissions and blog comment spamming for links? Of course you do, because they are still going on. Weaning Ourselves Off of Short-Term Gains.jpg) Look, I get it, guys. It’s so easy to adopt SEO tricks, and when they actually WORK it can be incredibly hard to turn them down. If all of your competitors are outranking you thanks to their huge volume of paid/spammy links, the moral high ground’s not gonna put food on the table, amirite? So I feel ya. The “if it works I’m doing it, regardless of whether or not it follows the guidelines or is a good user experience” approach has gotten some serious short-term gains for some people (to my continuing chagrin – for more on this topic, see Wil Reynolds’ post How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO). Regardless of my personal feelings on whether or not they’re good for the Internet, I’m not going to say tricks don’t ever work. The problem with SEO tricks is that they’re about getting a site to the top of the SERPs regardless of whether it deserves to be there. That’s the kind of trick that search engines have a vested interest in continuing to combat, which leads to algorithmic updates like Penguin. Over-reliance on SEO tricks is what causes your rankings and traffic to be completely wiped out overnight by these updates. Without a foundation of quality SEO in place, you’re going to spend a lot of your time fixing stuff and doing stuff over every time the search engines catch on to your latest trick. SEO is Hard The difficulty with weaning ourselves off of SEO tricks is that doing SEO without doing tricks is hard freaking work. It is way harder to build great content and fix crummy code and build linking relationships and get people to share and link to your content and then do all that again, over and over, than it is to submit to a bunch of directories and hire a freelancer to spin some content to syndicate on article sites and to comment spam neglected blogs and then buy a bunch of links. However, it’s a lot easier to build great content and fix crummy code and build linking relationships and get people to share and link to your content and then do all that again, over and over, and have it NEVER STOP WORKING, than it is to completely change everything you do every year or so because your websites keep getting algorithmic slaps. And it’s a lot less stressful, in the long run, not to have to explain to your clients why their sites are totally hosed now. SEO Tactics that Never Stop Working We talk a lot about how SEO changes all the time, but in the 6 years I’ve been doing this, here are some things that have never stopped working for me:
The ways in which we do these things have changed a lot over the years, and we’ve been given a lot of new tools (social media, schema.org, the canonical tag) to do them with, but despite the fact that a lot has changed, a lot hasn’t. Just like with weight loss, doing things the right way (the hard way) may not work as fast, but it will work for longer. Every time your competitors get slapped down for their SEO tricks, they have to spend a few months fixing everything and making up for the rankings they lost when their tricks stopped working, then finding a new trick and implementing that. You get to spend that same time building your foundation even stronger. Over time that’s going to make for a solid, well ranked, algorithm-proof site. 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! |
| Oops, I Ruined the Facebook IPO! Posted: 29 May 2012 04:05 AM PDT Posted by larry.kim 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 SEOmoz, Inc. Last week’s Facebook IPO may go down in financial infamy as being the biggest and most high profile IPO flop of the century – and this Internet Marketer's content marketing efforts may have inadvertently triggered the epic Facebook IPO meltdown. Sounds ridiculous and completely preposterous, right? Read to the end of the story and decide for yourself! Our Big IdeaEarlier this month, my colleagues at WordStream and I were planning our monthly content marketing effort. Like most other companies, we do a lot of content marketing on our blog, but we also make a point to publish at least one high-level story that might appeal to people who aren’t expert search marketers. The goals of these efforts are to raise the general public awareness of our company, and also drive valuable editorial links to our site. This month, with all the intense media focus on the Facebook IPO, our big idea was to develop a study comparing the effectiveness of Facebook Advertising vs. The Google Display Network. For those of you who don’t already know, The Google Display Network is the banner advertising component of Google’s business – it consists of banner ads on Google sites like YouTube, Blogger, Gmail (etc.) as well as over two million other popular websites (it’s roughly 25% of Google’s total business). Our research compared the two biggest banner advertising venues on the Internet based on criteria such as advertising reach, supported ad formats & ad targeting options, advertising performance, etc. Our study concluded (for now at least) that, that the Google Display Network offered advertisers greater value in the areas that we tested, which came as a surprise to many investors who aren’t familiar with the two advertising platforms. To help people visualize our study results, we partnered with Brian Wallace at NowSourcing, who turned our research into an Infographic. (Click to Enlarge) Launching our Facebook Advertising StudyWe timed the launch of our Infographic for Tuesday May 15 at 9AM EST, just three days before the Facebook IPO. We wrote a simple press release and a blog post, and then reached out to some of our friends in the industry to help get the word out. Early on, Rand helped us out big time by posting our article to inbound.org (thanks rand!) And we got a few press pick-ups from Jim Edwards at Business Insider, and John Letzing at the Wall Street Journal, and Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost, by lunchtime, we were thrilled with all the progress – we had nearly a dozen major news pick-ups! Little did we know, that we were sitting on a story that was about to explode. Our Study Goes ViralAs if to validate our research, a mere six hours after we launched our study, the Wall Street Journal announced that GM was dumping all advertising on Facebook, and our newly minted research – seen as a possible explanation for GM’s move – got picked up by Mashable, ABC, CBS, Fox Business, PC Mag, PC World, the Washington Post, USA Today, AFP, CNN, The Register, Fast Company, The Economist, Forbes, etc., etc. Here’s what it looked like on Google News: In a matter of just hours, our Facebook Advertising study got picked up in thousands of the world’s leading news publications! Our Study Goes InternationalOur study got picked up by all of world’s largest news networks, such as Reuters, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Associated Press (AP), and USA Today. Content from these news networks are translated into dozens of languages in over 150 countries – so for example, our study was being picked up in even small-town newspapers like my college newspaper: the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in Canada, as well as newspapers in New Zealand, Indonesia, Turkey, and many other countries I had never even heard of! We Got on Cable TV and Radio, Too!Within hours of publishing our study, we started getting phone calls from producers of major cable TV channels, asking us to appear on Fox Business well as national and Radio Stations such as The Takeaway, the BBC and NPR. Here’s a picture of Ralph Folz, WordStream CEO, on Fox Business last week! 5 Quick Tips to Help Make Your Content go ViralI definitely have had my share of content creation efforts that went absolutely nowhere. Each effort is a learning experience, and so I’d like to share the five key ideas that I learned this time around! 1. Pinterest is Very Effective for Infographic MarketingWhen you content goes viral, expect to get a large chunk of traffic from social media outlets. Our top referring social sites were (in order): Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn. I was quite surprised to see Pinterest beating out Google+ and LinkedIn. In fact, Pinterest was our 12th largest traffic referring site to our study. So if you ever do an Infographic make sure you add that Pinterest button! (If you need to make space, dump the Delicious bookmark button – that was nearly useless) 2. Twitter is still very effective, too.This isn’t to say that the other social networks are any less important. In fact, Twitter is effective as it always has been. For example, we got this mention in the Guardian just by reaching out to an author via Twitter! 3. Stay Out Front.The news cycle is fast – it’s important to adapt your story to the prevailing narrative, by anticipating different angles for your news. When we first launched our study, our press release headline read: New Research Compares Facebook Advertising to Google Display Network: Who Comes Out on Top? It was OK, but not viral. But when the GM news broke, we re-released a similar press release with a slightly different angle: Does Facebook Advertising Work? This was because we found that the press was now looking to find reasons for why GM dumped Facebook. This new angle was much more effective than our original angle. And we didn’t stop there. I wrote follow-up stories, such as: Why I Bought Facebook IPO Shares Today and Why I Dumped My Facebook IPO Shares at the Open Today, to keep this thing going. 4. Don’t Miss The Window.I did an interview with The Independent at 4AM EST on Wednesday morning. Why? Because if you’re a reporter in London, that’s when you typically arrive in the office. The attention of the news media cycle an incredible force that is both incredibly powerful and incredibly short. If you happen to catch a lucky break as we did, be prepared to do whatever it takes to make the most of it in the short amount of time you’re in the media spotlight. 5. Don’t forget to include the “so what” factor in your story.I have found that my most successful content marketing efforts are the ones that contain an unexpected result – something unusual or contrary to conventional wisdom. I call this the so what factor. As in: so what, why should anyone care about this story? Our research basically concluded that (for now at least) Facebook Advertising options aren’t that effective, and that was a pretty profound conclusion given that Facebook is essentially an advertising company (86% of revenues last year came from advertising last year), and given all the IPO hype and that exuberant +$110B IPO valuation. Summary: Did My Study Really Burst the Facebook IPO bubble?No. I don’t actually think I ruined the Facebook IPO (apologies for the sensational headline, guys!). The Facebook IPO will go down in history as one of the worst IPO for retail investors. Why did the Facebook IPO crash and burn? It’s because there were more sellers than buyers at that price level. If you’re looking for someone to blame for the loss of around $20 Billion in Facebook market capitalization as of today, blame the greedy bankers and Facebook management for setting such a high IPO price, or the Facebook for not yet developing compelling advertising options, or possibly GM for the unusual timing of their announcement. But here’s what I can say about the impact my Facebook advertising study.
What do you think of our most recent content marketing effort? Any additional tips to share? Do you advertise on Facebook? What have your experiences? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below! About The Author Larry Kim is the Founder/CTO of WordStream, a PPC software company, provider of the AdWords Grader and the 20 Minute PPC Work Week. 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! |
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