Central Perk: 7 sept. 2012

vineri, 7 septembrie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Posted: 06 Sep 2012 07:39 PM PDT

A compilation of some of the best offerings from Reddit's GIF Sound subreddit, which are largely made using GIF Sound, a site that allows users to combine animated GIF's with sounds/music from YouTube videos.

Is Social Media The Best Use of Your Time? Graywolf's SEO Blog

Is Social Media The Best Use of Your Time?

Posted: 07 Sep 2012 10:26 AM PDT

When it comes to small businesses, time is usually one of the biggest hindrances. Every small business owner I know (myself included) would love to have a few more hours each day. Since our time is limited, it’s important to plan and be productive with every hour. Almost every day, I will have 10 hours [...]

This post originally came from Is Social Media The Best Use of Your Time?

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Using Followerwonk to Grow Your Twitter Account - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 06 Sep 2012 08:04 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Building and analyzing social accounts is a must for SEOs. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses the newest free product for SEOmoz PRO members: Followerwonk! This splendid tool is a great way for SEOs to manage their social accounts through linkbuilding, outreach, adding value to campaigns, growing a social media presence, and more.

Based on four key sections of the Followerwonk site, you'll learn how to search inside Followerwonk for specific users, compare your users for overlaps in follows and followers, analyze your followers for details and stats, and track your followers for wins and losses. Analyzing your social accounts has never been so easy - and so fun!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to talk a little bit about Followerwonk.

Now, for those of you who don't know, SEOmoz recently acquired Followerwonk. It's now a completely free product for PRO users. So if you're a SEOmoz Pro customer, you literally just go over to Followerwonk, connect your SEOmoz account, log in with Twitter if you haven't already connected a Twitter account, and boom, you're good to go. You get Followerwonk free. We're very excited about this.

I've loved Followerwonk for a long time, kind of wanted to do a Whiteboard Friday about all the cool ways that I use it, and all the cool ways that SEOs can use it to do magical stuff with their social accounts on link building and outreach and all that kind of stuff, but I figured hey, let's wait until it's free for you. So, here you go. Now Followerwonk, totally free, you can use it any time you want.

So I've got four tips, and this is based on four different sections of Wonk. So if you go to the Followerwonk product, you'll see four tabs that look like this: Search, Compare, Analyze, and Track. Those four tabs, there's actually a fifth tab that I'm not going to mention today, but you can go check it out, too.

Number one, the first one, is the Bio Search feature. Now, this is very cool for sort of outreach and discovery. If you think of Open Site Explorer as a look into the link graph of the Web, the bio search inside Followerwonk is really a look into the Tweet graph or the Twitter user graph of Twitter.

So I can go and I can do things like outreach, look for journalists or bloggers, influencers in a specific niche, etc., just by searching the words in here. A warning though, you've got to be pretty literal. So I would do a couple of things. I would first click on the More Options. There's a More Options link right below the search box. If you click that link, it'll drop down another box that shows you a bunch of other options. Get creative in there. Start searching for synonyms. Someone might call themselves a journalist, a reporter, a writer, an investigator, whatever it is, and you want to be making sure that you're using all those different combinations.

Same is true for location stuff. So some people, they'll say they're in Dublin, they'll say they're in Ireland, they'll say they're in Southern Ireland, they'll say they're in some weird combination of phrases. Sometimes people will use SEA to describe Seattle. Fine, great. So you just need to be creative when you're plugging those terms in here.

You can also use it for geo-targeting, so find folks to connect with. If you're going to a city, you're going to an event somewhere, you're visiting somewhere, and you know hey, let me just see if there are influential people in my sphere. So if you're in the paper goods industry and you want to see if there's a big letterpress person, a big engraver person, a big craft artist who happens to be in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or Austin, Texas, wherever you're going, you can use that Bio Search to find those people, start tweeting back and forth. "Hey @soandso, I'm visiting next week. Any recommendations?" You often get great replies and can build great connections out of that.

Events and interests, so this is another way to use this. If you're going to be at a specific event, even an online event, a webinar, or you're going to participate in a Twitter chat or something like that, you can look for the people who have those hashtags and who are in a location or in a specific field. So if I'm going to Dublin, for example, later this month, I might search for SEOs who happen to be in Dublin, and I can see if I can connect with those folks, get them to come to an event that I'm going to be speaking at while I'm there, those kinds of things. You can really use this to figure out who are the influencers in a specific industry or at a conference or meet-up.

Number two: Compare Users. This has got to be one of my favorite features, and the reason is really simple. When you think about doing link outreach, one of the most powerful ways and things that people do is use the SEOmoz link intersect tool, and they use it to go, "Who is linking to two or more of my competitors, but not to me?" Magical. You can do that with Followerwonk on Twitter.

If you go to the Compare Users tab, you can only do it for two at a time, but it still works really well and it's very fast. So I can go, "Oh, hey, I want to see who's following Joel and who's following Karen, who is not following me." And that's exactly what this point of intersect in the little Followerwonk Venn diagram does. If I look at those, there's a list on the side, I can actually click and see the list of users, sort them by influence, sort them by follower count, sort them by a ratio, whatever I want to sort them by. I can even download in Excel that group if I want, and then import and play around with it and do my pivot tables, whatever you want to do. This is an awesome way for discovering those likely influential followers of your topic area, who are interested in things you're interested in and follow multiple competitors. If they follow one of your competitors, they might just be a fan of them. If they follow two or more, chances are they're a subject matter expert or subject matter interested person, and that means they're a great potential target for outreach, for influence. You know that you want to probably reach that group, particularly the ones who have lots of followers.

Number three: the Analyze Followers. Oh, I don't know. Tough call as to whether this is my favorite feature or this one. For you, for your own account, what I recommend is plugging it into the Analyze Followers. So I'd plug in @randfish, you plug in your account name, and it'll show you all sorts of things. If you scroll to the bottom of that list, there's tons of stuff. So there's geo-data, and there's tweet and re-tweet data, and there's the distribution of the influencers of your followers, and all sorts of other cool stuff. But one of my favorite ones is this little graph right here. It basically shows times of day. So this'll be 12:00 a.m. or whatever, and this will be 12:00 p.m. here, and that's 11:00 p.m. down here, and it'll show me what time my followers are online and what percentage of them are online.

The coolest part about this is if you look at the top, the highest bar on there, what you'll most likely see is something under 10%. What this means is that people who are on Twitter, of your followers who are on Twitter, less than 10% for me it's 6.5% of my followers maximum are on Twitter, using Twitter at any given time. So if I tweet a link, unless someone's going back through and looking at all their tweets and my account specifically, the maximum number of people that I'm going to reach is less than 3,000, because I have 60,000-ish followers. So 5% of that would be around 3,000. Crap! You know what this tells me? This tells me I really, really, really should be sharing not just at this time of day, but probably at least once or twice more if I have an important link to share.

So I put up a new blog post pretty much every night on Moz.com/rand, my new blog, and I share late, late at night. In fact, I share right there, at probably the worst possible time I could share, because that's when I'm up, and I go to sleep around 1:00 or 2:00 am, and I don't get enough sleep. I should probably change that. But I share here. I need to share again in the morning Pacific time, because that's when the most, the highest number of my followers. And I could probably do with sharing again the next afternoon, without much overlap. There are very few people who are going to be online all three of those times. Sharing twice or three times saying,

"Hey, here's my post from last night in case you missed it," that kind of a thing, which I do almost every morning, this is a very, very excellent idea. And then this graph will show you exactly when to do that. Super smart, really, really cool.

For other accounts, I would also recommend that you plug in some other folks and analyze, particularly folks in your industry or folks who are influencers or journalists or whoever it is that you think you want to have some overlap with, find who their most influential followers are. So this could be a competitor. It could be a reporter in your space. It could be someone who's just a very powerful blogger, and whether they're a right target, because the list of data that you'll see will show you a lot of information about who's following them from a demographic and psychographic perspective and a tweet-likelihood perspective, and a influencer perspective. Sometimes clicking on that list of high influencers, of followers of them, that have a lot of influential followers and seeing who those people are, those can also turn into great targets to connect with.

Last thing: the Track Followers account. My favorite part of this particular feature is that it shows me a timeline of new followers and lost followers. So basically, what I'm seeing up here is I gained +100 new followers on this day. Well, what did I do that day? And I can click and actually see who are those followers. I can click over to my Twitter account and see what was I tweeting that day. This is a great, great way to see, "Am I doing a good job of engaging? Is it when I tweet a lot, or when I tweet a little? Or when I get a lot of re-tweets? Or when I share a particular link? What am I doing that's getting me there?"

In fact, I had a fascinating example recently. This past week, actually when you're watching this, this will be two weeks ago, I was in Boston for the Inbound Conference from HubSpot, and I spoke to a big audience there. There were almost 2,000 people in the audience I think like 2,800 attendees, so big audience. I do a keynote session on some SEO stuff, and this is what happened. I basically had my highest growth day that I've had in almost three months - well, I had a big day when we got some funding too

- but this was like +390 some odd followers that joined that day and started following me. And I had a bunch a followers the next day, and that same time, I got verified by Twitter. Twitter sent me and email saying,

"Oh, hey, we'd like to verify your account."

So kind of a fascinating thing and this actually keeps track of who those people are and what happens so I can see and I can try and track down, "Was it really me doing the HubSpot conference, or was it something else?" It probably was the Inbound Conference, but this is a fascinating thing. I can do this same thing on the other side and look at, "Why did I lose so many followers here? What did I tweet?"

By the way, almost every time I lose a bunch of followers, it's one of two things: I tweeted something relatively political, and I mean political not just in the sense of like American politics and national politics, but also political in terms of black-hat/white-hat, and SEO spammers versus the good guys in SEO, that kind of stuff. That can lose me quite a few followers. And then the other reason that I lose a lot of followers that I've seen is when Twitter does a big spam clear out. So clear out a ton of spam accounts and that'll drop my follower account.

So it's fascinating to watch this stuff. All four of these are just great reasons to be using Followerwonk. If you've got an SEOmoz Pro account, you should go check this out. Even if you don't, a lot of these features are free. You can use them for the first time for free, so I would encourage you to do it. You'll get a ton of value out of Wonk. In terms of Twitter and adding value to your SEO campaigns and growing your social media presence and the reach of your links, there's nothing like this. So that's why I was so excited to acquire them.

If you have great suggestions for Followerwonk, things that you want to see, please leave them down in the comments. We would love that.

Thanks very much everyone. We'll see you again next time for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Where Are My Rankings?

Posted: 06 Sep 2012 06:15 AM PDT

Posted by Thomas McElroy

Over the last 3 weeks, you may have noticed some instability with our Rankings tools through missing data and error messages stating some tools are unavailable. On Friday, we experienced a totally different, unrelated problem with our rankings data. We expect to have an updated prognosis for that problem by tomorrow, but we want to fill you in on what went down at Mozplex to cause these issues in the first place. To be as transparent as possible about what happened and how we're working to fix the issue, below is a summary of what was impacted, the work we did to get things going again, and what we’re doing in the future to make the system more resilient.

Database issues? What gives?

Our SERP data subsystem (which runs on the distributed storage technology Riak) had a couple of nodes fail. To learn more about Riak, here's a blog post we wrote when we made the switch last year. The subsystem is designed to handle such failures; however, we did not handle the failure correctly.

In the process of fixing our Riak storage, we disrupted some of our queues for SERP data processing. Given Moz's growth over the last six months and the number of SERPs processed in the Riak cluster, Roger can no longer recover from outages in a timely manner. In late 2011, we could recover the system in 3-8 hours and be caught up on data processing in a few days. This time around, it took us six days to get the system back up and another two weeks to catch up on the missing data and the inconsistent data states that resulted.

Impacted services

Riak stores our SERP data (rankings data), so all the systems that depend on it were impacted. The impacted systems include:

Custom reports
On-page reports
Historical rankings CSVs
Rankings
Keyword Difficulty & Full SERP Analysis reports

Work completed to get things going again

Our dev teams have been hard at work to restore all missing and inconsistent data post Riak malfunction. At a high-level, here's what we did to get Rankings and all its dependencies going again:

Created scripts to heal the different broken states of jobs
Added more nodes to speed up processing and help in future failures
Improved monitoring to get information about failures and performance bottlenecks
Improved performance in a multiple areas

Future work

It took the team 20 days to fully recover from the cascading problems that resulted from the original issue. We know that this timeframe is highly unacceptable, and we apologize for not being able to recover quicker. We are now in the process of ensuring that the same failures do not occur in the future and to lessen downtime in the event something like this does happen again. Work has begun on multiple improvements to help us reach our goals, including:

Improving health checks and threshold monitoring of Riak nodes and subsystem dependencies
Adding more Riak nodes
Beefing up queue and job execution monitoring and alarming
Creating a dependency matrix that indicates what’s impacted when something goes down
Improving fault tolerance in parts of the system
Providing additional excess service capacity
Creating system operations documentation for dealing with emergency scenarios and how to recover

So, what's the current ETA?

Unfortunately, as you can probably tell, we have a lot of work to do to get Rankings back to 100%. We don't have an ETA quite yet. However, we hope to have a solid date in place by tomorrow and will update the post as soon as we know. Again, we apologize for the failure and any issues it has caused. We are working our butts off to ensure it doesn’t happen again!

If you need an immediate alternative for rank-checking, try using the Rank Checker at SEOBook.

For status updates on this issue, please check out our Rankings page on the Help Hub.

West Wing Week: Engage!

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, September 7, 2012

West Wing Week: Engage!

This week, the President visited Fort Bliss two years after he marked the end of major combat operations in Iraq and visited with victims of Hurricane Isaac. Meanwhile, the White House released its top secret beer recipe and the new White House app, and "We the People" got its three millionth signature.

Be sure to check out this week's behind-the-scenes video.

What SEOs can learn from online journalists

Posted: 06 Sep 2012 04:36 AM PDT

Journalists have been frantically learning SEO and social media techniques over recent years, so they can stay ahead online. But now some of them are so skilled that SEO teams could learn a few things from them too. From writing clickable headlines, to using Twitter to network, here are all the journo skills that I've learnt by following (no, not stalking!) some of the best in the business…

Monitoring and Targeting

Like most blogs, news sites tend to cover a number of different subjects. For the main newspapers, these tend to be major topics such as politics, finance, property, jobs and so on. However, within those ‘channels’, similar stories often come up again and again – interest rates, house prices, unemployment figures, that kind of thing.

Journalists and editors use analytics programs to check how many readers are visiting each section and which stories are grabbing their interest. That means that they can give more coverage to the stories that really interest their readers, and move other stories further down the hierarchy. This also allows them to maximise click-throughs from their front pages because they know what stories get readers excited.

You can replicate this on your own blog or corporate site. Work out what content works best for pageviews, CTRs and purchases. Then ensure these most successful topic areas are well optimised, often updated and well positioned on your website.

Massively successful news resources like the Mail Online and the Huffington Post only reached where they are by endlessly testing and never being entirely satisfied with their websites' click-through figures. You should do the same.

Using Twitter and Facebook to Research and Network

Anyone who’s used Twitter to any extent knows its power and reach. You can contact almost any other user, anywhere in the world, with a message of just 140 characters (or fewer) this is genuinely revolutionary. For journalists, it’s a whole new way of researching articles, and the #journorequest hashtag has become a first port of call for many when they’re looking for case studies or quotes from members of the public.

Most online news sites now tweet links to their major stories too. A single headline-worthy article can get a significant number of retweets, helping it to reach readers who might otherwise not have seen it. Add to this the Twitter conversations journalists and press representatives hold with each other on a daily basis. For journalists it’s a quick, easy but powerful way to network with other writers and to engage with their readers.

The lessons to be learnt for other webmasters and SEO teams are simple but worth spelling out – ignore Twitter, and your voice is missing from a global conversation. Make sure your best content is being tweeted, use hashtags to help get the message to people who don’t follow you, and aim to widen that audience still further. And don't allow your Twitter feed to become mundane and overly-corporate. Stay fun and stay engaged. You'll learn a lot about your customers and it could even help you generate ideas for blog posts and other content.

Although I hear a lot of negativity from SEOs about Facebook (some of them have already disabled their Facebook accounts), journalists use Facebook to engage with their audience and to reach out to a wider audience beyond the niche they operate within. Mia Aquino, The Huffington Post's social media editor has set up an 'interest list' on Facebook of all their journalists so people could keep up-to-date with what their journalists write. Journalists such as Craig Kanalley, Jahnabi Barooah and Rosa Golijan engage with their Facebook subscribers almost at a personal level on a daily basis, thereby increasing visibility to their posts on user's Facebook feeds.

Engagement and Relevancy

A good news site will pick out the most headline-worthy articles of the day, and give them pride of place on the front page (or main blog/magazine page). Think about this when updating your site – what belongs on your homepage (or main blog page)? And what can be moved deeper within your site?

It’s a rule of thumb that’s worth applying throughout your content – if a page is irrelevant to what you’ve got to offer, it'd be best to retire it, or update it so that it's relevant to your audience and your business. By keeping a tight focus on the topics you cover, you can demonstrate expertise and relevancy throughout your site to search engines, helping them better understand what your website is about and the industry you operate within.

Make sure all your authors and bloggers have verified authorship on Google Plus. This will help Google's algorithm distinguish the quality and relevancy of the content. If the blogger or author already possesses a high reputational score with Google, you will increase your site's visibility and ranking ability for a greater number of keywords.

Opinion and Controversy

Not everyone can court controversy on their website, but blogs are a good place to express opinion and welcome conflicting comments from your readers. Again, take your inspiration from news sites – while many news outlets have a political agenda to push, they typically don’t do so (well, not too obviously…) in their main articles.

Legitimate news providers distinguish between their journalistic reporting and their editorial columns – and on any website, you can create a similar distinction between static content, opinion-based blogs and self-promotional press releases. It helps your reader to understand where you’re coming from, and why some pages might be more opinionated than others – and a little controversy can help to get some commenting going on your blog posts, too.

There is an important distinction to make between news site comments and those on a less formal blog, however. When somebody comments on your personal blog, it’s common practice to reply to them, to keep the conversation going. In contrast, news sites usually rely on interaction between their readers, rather than with the article’s original author – something worth aiming for on your blog, if you can get your readers’ activity levels high enough.

Catering for Fickle Readers

Online readers are impatient – they won't wade through lengthy prose, even if they're happy reading War and Peace in real life. The internet isn’t the place people settle down to enjoy some timeless literature – in fact, they’re more likely to take ‘timeless’ to the other extreme and spend as little time as possible on your page.

Journalists understand this and are trained to use the ‘inverted pyramid’ model in their articles, with the most important information up top for those who don’t read to the end. For SEO it’s a particularly good approach, as the words and phrases you use up top will be given greater significance in choosing your page’s position in the search results.

The headline is a particularly important part of any page – whether it’s a news article or a static web page – as it highlights the main theme of your content. Make sure you’re picking out the key points in your headline, particularly if it doubles as your page’s HTML title and/or URL, as together these can all contribute towards the words and phrases the search engines associate with your page. Like in a news article, sub-headings also help to signpost readers to the sections of the page that include the information they’re looking for.

Remember, print came first, and while SEO has evolved over time much of it is still inspired by the early, print-like days of the internet. Classic page structures like news articles have left a permanent impression on the things search engines and people value.

Always on the Job

Finally, when you step away from your computer, it doesn’t mean your website ceases to exist. A good journalist will often carry around a notepad and jot down ideas for future articles, or make notes if he or she sees anything that might be worth investigating. You should do the same if you come across a timely and relevant issue that might earn you some extra search traffic if you blog about it or mention it on your website.

Many such ideas ultimately get forgotten by website owners, internet marketers and SEO teams, even if they seem unforgettable when you dream them up. By keeping a notepad – or even a note in your phone – handy, you make sure you remember your ideas. And it's worth it. If you manage to build your online brand successfully enough, you might one day be making a few headlines of your own.

Image credit: Yan Arief