joi, 28 februarie 2013

SEO Blog

SEO Blog


Integrating Google Plus Into Your Online Business Strategy

Posted: 28 Feb 2013 11:14 AM PST

Launched in 2011 as Google’s response to social media, for online businesses Google + is anything but the networking graveyard it was initially perceived to be. An accessible platform for sharing corporate content to social and professional networks, Google + has vast SEO benefits, the added advantage of Places/Local linking, and great...
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How Students Can Make Money Through Facebook?

Posted: 28 Feb 2013 11:10 AM PST

Everyone nowadays have their own Facebook account because it can be used to meet new people, see old friends, play games or to simply post what's on your mind. But because Facebook has so much people logged on it all the time, it can be used as a market for...
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Special Features Of Employee Monitoring Software Increases Productivity

Posted: 28 Feb 2013 11:06 AM PST

Advanced online technologies have benefitted many businesses. Although, internet has brought about many positive changes in the way the works are being done, but there are some drawbacks attached to it. Internet has become very important for most workplaces, but some of the employees use it for non work related...
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SEO stands for more profit and more money in business

Posted: 28 Feb 2013 11:01 AM PST

Whether you have an online or offline business, online marketing always is a smart way of making more money and more profit by enhancing sales. Today a large section of potential consumers search over the web before purchasing anything. Therefore you need to have a web presence to reach out...
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SEO Fundamentals | Defining your audience, topics, angle, and style

Posted: 28 Feb 2013 10:58 AM PST

Defining and understanding your target audience is the first step to writing content for them. Attracting just anyone to your website is not so hard, it is attracting the right kind of people and offering the right topics in the right tone in the style that is a challenge. A...
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Social Media Curation Guide

Social Media Curation Guide


Social Media Curation Guide

Posted: 27 Feb 2013 05:21 PM PST

Posted by gfiorelli1

Last year on SEOmoz, I published The Content Curation Guide for SEO, which - even though it is still valid - I thought it needed a fresh addition. Not only does this post update some of the information shared, but it also digs deeper into an aspect of content curation that is actually the most used and, possibly, useful to SEOs and Content Marketers who must deal with more duties than just curation: social media curation.

For that reason, I gave a Mozinar last week about this topic where I explained why it is important to include social content curation in your inbound marketing strategy; how to prepare, organize, execute, and analyze your social curation activities; and what tools to use.

If you missed the opportunity to attend the live broadcast of the Mozinar, you can watch it here.

Joanna Lord does great social content curation on Pinterest! 

Audience Q&A

1. If you have many clients for which you need to curate content, you need to have so many profiles for all the social media accounts etc for their respective industries. Any good tools for managing these and managing mentions and more across all the accounts?

During the webinar, I praised Buffer for their awesome tools. However, its premium version only allows adding up to 12 social profiles and have up to two team members access the accounts. If you are doing social content curation for many clients, it might not be the best tool to use.

In your case, I would possibly use Hootsuite, whose premium plan allows you an unlimited number of admins for social profiles, a much larger number of social networks (Google+ included), and strongly social web platform like Scoop.it, Tumblr, YouTube, and others. 

2. Can you discuss your methods of not repeating content through different forms of social media (i.e. posting the same link on your organization's Facebook and Twitter accounts)?

Ideally, to obtain the best effect from your social content curation, it is always better to craft the message accordingly to the specific nature of the social media you are going to share it. For instance, not only Twitter, Facebook , and/or Google+ have their own specific characteristics that you could miss using at your advantage with a single "standard" message, but they also present very different user behaviors, even in the case the users are the same in those three social networks.

With platforms like Buffer and Hootsuite, you can easily switch from social to social from within the same platform, which will surely help.

3. How do you stay on top of all this content? I have Google RSS feeds, Pocket, Paper.li newspapers, Flipboard, and more continuously feeding in stories on SEO, PPC, social media, etc. - and it just overwhelms me. How do you a) stay sane, and b) decide what and what not to read/create content about?

Good question! Actually, even if I like to experiment and play with as many tools I can, I don't use many. To be honest, I use only these ones:

  1. Zite, Twitter (the selected people/sites I follow and the list I created), Google+, and the posts/comments in the blog I trust the most (i.e. SEOmoz and YouMoz) for discovering new sources
  2. Google Reader as the hub of all the sources I select with time
  3. Buffer, for the sharing process, and Bit.ly, Followerwonk, Google+ Ripples, and Facebook Insights for the analysis of my social curation activity

How do I "stay sane" and decide what and what not to read/create content about? Experience sure helps me, because with the passing of time, you learn how to easily recognize if one piece of content is so outstanding you should share it with your audience. But here few tips, which may help you:

  1. Don't read first, but "skim" the posts in your RSS Feed. If the first paragraph (more than the title) makes you want to read more, then there's a chance that the posts is good and interesting.
  2. Put a lot of weight in your sharing decision of the conclusions of the post. The best posts usually have amazing last paragraphs, which not only summarize the thesis of the post and its takeaways, but also make you literally say "WTF!"

4. What should the frequency of shareing blog posts be?

If by blogs we mean social shares, the frequency depends on the social network you are sharing your updates. The most common rule is to not overwhelm your audience with an excessive amount of shared content. For this reason, I am not particularly a fan of automation in social media, even if acclaimed people like Dan Zarrella are praising it. Automation, which is not the same as scheduling, takes away the human touch of a real and thoughtful human social curation, which - with the quality of the content shared - is what makes the difference.

That said, especially if your audience is spread all over the world, it is more than probable that you will need to share the same content at least twice in order to be reach the most of them when they are socially active. Luckily, social networks like Facebook and Google+ ( thanks to their Lists and Circles) offer you to make invisible these "reshares" to that part of your audience, who saw it previously.

5. How do you measure the success of content curation?

I measure it considering the two objectives I always want to reach with my content curation activities:

  1. The increment of the number of followers/fans my social profiles
  2. The number of the authors of the content I curated who thanks me and, possibly, follow me

Why social content curation

We see it everyday in the SERPs, we see it as being in the background of every Google update of late (Panda, Penguin, EMD), and we see it in people's buying behavior: trusted brands are the entities of excellence for Google.

This positive attitude of Google toward brands is logical. In fact, people tend to trust more a recognized brand rather than some unknown one.
This is even truer online because brands tend to be considered as a reassuring “lighthouse” within the Internet, which is mostly a confused ocean of information.

Brands like Amazon, REI, CocaCola, Airbnb, and Zappos have a trust advantage that sites as onlinewarehouse.com, outdoors.com, sodabeverages.com, cheaphotels.com, and allkindofshoes.com (any reference to existing sites is purely casual) may have.

The same can be said regarding to people. We naturally tend to consider someone as the trusted reference in a specific niche as we get to know them. For instance, our own Rand Fishkin is a trusted reference in the SEO niche.

Thoughful Leaders

Just few examples of thought leaders in different areas, present and past.

As well defined by Forbes: "A thought leader is an individual or firm that prospects, clients, referral sources, intermediaries and even competitors recognize as one of the foremost authorities in selected areas of specialization, resulting in its being the go-to individual or organization for said expertise."

More over: A thought leader is an individual or firm that significantly profits from being recognized as such.

Thoughtful leadership is the real intangible gold that makes a Brand or a Person a leader in its niche. But none is born a leader.

Throughout the past years, we have understood how inbound marketing (meant as the synergy of SEO, content, and social media marketing) is the correct strategy to use in order to obtain this so dreamt leadership. Content curation, as a facet of content marketing, can be of help in making that objective true.

How to to properly conduct a strategy of social content curation

First of all, you must make sure you're targeting the correct audience. This section of Followerwonk is a huge help in making that goal possible, and the methodology explained by Peter Bray in this post.

However, while that methodology is useful to understand your potential audience, you also need to understand a second kind of audience: the people who are able to influence the thought leaders in your niche, because nothing is truer – especially for brands in its beginnings – than that it is easier to influence an influencer via the ones who are already influencing them (sorry for the tongue twister).

Followerwonk

Once you have determined your audience, you should map it and segment it. After these steps are complete, you can start doing Social Content Curation for real.

How can I find trusted sources of information to curate?

Resource directories and news aggregators

You can use directories like Alltop, where you can find extremely well curated list of blogs for almost any kind of topic.

You can also use curated aggregation sites like Inbound.org or Hacker News in the Internet marketing and technology fields. Sites like those exist in mostly every niche; for instance, www.mortgagenewsdaily.com is news aggregator about mortgage.

Don't forget about how often news aggregation is conducted via newsletters, especially when it comes to very small and specific niches. Fortunately, you can rely with newsletters aggregators as Smartbrief to dig into these hidden treasures.

Finally, if you are working for an enterprise level company, you can find market content curation enterprise solutions such as Factiva by Dowjones.

Social network personalized suggestions, lists, and groups

Quality resource directories, curated news aggregation sites, newsletters aggregators, and enterprise solutions are perfect for collecting sources, but as time passes and you become more socially active, you should start paying more attention to other sources for discovering new content to curate. A few examples include?

  • Twitter Stories
  • Linkedin Today
  • Slideshare’s recommendations
  • Suggested Communities and Google+ suggestions in its Explore section
  • YouTube suggestions
  • And so on…

As you can see, all kinds of information is based on personalization factors. For this same reason, it is safer not to mix the use of what you are doing on your personal social profiles, or you can literally screw up the quality of the suggestions.

Results of personalization on YouTube

Never forget to log out when letting your kids watching videos on YouTube, or...

A site like Topsy, thanks to its very good internal search feature, is another great source for discovering new content to share with your audience, especially when you must to care also the "freshness" factor of your curation.

Lists, like the ones created by the users on Twitter and Facebook, Groups (FB), and Communities (G+) are usually overlooked. However, they are amazing sources of new and surprisingly good content. They are also an easy way to extend your own audience thanks to the conversations you can create there, and a really easy way of discovering the ones I previously defined as the influencers’ influencers.

The old school (still good) methodology: blogs commenter’s analysis

Personally, this is still the methodology I prefer the most.

It is not scalable and presents many defects in terms of time spent conducting a curation research, but – possibly – it is the best way not only to discover new amazing sources, but also for creating strong relationships with those same sources.

When I was more of a new kid on the block in this industry than I am now, I follwed this tactic. I was able to discover sites like SEOgadget, Distilled, and SEERInteractive, and I also created great relationships with people like Richard Baxter, Dr Pete, John Doherty, Mike King, and many others, all thanks being very active on the SEOmoz community.

How can I organize the sources I have collected?

"It's not information overload. It's filter failure," Clay Shirky once said. And filter failure happens if you are not able to organize the sources you have collected for performing you social content curation activity.

What I am going to present is my methodology, which I do not pretend is the best one. What I know is that it gives me positive results, and therefore it may be of help to you, too.

The curator’s best friends

Google Reader and Buffer are my best allies when it comes to content curation. I use the Google Reader as the hub of all the sources I have discovered, and Buffer is the tool I prefer for socially sharing my curated content.

When curating content, it is essential to perfectly categorize the main subject of your curation interest in subtopic. For instance, I subcategorize SEO into its different facets:

  • Technical SEO
  • Local search
  • Link building
  • International SEO
  • Schema, Authorship, and G+
  • Etc., etc.

More importantly, you must maintain the consistency of this categorization in every platform you are saving sources; for your Pocket account, Diigo, or your own browser favorites, and not just in Google Reader.

This is how I categorize the SEO and social media topics in Subtopics

How do I curate things? Do you have an example?

The style and tone to use when doing social content curation varies depending on the social networks you are using for these simple reasons:

  • Every social platform offers you different “formal” opportunities for sharing content. The character limitation of Twitter is the easiest difference you can list, but others are present.
  • The users’ behavior varies a lot from a social platform to another. On Twitter, they tend to prize timely news shares; on Facebook, photos and videos; and on Google+, long forms works usually better than short ones.

What voice to use is something that you learn with the experience and the analysis of the success (or failure) of the curated content you have shared. For that reason, it is important to use shorteners like bit.ly, or to use proprietary tools like Google+ Ripples and Facebook Insights, which allow you to track the life of your shares.

You can find inspiration from people who master the art of curation. Here is a short list of “non-official curators” people and brands, who are indeed doing great social content curation:

What is the best side effect of content curation?

Relationship Marketing Venn

As I have said since the beginning, social content curation should be meant as a content marketing tactic to help you and your brand become a trusted source of information, and eventually a thoughtful leader, in your niche.

Social content curation can also be a great way to break the ice and start creating bonds, relations, and serendipity with other people, that can then result in future occasions for link building, social shares of your own original content, or even collaborations.

In this sense, social content curation is a great “tool” for what it is normally defined as relationship or influencers marketing, as it shares the same purpose: creating trust.


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The Second February Mozscape Index is Live!

Posted: 27 Feb 2013 05:06 AM PST

Posted by carinoverturf

We're continuing the trend of two index releases each month by bringing you the latest Mozscape index release today - only 15 days after our last release on February 12th! The latest Mozsacpe index took about 11 days to process, with a fairly significant portion crawled the beginning of February. The crawl data spans about 38 days, so the oldest crawl data will date back to the beginning of January. You can access refreshed data across all of our applications - Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

Our Big Data processing team (Martin York, Douglas Vojir, and Stephen Wood) have been working on some really exciting improvements to our processing code base reducing the length of time processing takes, as well as beginning development on a highly anticipated new Mozscape index feature: 

  • The Mozscape index is created in one continuous batch processing pipeline. A massive amount of crawl data is initially downloaded which is first sorted and organized, then the computations and magic are applied. Every so often, files get uploaded in a checkpoint step; just in case something catastrophic happens to the index, we'll be able to roll back to a fairly recent step.

    Recently the Big Data processing team dug through this checkpointing code to see where they could optimize - and they really optimized! The time needed to checkpoint files varies throughout the pipeline, but the longest checkpointing step used to take about 60 hours to complete… With the optimization from Doug and Martin, this step now takes on average 2.18 hours! Holy time savings!!
     
  • The first few steps in processing are dedicated to organizing how the work is going to be distributed across the entire Mozscape processing cluster. These files are broken out into what are called shards and then assigned across the entire fleet of machines. Sometimes these shards aren't always completely full; this means one machine will be all done with work before another machine. Martin revisited this code as well to see what type of optimization could be applied. With the help of our master data scientist, Matt Peters, Martin was able to improve the distribution of work, saving around 25% of time spent processing! 
     
  • One feature we hear requested fairly often is including HTTPS crawl data in the Mozscape index. Good news - development on this feature has begun, and we hope to have HTTPS data included in the Mozscape index this summer! 

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

  • 82,275,594,589 (82 billion) URLs
  • 9,097,532,641 (9.1 billion) Subdomains
  • 148,991,416 (149 million) Root Domains
  • 829,267,740,331 (829 billion) Links
  • Followed vs. Nofollowed
    • 2.25% of all links found were nofollowed
    • 56.08% of nofollowed links are internal
    • 43.92% are external
  • Rel Canonical - 15.43% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
  • The average page has 73 links on it
    • 62.93 internal links on average
    • 10.33 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google's US search results:

  • Page Authority - 0.35
  • Domain Authority - 0.19
  • MozRank - 0.24
  • Linking Root Domains - 0.31
  • Total Links - 0.25
  • External Links - 0.29

Crawl histogram for the February 27th Mozscape index

As you can see from the metrics above, there continues to be an increase of subdomains as we have discovered a small number of root domains that have a substantial number of subdomains associated with them. 

We always love to hear your thoughts! And remember, if you're ever curious about when Mozscape next updates, you can check the calendar here. We also maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.


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Honoring Rosa Parks

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, February 28, 2013
 

Honoring Rosa Parks

One hundred years after she was born and 58 years after she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama city bus, Rosa Parks has a permanent place in the halls of Congress.

President Obama was one of the leaders on hand for the unveiling of the statue yesterday: "Rosa Parks held no elected office," he said. "She possessed no fortune; lived her life far from the formal seats of power. And yet today, she takes her rightful place among those who’ve shaped this nation’s course."

Check out more from this historic event.

President Barack Obama touches the Rosa Parks statue after the unveiling during a ceremony in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Feb. 27, 2013. Helping with the unveiling, were, from left: Sheila Keys, niece of Rosa Parks; Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.; House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio; House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Assistant Democratic Leader Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.; and Elaine Eason Keys. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

President Barack Obama touches the Rosa Parks statue after the unveiling during a ceremony in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Feb. 27, 2013. Helping with the unveiling, were, from left: Sheila Keys, niece of Rosa Parks; Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.; House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio; House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Assistant Democratic Leader Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.; and Elaine Eason Keys. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

President Obama Calls for a Responsible Approach to Deficit Reduction
President Obama strongly believes we need to replace the arbitrary cuts known as the sequester with balanced deficit reduction, and on Monday he was at a shipyard in Newport News, VA to talk about what failing to do so will mean for middle class families.

Catching Up with the Curator: Watch Meeting--Dec. 31st 1862--Waiting for the Hour
To mark African American History Month, as well as the 150th anniversary of the year the Emancipation Proclamation, we talked with White House Curator Bill Allman about a painting called Watch Meeting--Dec. 31st 1862--Waiting for the Hour that hangs near the Oval Office in the West Wing.

Let's Move Tour Day 1: Cafeteria Cook-off
First Lady Michelle Obama was joined by Rachael Ray and 400 Mississippi elementary school kids to celebrate the changes that state has made that are helping kids get healthy.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Standard Time (EST).

11:15 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

12:30 PM: The President hosts the swearing-in ceremony for Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew; The Vice President administers the oath of office

12:30 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

12:40 PM: The President and the Vice President meet for lunch

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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Seth's Blog : You can't change everything or everyone, but you can change the people who matter

 

You can't change everything or everyone, but you can change the people who matter

Marketing is about change--changing people's actions, perceptions or the conversation. Successful change is almost always specific, not general. You don't have a chance to make mass change, but you can make focused change.

The challenge of mass media was how to run ads that would be seen by just about everyone and have those ads pay off. That problem is gone, because you can no longer run an ad that reaches everyone. What a blessing. Now, instead of yelling at the masses, the marketer has no choice but to choose her audience. Perhaps not even with an ad, but with a letter, or a website or with a product that speaks for itself. And yet, our temptation is to put on a show for everyone, to dream of bestseller lists and the big PR win.

So the first, most important question is, "who do we want to change?"

If you can't answer this specifically, do not proceed to the rest. By who, I mean, "give me a name." Or, if you can't give me a name, then a persona, a tribe, a spot in the hierarchy, a set of people who share particular worldviews. People outside this group should think you're crazy, or at the very least, ignore you.

Then, be really clear about:

What does he already believe?

What is he afraid of?

What does he think he wants?

What does he actually want?

What stories have resonated with him in the past?

Who does he follow and emulate and look up to?

What is his relationship with money?

What channel has his permission? Where do messages that resonate with him come from? Who does he trust and who does he pay attention to?

What is the source of his urgency—why will he change now rather than later?

After he has changed, what will he tell his friends?

Now that you know these things, go make a product and a service and a story that works. No fair changing the answers to the questions to match the thing you've already made (you can change the desired audience, but you can't change the truth of what they want and believe).


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