Biting the Bullet of Technical Debt

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Biting the Bullet of Technical Debt Posted: 27 Nov 2012 06:44 PM PST Posted by MozCTO Rand has talked about the technical debt  that is impacting our ability to grow and deliver new products. We knew we’d have to bite that bullet at some point, but sometimes it’s not a clean bite…you’ve got to gnaw away at it until you finally break through. To that end, we created an 18-month roadmap to pay back that technical debt, and have worked out the stepping stones needed for each team to chip away at that proverbial bullet. It’s going to take a lot of hard work and some of our funding to help get us there, with the ultimate goals of giving you, our customers, greater value, enabling further growth, and getting to 99.9% uptime. We’ll update you as we take each step along the way. But for now, take a look at the roadmap as we see it.   Get to 99.9% Uptime The first step on the road to success is upgrading system operations. We’re focusing our efforts here on hardening our network infrastructure and increasing system redundancy and monitoring, with the following key goals: Better and redundant equipment: We’re implementing the network at our own co-location facility in a way that allows us to grow and is not as vulnerable to equipment failures. We are also moving off hosted servers, load balancers, and switches in favor of our own equipment. The new equipment is much higher quality, and will be duplicated here in Seattle and at our colocation site in Herndon, Virginia. Rigorous monitoring: I love that we have enthusiastic customers willing to tweet when one of our systems is down, but that is not the normal way to monitor systems! Our system administrators are implementing monitoring not only on our servers, but also on the jobs, queues, and a plethora of other things that keep our service running. Increased monitoring will help us catch problems before the servers go down, and hopefully head off problems like the latest rankings outage before they affect our customers. The Tech Ops Team   Mark Sr. Director David Principal Engr Stephen Sys Admin Jacob Sys Admin  Nicholas Tech Writer       Fay Database architect Dave K Office Admin New System/ Network Engineer New DBA     The Tech Ops Stepping Stones Deliver Our Largest, Freshest, Most Reliable Index In parallel to this systems work, we are also working on our applications reliability and scalability.  The Big Data team’s work includes: More reliable data processing: We’re moving our processing out of the cloud and onto our own hardware. Fix things right: We now have the luxury of the time and a little cash in the bank to do things right. We’re not going to cobble together a hack that will get us over the hump today, but will come back to bite us tomorrow. Improve the index: Our goal is to triple our index size and release more frequently, getting back to our May 2012 index size, while also increasing freshness…with the ultimate goal of creating an index every 7-10 working days. The Big Data Team Carin Senior Manager Phil Principal Engineer Brandon Principal Engineer Martin Principal Engineer Doug Senior Engineer Dan Engineer   Maura Senior Engineer Sarfraz TPM Kenny Web Dev Brad K Senior Engineer David B. Engineer     The Big Data Stepping Stones Make Everything Bullet-proof The Production Engineering Team (PE) is knee-deep in the bowels of the production systems: reviewing code, suggesting where new or more hardware could be used, and making things more maintainable and bullet-proof in general. PE has already implemented code changes to our core systems over the last few weeks to address some of the current sticking points. Some of the things this team is working on: New servers: We’re in the process of standing up over 200 new servers. Reducing complexity: We’re reducing the types of databases and queuing systems we run on. We’re picking systems that either we can support or that have dependable support to help us reach our goal of 99.9% uptime. Between data storage/retrieval and queuing, we have 7 (that I know of) different types of systems.  We aim to get down to one queuing system and two or three different database types. For more information on these recent fixes, check out the blog post Where are My Rankings? The Production Engineering Team  Shawn Senior Manager Thomas Senior Engineer David W.  Engineer Evan  Engineer Ben Engineer   Ethel SDET   Shelly TPM New Ruby Engineer New Ruby Engineer   The Production Engineering Stepping Stones Net New Development The Net New Development Team is working on implementing on new product features. Shhhhh! The Net New Development Team Walt Sr. Software Manager Chris TPM Andrew SDET   Myron Senior Engineer Marty Engineer Patrick Engineer Brandon Engineer Ben K. Engineer Wes Principal Engineer John Senior Engineer AK Engineer Jason Engineer Koos Engineer New Net Stepping Stones Rock the Marketing Website Inbound Engineering is the team focused on the Marketing website. The team goals are: Create new services: Create the Common Email service, the new Moz Authorization service, and the front end for Q&A. Upgrade billing: Upgrade our billing infrastructure for more reliable payment processing. Upgrade the website: Build additional functionality into the marketing website. Inbound Engineering Team Casey Senior Web Manager Dudley Senior Director Devin PHP Engineer New PHP Engineer New PHP Engineer New PHP Engineer Inbound Stepping Stones Make Tweets Sing The Followerwonk team is working on advancing the customer experience and digging deeper into Twitter and what makes Tweets sing.  We’re going to use split-testing to specific goals to measure customer experience, which will help us decide on designs and features that our customers like the best. Followerwonk Team Peter Followerwonk Founder Galen Software Engineer Marc Software Engineer Amy TPM Followerwonk Stepping Stones Test and Document In lockstep with these teams, our test and doc folks are adding testing and documentation that will improve quality and communication across the company. These teams are still small, but are already having a big impact. We have already seen an improvement in our last index release, where testing contributed to it going out with no issues. Test and Docs Team Lisa Technical Writer Nicholas Technical Writer Ethel SDET Andrew SDET Docs Roadmap Test Roadmap Sharing Our Success As we take each step along our technical roadmap we will share our accomplishments, turning these planned stepping stones green over the next 18 months. As we gnaw away at our technical debt, we hope you’ll start seeing benefits from the changes along the way. Stay tuned! 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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25 Online Marketing Trends for 2013

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25 Online Marketing Trends for 2013 Posted: 27 Nov 2012 04:30 AM PST Every year for the past 4 years the SEOptimise blog has predicted trends within the online marketing industry.  In keeping with this tradition, I've listed 25 trends that I think we’ll see becoming more and more mainstream in 2013. Considering the rate of change within the online marketing space, most of these listed may not even be new. So, without further ado, here’s my list of online marketing trends for 2013: The notion that 'content is king' will slowly diminish, being replaced with "context is king". I know this sounds blasphemous right now, but let me elaborate.  Your website could have the most outstanding piece of content written about pizzas; but someone who's looking to order pizza at 1 am in the morning wouldn't be interested in your awesome content. Therefore, brands and publishers will need to focus their efforts on gaining a greater understanding of 'context' to guide them with their content creation. In order to provide context to content, semantic mark-up will become increasingly important. In the example above, search engines can look up all the Pizzerias around that particular user and display which ones are open at 1am in the morning based on their 'opening times' and figure out distance based on their address. Imagine if Google knew your dietary requirements and only displayed search results that met them. Semantic mark-up makes it easier for Google to make these judgements. Although most SEOs wouldn't have paid much attention to structured mark-up in the past, in 2013 we will see more and more SEOs learning and executing semantic markup as part of the optimisation process. Quality of content suffers as channel tacticians succumb to pressures of audience content demands and editorial calendars. The ones who will succeed are those that follow the following (or similar) customer focused content creation model: Purchase decision making journey Problem recognition Solution comparison Supplier comparison Validation Persona 1 Content? Content? Content? Content? Persona 2 Content? Content? Content? Content? Persona 3 Content? Content? Content? Content? Persona 4 Content? Content? Content? Content? Source: The digital Evolution in B2B marketing (2012), The Corporate Executive Board Company. Find the pdf here. The above model outlines a framework for content creation focused on the customers' information needs. The question essentially is, what information needs will you satisfy your diverse customers at varying stages of the buying cycle? Perception of visual content (video, image, custom illustrations, illustrative animation, and infographics) will change among marketers from "it's a 'nice-to-have' marketing collateral", to a key strategy in acquiring and increasing customer engagement and influence within target audiences. Creative teams will expand the core skill set by including web developers, digital experts, and freelance specialists based on project needs. Conversely, more and more SEO agencies will begin to forge strategic partnerships with PR and creative agencies in order to increase impact on client service delivery. Mobile specific marketing strategies will be a core customer acquisition channel, especially for local and small businesses. With the increase in devices that content is consumed, websites designed in 2013 will largely incorporate 'responsive web design'. Google's intentions of becoming an 'answer engine' will become even more obvious in 2013. Google's ability to answer complex questions gets better. More and more businesses will begin taking their Google plus strategies much more seriously. This will help unify all their Google specific campaigns. Continuing from the last point, Google plus will be looked at as an important digital fingerprint for not only businesses but for regular users. With smartphones increasingly becoming our trusted companion at all times, faith in email marketing as an acquisition channel will increase. With the increasing complexity and maturity of the SEO industry, and due to Google's algorithm updates such as Panda, top-heavy, and Penguin, the cost of SEO will continue to increase. Users will continue to have contradicting needs. On the one hand, they want personalised and customised service and product offerings, but on the other, will be increasingly uncomfortable over the amount of personal data being mined. Google will continue to mine more and more data about people and their relationships via Google plus and Gmail. Marketers will create assets from a multi-screen perspective. Based on how consumers engage with different devices; content creators will need to start focusing on channel-specific marketing strategies and content. More and more companies begin to dedicate a greater proportion of their marketing budgets towards going beyond online contact-level web analytics to incorporating important off-site social behaviours. Marketers will begin to make a greater effort to place estimates of digital impact in proper proportion and context of broader marketing strategy and the market environment. Marketing teams, typically in slower moving industries, will graduate from digital experimentation (via pilot tests) into actually defining their digital marketing strategy. Marketing teams that have gone further than that will look to approach the more sophisticated tasks of aligning and integrating activities across organizational siloes to deliver a more cumulative impact on their audience. Brands will continue to build communities on social media and blog platforms. We will begin to hear the role 'community manager' or 'community relationship manager' in the UK more and more. We all know that increased digital marketing efforts demand continuous and collective management, something few companies are designed to support at this point in time. The value destroyed by this misfit approach—although hard to quantify—is potentially very large. Several companies will be looking to take steps to restructure internal teams as a result. Companies looking to make structural changes will begin to look for individuals who can take ownership in executing processes and bringing the following disparate functions together: paid search, online community, corporate website, advertising, social media and blogging, and SEO. Television advertising is far from dead. On the contrary, television ads will begin to incorporate more and more social integration. Television advertising will also incorporate "second screen experiences", where a TV programme’s tablet app, mobile app, and even discussions will be promoted and encouraged on social media platforms. Content creators will need to create assets that can live across multiple screens seamlessly. There will be an increased push for social marketing among businesses. Companies will look to align their brands with social causes. And finally, Facebook will finally figure out their eco-system. Businesses will have to use Facebook advertising to build a relevant audience and use Facebook advertising to reach their audience.  Have I missed anything? What do you think will be among next year’s online marketing trends? I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below. Image credit: futureshape © SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 25 Online Marketing Trends for 2013 Related posts: Tracking Your QR Codes to Bring Offline Marketing Online 30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change What SEOs can learn from online journalists

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