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Pins worth a thousand words

Here at Pinterest, we're inspired by amazing imagery every day, whether it's a cool logo design or a pixel-perfect panorama. This week we're celebrating photography for the 125th anniversary of Kodak. It was way back in 1888 when they registered their trademark, introduced their first camera, and with it, the "Kodak moment."

JewelMint

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Sief H onto style etc

Easy Maple Pecan Cinnamon Rolls

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Arne Jacobsen Station and Roman watches at Dezeen Watch Store

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Jamielyn {iheartnaptime.net} onto pins i love :)

skull sweater

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Floral and Frill Maxi Skirt

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Cindy Wysocki onto Love, love, love

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Weighting the Clusters of Ranking Factors in Google's Algorithm - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 05 Sep 2013 04:07 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

One thing we collect for our semiannual ranking factors survey is the opinions of a group of SEO experts (128 of them this year!) about the relative weights of the categories of ranking factors. In other words, how important each of those categories is for SEO relative to the others.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains some key takeaways from the results of that particular survey question. In addition, the pie chart below shows what the categories are and just where each of them ended up.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard and a fancy version of the chart from this week's video!

_{larger version}

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm going to talk a little bit about the ranking factors survey that we did this year and specifically some of the results from that.

One of my favorite questions that we ask in our ranking factors survey, which happens every two years and goes out to a number of SEO experts. This year, 128 SEO experts responded, sort of folks who were hand chosen by us as being very, very knowledgeable in the field. We asked them, based on these sort of thematic clusters of ranking elements, things like domain level link authority versus page level keyword agnostic features, weight them for us. You know, give a percentage that you would assign if you were giving an overall assessment of the importance of this factor in Google's ranking algorithm.

So this is opinion data. This is not fact. This is not actually what Google's using. This is merely the aggregated collective opinions of a lot of smart people who study this field pretty well. This week what I want to do is run through what these elements are, the scores that people gave them, and then some takeaways, and I even have an exercise for you all at home or at the office as the case may be.

So interestingly, the largest portion that was given credit by the SEOs who answered this question was domain-level link authority. This is sort of the classic thing we think of in the Moz scoring system as domain authority, DA. They said 20.94%, which is fairly substantive. It was the largest one.

Just underneath that, page-level link features, meaning external links, how many, how high-quality, where are they coming from, those kinds of things for ranking a specific page.

Then they went to page-level keyword and content features. This isn't just raw keyword usage, keyword in the title tag, how many times you repeat on the page; this is also content features like if they think Google is using topic modeling algorithms or semantic analysis models, those types of things. That would also fit into here. That was given about 15%, 14.94%.

At 9.8%, then they all kind of get pretty small. Everything between here and here is between 5% and 10%. A bunch of features in there, like page-level keyword agnostic features. So this might be like how much content is in there, to what degree Google might be analyzing the quality of the content, are there images on the page, stuff like this. "How fast does the page load" could go in there.

Domain level brand features. Does this domain or the brand name associated with the website get mentioned a lot on the Internet? Does the domain itself get, for example, mentioned around the Web, lots of people writing about it and saying, "Moz.com, blah, blah, blah."

User usage and traffic or query data. This one's particularly fascinating, got an 8.06%, which is smaller but still sizeable. The interesting thing about this is I think this is something that's been on the rise. In years past, it had always been under 5%. So it's growing. This is things like: Are there lots of people visiting your website? Are people searching for your domain name, for your pages, for your brand name? How are people using the site? Do you have a high bounce rate or a lot of engagement on the site? All that kind of stuff.

Social metrics, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc., domain-level keyword usage, meaning things like if I'm trying to rank for blue shoes, do I have blue shoes in the domain name, like blueshoes.com or blue-shoes.com. This is one that's been declining.

Then domain-level keyword agnostic features. This would be things like:
What's the length of the domain name registration, or how long is the domain name? What's the domain name extension? Other features like that, that aren't related to the keywords, but are related to the domain.

So, from this picture I think there's really some interesting takeaways, and I wanted to walk through a few of those that I've seen. Hopefully, it's actually helpful to understand the thematic clusters themselves.

Number one: What we're seeing year after year after year is complexity increasing. This picture has never gotten simpler any two years in a row that we've done this study. It's never that one factor, you know, used to be smaller and now it's kind of dominant and it's just one thing. Years ago, I bet if we were to run this survey in 2001, it'd be like page rank, Pac-Man, everything else, little tiny chunk of Pac-Man's mouth.

Number two: Links are still a big deal. Look here, right? I mean what we're essentially seeing in this portion here is domain-level link authority and page-level link features, all of them. You could sort of think of this as maybe page authority being a proxy for this and domain authority being a proxy for this. That's still a good 40% of how SEOs are perceiving Google's algorithm. So links being a big important portion, but not the overwhelming portion.

It has almost always been the case in years past that the link features, when combined, were 50%. So we're seeing that they're a big deal both in the page and domain level, just not as big or as overwhelming as they used to be, and I think this is reflected in people's attitudes towards link acquisition, which is, "Hey, that's still a really important practice. That's still something I'm looking forward to and trying to accomplish."

Number three: Brand-related and brand-driven metrics are on the rise. Take a look. Domain level brand features and user usage or traffic query data, this is comprising a percentage that actually in sum exceeds page-level keyword content and features. This is really kind of the branding world happening right here. So if you're not building a brand on the Web, that could be seriously hurting your SEO, maybe to the same degree that not doing on-page optimization is. Actually, that would be a conclusion that I personally would agree with as well.

Number four: Social is still perceived to have a minor impact despite some metrics to the contrary. So, social you can see up here at 7.24%, which is reasonably small. It's the third-smallest factor that was on there. And yet, when we look at how do social metrics correlate with things that rank highly versus things that rank poorly, we're seeing very high numbers, numbers that in many cases exceed or equal the link metrics that we look at. So here at Moz we kind of look at those and we go, "Well, obviously correlation does not imply causation." It could be the case that there are other things Google's measuring that just happen to perform well and happen to correlate quite nicely with social metrics, like +1s and shares and tweets and those kinds of things.

But certainly it's surprising to us to see such a high correlation and such a low perception. My guess is, if I had to take a guess, what I'd say is that SEOs have a very hard time connecting these directly. Essentially, you go and you see a page that's ranking number nine, and you think, "Hey, let me try to get a bunch of tweets and shares and +1s, and I'm going to acquire those in some fashion. Still ranking number nine. I don't think social does all that much." Versus, you go out and get links, and you can see the page kind of rising in the search results. You get good links from good places, from authoritative sites and many of them. Boom, boom, boom, boom. "I look like I'm rising; links are it."

I think what might be being missed there is that the content of the page, the quality of the page and the quality of the domain and the brand and the amplification that it can achieve from social is an integral part. I don't know exactly how Google's measuring that, and I'm not going to speculate on what they are or aren't doing. The only thing they've told us specifically is that we are not exclusively using just +1s precisely to increase rankings unless it's personalized results, in which case maybe we are. To me, that kind of hyper specificity says there's a bigger secret story hiding behind the more complex things that they are not saying they aren't doing.

Number five, the last one: Keyword-based domain names, which I know have been kind of a darling of the SEO world (or historically a darling of the SEO world) and particularly of the affiliate marketing worlds for a long time, continue to shrink. You can see that in the correlation data. You can see it in the performance data. You can see it in the MozCast data set, which monitors sort of what appears in Google and doesn't.

Our experience reinforces that. So remember Moz switched from the domain name SEOmoz, which had the keyword SEO right in there, to the Moz domain name not very long ago, and we did see kind of a rankings dive for a little while. Now almost all of those numbers are right back up where they were. So I think that's (a) a successful domain shift, and I give huge credit to folks like Ruth Burr and Cyrus Shepard who worked so hard and so long on making that happen, Casey Henry too. But I think there's also a story to be told there that having SEO in the domain name might not have been the source of as many rankings for SEO-related terms as we may have perceived it to be. I think that's fascinating as well.

My recommendation, my suggestion to all of you, if you get the chance, try this. Go grab your SEO team or your SEO colleagues, buddies, friends in the field. Sit down in a room with a whiteboard or with some pen and paper. Don't take a laptop in. Don't use your phones. List out these features and go do this yourself. Go try making these percentages for what you think the algorithm actually looks like, what your team thinks the algorithm looks like, and then compare. What is it that's the difference between kind of the aggregate of these numbers and the perception that you have personally or you have as a team?

I think that can be a wonderful exercise. It can really open up a great dialogue about why these things are happening. I think it's some fun homework if you get a chance over the next week.

Until then, see you next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power Speaks on Syria

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U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power Speaks on Syria

This week, the President laid out the case for a targeted military action against Syrian regime targets as a result of the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons that killed over one thousand people--including hundreds of children.

This afternoon at 2 p.m. ET, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power will discuss the President's decision on Syria at the Center for American Progress.

Click here to watch Ambassador Power's speech.

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Top 5 low hanging fruits

Posted: 04 Sep 2013 07:16 AM PDT

Creating and implementing a full SEO strategy can be a lengthy process. It often starts out with a detailed website health check and background research, which (when done properly) can take up a lot of time. This can seem counter-productive, as it delays carrying out changes and fixes that can actually start making a difference to your overall site performance.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way, as there are often a number of 'low-hanging fruits' that can potentially help your website to benefit from some quick wins with minimal effort.

We have put a list together of the top 5 low-hanging fruits – hopefully there's something in there for everyone. Be sure to let us know of any easy wins that you think deserve to be in the list!

To begin with, for anyone who's new to SEO, the very first thing you should do is to make sure that you have set up a Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools account and use them! These will provide you with valuable data, recommendations, and help you to identify issues with your website.

1. Always choose your preferred domain

This low-hanging fruit could really boost your link juice! The outside world may be linking to your site using both www. and non www. versions of your URLs, but in the eyes of the search engines, these are effectively different pages, so the value from these links could be diluted

I’m assuming that you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, but if you don't then this is in fact the number 1 low-hanging fruit! For details on how to get started and what you can get out of it, we have a great post on how to set up a webmaster tools account as well as a wealth of Webmaster Tools resources to get you started.

www. vs non-www.

First, decide how you would prefer your domain to appear in the search results (for example, http://www.example.com or http:// example.com). Then open your Webmaster Tools account, click on the 'Settings' gear icon on the right-hand side, then select 'Site Settings'. Now, in the 'Preferred domain' section, choose how you want your URL to be displayed.

This will force all inbound links to redirect to your preferred domain, allowing all of your link juice to flow to the right page.

It is also recommended that you use a 301 redirect to forward any traffic heading to your non-preferred domain to the correct version, thus ensuring that your visitors (and search engines) will only ever see your preferred domain.

2. Clear crawl errors in Google Webmaster tools

Google is less likely to rank a website highly if a large number of the pages that appear in its results simply direct visitors to error pages. These error pages also leak value, as they are usually caused by URLs that have not been redirected properly. As such, any value that they may have been built up in the past – through content and links – is lost, rather than redirected to an equivalent, or similar page on the website.

To find out if your website has any errors, open your Webmaster Tools account, then select 'Crawl', then 'Crawl Errors'. Use the drop-down on the right to view up to 500 errors at a time, and then navigate through the pages if there are more.

There may be several different types of errors, including 'Server errors' and 'Soft 404s', in which case you will need to click the relevant boxes above the graph in order to see them.

Fixing the crawl errors

Fixing these errors can be as simple as setting up 301 redirects to point the old broken URLs to the new pages on your website. The list can be downloaded as a CSV (handy if there are lots of them), by clicking the download button at the top of the list.

Once fixed, you can remove the errors from the list, either by clicking on each link and selecting 'Mark as fixed'; or by selecting several at a time, by ticking one or more boxes beside the errors (or all by ticking the box at the top), then clicking the red 'MARK AS FIXED' button.

3. A little effort can go a long way

This one requires a bit of knowledge in Google Analytics, so once again, if you don't have an account set up then get one, as this is another place to get some extremely useful stats, figures and information about the performance of your website.

You may be just missing out on some highly-searched terms, with your website appearing on page 2 of Google without you even being aware of it, due to a very small trickle of traffic coming in from them.

However, with a bit of research you can quickly uncover some of these missed opportunities. By generating a list of these keywords, you can quickly start to look at giving them a little push, by optimising the landing pages making them more relevant.

In Analytics, open your website and navigate to Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries. Now click the 'advanced' link (next to the search box) and add the following filters:
Include Average Position Greater than 10
Include Average Position Less than 19

You may only be interested in non-brand keywords, in which case you can add another filter to exclude queries containing your brand name.

This will retrieve all keywords that your website appears against on page 2 of Google (between position 11 and 20).

Now filter the results by impressions to get an idea of how popular each of these keywords are, and put together a list that you think you can benefit the most from. You should also check the positions in Google (make sure your search results are not personalised) along with the landing pages.

Now you know which keywords to optimise around and the pages that Google associates them to on your site, you can get to work!

4. Link reclamation

Throughout the life of a website, things change, from the look and feel, to page URLs or even the domain name itself. Link reclamation is the process of reclaiming links that were added to third party websites in the past, that now link to dead pages on your website, due to URLs not being redirected to their new locations. By identifying these broken links, you can set up redirects from the old pages to the new, and therefore pass on the value from the linking source that would otherwise have been lost.

For a step-by-step guide on how to salvage valuable link juice, check out our detailed post on link reclamation.

5. Long-tail keyword optimisation

Keyword research is an important process for any online marketing strategy, but nowadays there is a great deal of competition in most online industries, so aiming for the most competitive keywords can seem like an impossible task.

However, not everybody chooses the most obvious search terms when performing a search, so this is where the long-tail keywords can help. According to Moz, around 70% of all searches are long tail, which leaves a huge amount of often low competition keywords to optimise for.

Long tail searches are generally more specific, and tend to be used by people who are further along in the buying process. This means that you can be more specific with the page that you serve to users, helping them to find exactly what they are looking for, which will allow you to generate high quality converting traffic.

There are a range of tools that can be used to spot these 'diamonds in the rough', from the Google AdWords Keyword Planner (formally the Google AdWords Keyword Tool), which is very useful for finding keyword ideas, while also showing how competitive they are and how much estimated traffic they may provide, as well as SEMrush, Google Webmaster Tools (under search traffic > search queries) and Analytics, to name a just a handful.

Hopefully that gives you all something to take away and get your teeth into; helping you or your client benefit from a few quick wins while your deeper online marketing strategy takes shape.

If you know of any other 'low-hanging fruits' that you think deserve a mention, please feel free to add your comment or find me on Twitter @SamGooch – who knows, I may even feature them in Part 2!”

Flickr Image courtesy of Ian Carroll