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marți, 5 august 2014

Why You Should Avoid Numbers in Your URL Graywolf's SEO Blog

Why You Should Avoid Numbers in Your URL

Posted: 05 Aug 2014 06:47 AM PDT

While linkbait posts aren’t as popular as they once were, top 10 lists have been popular ever since Moses came down from the mount with his top 10 list of “thou shalt nots.” Magazines like Rolling Stone will always have top 500 playlists and AFI will always publish top 100 movies lists. However, as a responsible publisher, marketer, and SEO ... [Continue reading Why You Should Avoid Numbers in Your URL]

The post Why You Should Avoid Numbers in Your URL appeared first on Graywolf's SEO Blog.

"A Legend at the White House"

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"A Legend at the White House"

Yesterday, former White House Press Secretary James Brady passed away in Alexandria, Virginia at the age of 73.

After being shot and almost killed in an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Brady recovered and became a symbol of the ongoing fight against gun violence. In a statement yesterday afternoon, President Obama expressed his condolences to Brady's family, calling him a "legend at the White House."

The Vice President also released a statement -- and later in the afternoon, current Press Secretary Josh Earnest and 11 of his predecessors penned a joint statement on the passing of James Brady.

Read the statements, and find out more about the passing of a White House legend.

President Barack Obama stops by Press Secretary Jay Carney's meeting with James Brady in Carney's West Wing office at the White House, March 30, 2011. Brady was former President Ronald Reagan's press secretary during the assassination attempt on President Reagan thirty years ago. Brady's wife Sarah, right, and son Scott, center, joined him for the meeting. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The cost of inaction

Hey, everyone --

The facts are in. The science is definitive. The question is no longer whether climate change is happening, but whether we can afford not to act.

In the western United States, changes in our climate are fueling wildfire seasons that are longer and more intense -- putting people, communities, and businesses at risk.

As we're seeing right now, wildfires unquestionably have devastating impacts on the lives of many Americans. This weekend, California declared a state of emergency as two major wildfires scorched acres of land, threatening towns and forcing many to evacuate. These are just two of the 14 fires that are currently burning throughout the state.

Make no mistake: The cost of inaction on wildfires and climate change is too high a price for Americans to pay, particularly when we have a chance to address this right now.

Watch as President Obama's Science Advisor Dr. John Holdren breaks down exactly why this is a problem that we must meet head-on -- and pass it along to someone who needs to see it.

As a new report from the Council of Economic Advisors points out, the consequences of climate change reach beyond our environment. The impacts of climate change threaten our homes, our health, and our economic prosperity. In fact, delaying action for a decade would increase the cost of responding to climate change by 40 percent.

President Obama has been taking action on all fronts to reduce the harmful greenhouse gas emissions that are warming our planet, to make our communities more resilient to climate impacts, and to take the lead on the international stage. In June, he announced a competition to help Americans build a stronger capacity to protect their homes and neighborhoods from natural disasters.

If the question is, "Do we protect the lives, the economy, and the future of the American people?", the answer should always be a resounding "yes."

Check out the President's action plan to learn more about what we can do to take the lead on addressing global climate change:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/climate-change

Thanks,

John

John Podesta
Counselor to the President
The White House
@Podesta44

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What Happened after Google Pulled Author and Video Snippets: A Moz Case Study

Posted: 04 Aug 2014 05:12 PM PDT

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

In the past 2 months Google made big changes to its search results.

Webmasters saw disappearing Google authorship photos, reduced video snippets, changes to local packs and in-depth articles, and more.

Here at Moz, we've closely monitored our own URLs to measure the effect of these changes on our actual traffic. The results surprised us.

Authorship traffic—surprising results

In the early days of authorship, many webmasters worked hard to get their photo in Google search results. I confess, I doubt anyone worked harder at author snippets than me.

Search results soon became crowded with smiling faces staring back at us. Authors hired professional photographers. Publishers worked to correctly follow Google's guidelines to set up authorship for thousands of authors.

The race for more clicks was on.

Then on June 28th, Google cleared the page. No more author photos.

To gauge the effect on traffic, we examined eight weeks' worth of data from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, before and after the change. We then examined our top 15 authorship URLs (where author photos were known to show consistently) compared to non-authorship URLs.

The results broke down like this:

Change in Google organic traffic to Moz

Total Site: -1.76%
Top 15 Non-Authorship URLs: -5.96%
Top 15 Authorship URLs: -2.86%

Surprisingly, authorship URLs performed as well as non-authorship URLs in terms of traffic. Even though Moz was highly optimized for authors, traffic didn't significantly change.

On an individual level, things looked much different. We actually observed big changes in traffic with authorship URLs increasing or decreasing in traffic by as much as 45%. There is no clear pattern: Some went up, some went down—exactly like any URL would over an extended time.

Authorship photos don't exist in a vacuum; each photo on the page competed for attention with all the other photos on the page. Each search result is as unique as a fingerprint. What worked for one result didn't work for another.

Consider what happens visually when multiple author photos exist in the same search result:

One hypothesis speculates that more photos has the effect of drawing eyes down the page. In the absence of rich snippets, search click-through rates might follow more closely studied models, which dictate that results closer to the top earn more clicks.

In the absence of author photos, it's likely click-through rate expectations have once again become more standardized.

Video snippets: a complex tale

Shortly after Google removed author photos, they took aim at video snippets as well. On July 17th, MozCast reported a sharp decline in video thumbnails.

Most sites, Moz included, lost 100% of their video results. Other sites appeared to be "white-listed" as reported by former Mozzer Casey Henry at Wistia.

A few of the sites Casey found where Google continues to show video thumbnails:

youtube.com
vimeo.com
vevo.com
ted.com
today.com
discovery.com

Aside from these "giants," most webmasters, even very large publishers at the top of the industry, saw their video snippets vanish in search results.

How did this loss affect traffic for our URLs with embedded videos? Fortunately, here at Moz we have a large collection of ready-made video URLs we could easily study: our Whiteboard Friday videos, which we produce every, well, Friday.

To our surprise, most URLs actually saw more traffic.

On average, our Whiteboard Friday videos saw a 10% jump in organic traffic after losing video snippets.

A few other with video saw dramatic increases:

Domain Authority: +157%
MozBar: +77%
Learn SEO: +43%

The last example, the Learn SEO page, didn't have an actual video on it, but a bug with Google caused them to display an older video thumbnail. (Several folks we've talked to speculate that Google removed video snippets simply to clean up their bugs in the system)

We witnessed a significant increase in traffic after losing video snippets. How did this happen?

Did Google change the way they rank and show video pages?

It turns out that many of our URLs that contained videos also saw a significant change in the number of search impressions at the exact same time.

According to Google, impressions for the majority of our video URLs shot up dramatically around July 14th.

Impressions for Whiteboard Friday URLs also rose 20% during this time. For Moz, most of the video URLs saw many more impressions, but for others, it appears rankings dropped.

While Moz saw video impressions rise, other publishers saw the opposite effect.

Casey Henry, our friend at video hosting company Wistia, reports seeing rankings drop for many video URLs that had thin or little content.

"...it's only pages hosting video with thin content... the pages that only had video and a little bit of text went down."
- Casey Henry

For a broader perspective, we talked to Marshall Simmonds, founder of Define Media Group, who monitors traffic to millions of daily video pageviews for large publishers.

Marshall found that despite the fact that most of the sites they monitor lost video snippets, they observed no visible change in either traffic or pageviews across hundreds of millions of visits.

Define Media Group also recently released its 2014 Mid-Year Digital Traffic Report which sheds fascinating light on current web traffic trends.

What does it all mean?

While we have anecdotal evidence of ranking and impression changes for video URLs on individual sites, on the grand scale across all Google search results these differences aren't visible.

If you have video content, the evidence suggests it's now worth more than ever to follow video SEO best practices: (taken from video SEO expert Phil Nottingham)

Use a crawlable player (all the major video hosting platforms use these today)
Surround the video with supporting information (caption files and transcripts work great)
Include schema.org video markup

SEO finds a way

For the past several years web marketers competed for image and video snippets, and it's with a sense of sadness that they've been taken away.

The smart strategy follows the data, which suggest that more traditional click-through rate optimization techniques and strategies could now be more effective. This means strong titles, meta descriptions, rich snippets (those that remain), brand building and traditional ranking signals.

What happened to your site when Google removed author photos and video snippets? Let us know in the comments below.

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!

Why and how to create great content: part 2

Posted: 05 Aug 2014 01:00 AM PDT

Hello again – you must be back here because you read part 1 of this blog post a couple of weeks ago. Undoubtedly you will have been waiting patiently to learn about some of the processes we use here at White.net when looking at content creation and strategy, and luckily for you that is exactly what I'll be talking about today! (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I recommend that you take a short detour to catch up on my first post on this topic, before continuing on here)

Now for the good stuff – let’s talk about preparation, research and reason. Start by asking yourself this question:

Why am I creating a content marketing piece?

If you think you have a good answer, let’s put it to the test by delving a little bit deeper…

What are your goals?

It’s amazing how many people jump straight into the idea generation stage without setting out the reasons for creating a content marketing piece in the first place. If clients had infinite budgets, this might not be such a problem – but this isn’t usually the case! Instead it is important to identify the goals associated with the project; some of these may be broad and others might be more specific.

Here are a few suggestions to get you thinking:

Grow number of sign-ups or subscriptions
Reach a target number of downloads
Increase number of sales
Boost visits and/or engagement
Increase number of referring domains to your site

Once you have come up with the most logical goals (which should hopefully align with the overall business and marketing strategies), make sure to identify metrics that you can track to analyse levels of success upon, and after the launch of your content.

Now you will be able to properly answer the question asked above:

Why am I creating a content marketing piece?

Now that you have the “why” solved, it’s time to look at “how” to create great content. It would be amazing if there was some magic formula that worked perfectly for each and every person, but the fact remains that some people have creativity skills on their side, whilst others can boast an analytical mind. This is why teamwork is so important.

Tenacious D know all about teamwork

A team made up of people with different personalities, preferences and skills is really important in my opinion. Having recently done the Myers-Briggs type indicator test, I know much more about my own preferences than I did before. I found out that I tend to look at the ‘big picture’, so I can bring something different to the table than someone who looks at individual elements of a project. That’s why it makes sense to join forces with at least one other person; ideas can be built up more effectively than when tackled alone.

Hold your horses though, there is still another important step to cover before you start thinking of the actual content marketing piece! Don’t worry, it’ll help you to make your actual concept more targeted and successful.

Perform a scan

Here’s the part where you consider a few things to do with your company, your competitors and your customers. A few things to think about include:

Product truth
Product pain points
Main unique selling point
What competitors are saying
Customer personas / target market / demographics

How you actually go about documenting this is up to you; it could be anything from a scrawl on a whiteboard to an extensively researched PDF. Whatever you do, just make sure you don’t skip this step as it can remind you of the goals that you thought of at the beginning of the project.

Get thinking

Hurrah, you have reached the creative part of the process! At this point you will want to fetch paper and pens, or at least position yourself in front of a fairly large whiteboard. At White.net we actually have a comfy creative room with the helpful addition of a whiteboard wall; all of our best work is done in there!

We like to start off with a bit of word association by creating a map like the one below. It helps to take one or more steps away from the product offering, which can introduce some interesting content ideas to the mix.

We then take time to look at different categories of content, so we can follow the route that will keep us most aligned to the campaign goals. Here are the ones we take into consideration:

Timely
Useful
Personal
Entertaining
Inspiring

We always endeavor to come up with multiple ideas for each of these categories so we can develop those that have potential, or discount those that clearly don’t fit the brief. In line with this, we also think about how each of the ideas would work within the framework shown below. These go hand-in-hand with the goals that I keep referring back to.

Share ideas

At this stage it is easy to get ahead of yourself and spend hours doing research and design mock-ups, but it can save you a lot of time and money if you wait for ideas to be discussed, analysed and signed off first. Decision makers (whether clients or management) may have something else in mind, or may not have yet disclosed an expected budget with you yet. You need to get this feedback in order to tweak your ideas, or as a cue to head back to the drawing board.

Create, share and analyse

Now that you’ve got your idea and it has been given the green light, go forth and create your vision. Don’t forget to come up with a robust plan when it comes to actually publishing it! When everything is up and running, you will want to revisit those goals that you created originally in order to track how successful your content marketing piece was. It should provide you with food for thought for your next project, as well as helping you to see exactly where the return on investment is in your business or for your clients.

Sources