miercuri, 8 februarie 2012

Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter Graywolf's SEO Blog

Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter Graywolf's SEO Blog


Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 10:09 AM PST

Post image for Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter

Being the owner of a Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, you might consider me an Apple Fanboy. I can tell you I’ve been involved in web development long enough to tell you that the current state of usability on the web is nearing the low point: when, in the late 90′s, browsers had no standardization and we had to design different sites for Netscape and Internet Explorer. The current situation comes mostly from designing sites that don’t render properly or at all on mobile devices like a mobile phone, tablet, or iOS device.

Before you cast me aside as being on the bleeding edge of technology and that I don’t really register as being statistically significant, I’ll share three links with you:

In most cases, people aren’t going to share or link to you if your website doesn’t work on their platform of choice…
Recently, I was trying to fix my dishwasher (listen, I cook a lot and dirty a lot dishes…knowing how to do some basic repairs myself saves me a little cash now then). About every 8-10 months, the part of the dishwasher that is supposed to grind up the food that doesn’t get pre-rinsed gets clogged and needs be cleaned. I’ve bookmarked the site with the video for my model in Evernote because I use it so often. However, because the site was using a proprietary flash video player, when I clicked the link, I only got the audio podcast not the video showing me assembly/disassembly (screen shots below).

Laptop Version

iPad Version

Not a problem. I figured I’d head on over to Sears, get a link to the product manual, and do it the long way. Turns out ManageMyLife.com does such a bad job of user detection that they think I don’t have the Adobe Reader installed and can’t view the PDF for my model number.

Laptop Version

iPad Version

Great. So I had a hard time getting a video on how to fix my dishwasher and viewing the PDF for the instruction manual on my iPad. I had to go upstairs and use my laptop. Boo hoo on me for having first world problems, right? What we really have here is a case of bad site design and usability for not designing in a site that fails gracefully when it gets user agent detection wrong. As a marketer and SEO, these things matter and they are going to matter more in the future …

First World Problems

In most cases, people aren’t going to share or link to you if your website doesn’t work on their platform of choice. They aren’t going to share your link on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other social network, and if they do it will be the way I did: to make fun of you or use you as an example of a McFail. Search engines are getting smarter. They are using lots of signals to determine which sites rank. These days, usability and engagement are two key signals and, as Google gets better at measuring them more accurately, they’ll play an even more prominent role.

So what should site owners do in these cases:

  • Avoid using proprietary audio/video/pdf viewers and players. If you need to for advertising reasons, build a more bulletproof system of user agent detection and fail gracefully into a condition that allows users to still get the content.
  • Don’t let the same content exist on a mobile subdomain (link) and normal domain (link) as this only leads to trouble when content gets shared across mobile devices and laptops (looks squarely in the direction of Facebook and Youtube). Use one URL improve your user agent detection if you need to do so, but try to design a system that is user agent agnostic.
  • The number and kind of devices that people are going to use is only going to increase in the coming years. This is a problem that you will have to deal with sooner or later. If you design systems that are flexible and embrace these platforms, you will have an easier time building links, getting content shared, and improving the on site signals and metrics that the search engines are using.

photo credit: Shutterstock/Jaroslav74

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter

10 Ways Paid Marketers Can Leverage Inbound Marketing

10 Ways Paid Marketers Can Leverage Inbound Marketing


10 Ways Paid Marketers Can Leverage Inbound Marketing

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 12:33 PM PST

Posted by JoannaLord

It happened friends. After years of Rand exposing me to the many benefits of inbound marketing I am ready to admit it...{big gulp}...today's marketer needs to be doing more than paid marketing. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, if you are only doing paid marketing you are failing yourself and your company. THERE I SAID IT. I feel better. Way better actually.

Because it's true. Things have changed. There is no longer two main players in the game (SEO and PPC). Search marketing itself has evolved. We've covered a great deal of this here on the blog so I won't go into it too much. If you need a reminder, I urge you to go check out Rand's posts where he outlines The New Era of Inbound Marketing, and outlines how quickly it is growing. As marketers, we saw the shift coming, and now we are feeling it in our every day gigs. Our roles are expanding as traditional SEO itself expands. There is so much happening all around us. Who is freaking out? Yeah me too.

paid and inbound marketing crossover
 

The real question you may be asking yourself is, "why is this paid marketing lady talking about inbound marketing?" Good question. The other day I was running through my to-do list and I couldn't help but notice how not-focused it was on paid marketing. In fact, most of my day was spent brainstorming with others on how to better share data, repurpose existing assets, and collaborate. While Justin and I manage paid marketing here at Moz, more and more of our time is spent on learning and leveraging our inbound efforts more effectively.

I thought I'd run through some ways that I'm leaning on our inbound marketing efforts to both reduce Moz's costs and capture more leads. Did you all know you could get leads for free? Yeah, crazypants I know. Anyway, here are the top ten ways I've leveraged inbound as a paid marketer here at Moz;

#10: Share Persona Outlines
You know who is really good at researching a target audience? Content writers. Recently, Michael King actually did a killer webinar on understanding your target audience and using social media tools to help define your best audience. It covers this concept really well. The idea is there are so many excellent demographic tools available to us now that these social networks want us to buy ads on them. We can look at audience sizes, location, categories, etc. All of this information has been helping organic marketers write targeted content for years. Paid marketers should be leaning on this data. What have they discovered that could help me better target high-value leads?  Outline your target audience and extracting personas can be really challenging, but the more teams connect on this the better all our marketing efforts are targeted.

#9: Leverage Landing Pages
Design resources are hard to come by. Here at Moz we have Derric and Ramil basically sleeping in the office and we still have a backlog of projects that need their creative brains. Ask any paid marketer what is the bottleneck and often you will hear design resources pop up. So what can we do? Use landing pages that our inbound marketers have already queued up for us! Brilliant! Often times these pages are beautifully designed, and laced with excellent engagement opportunities. These are mandatory in a solid inbound marketing page and they are requirements of a successful paid search lander...coincidence? I think not. 

#8: Exchange Conversion Reports
Oh conversion data, how sweet you are. I think most paid marketers are looking at the SEO data at their company. At least I hope they are! Beyond that though, there is more data you should be looking at. Here at Moz, we are a little data crazy. Jen, our Community Wrangler, puts together amazing metrics on our social activities every week. I have found that by mining her weekly data summaries I can see what content has gone hot and where. I can see where we are increasing brand awareness and what type of people are taking to the Moz brand. From there I can better allocate our budget to supplement these efforts. 

#7: Collaborate on Keyword Research
So this one is one of those things we keep saying we are going to do, but rarely does it actually happen. I am always amazed by the keyword research process. First off, it's really time consuming. Secondly, it's not effective as a one-time step, it really needs to be done in an ongoing basis. Yet despite all this, both paid teams and organic teams have been doing separate keyword research for years. Ick. Yuck.

An awesome benefit to doing inbound marketing is the speed in which we can detect if something resonates. Where as before I might have used paid search budget to test an adjective or product description, I can now push out a targeted piece of content and see how the audience responds. It's immediate data collection and its statistically valid. I can't get over the power of the social graph when it comes to crowdsourcing reactions to certain keywords. This is the new keyword research in my opinion. We must combine our traditional keyword tools with audience response across these inbound channels. 

#6: Repurpose Content
This one is pretty obvious, yet, so easy to skip over. I am guilty of this too often myself. Paid marketers need to be driving traffic to past inbound marketing wins. For example, about a year and a half ago we updated the Beginners Guide to SEO. This has gone on to be downloaded close to a million times, translated into other languages, and continues to be an excellent traffic driver. Guess how much of my paid marketing budget goes to driving traffic to this excellent piece of content? Yup you guessed it...none.

In the past, my argument was "it didn't drive enough free trial signups to show ROI." What I've realized over the past few months is I need to go deeper into what "conversion" means. What does acquisition mean? What does growth mean? My paid marketing efforts should be wrapped around these already successful content pieces. Repurposing hot viral content through paid marketing channels is a great example of how we can accomplish cross-channel marketing. Isn't it pretty when we all get along? Who wants to hug? Bueller?

#5: Share Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is gold, pure gold. Inbound marketing is about being found online through a variety of activities -- content publishing, social engagement, etc. A huge benefit of these conversations and interactions is the wealth of feedback you can receive from the community you have created. Often here at Moz, we will ask our community team to help us understand what our customers really love about our PRO service. We can hear right from them what keeps them happy, and what we can do better. This helps drive our marketing messages and our product roadmaps. Sharing the customer feedback and voice is so important, and the value found in sharing that across multiple teams in the organization is huge.

#4: Planning for Resources
Over the past few years we have seen the expectations of an online marketer change. We have more on our plates, more tools to log into, more reports to pull, more content to write, and so on and so forth. Inevitably these demands require more resources and more talent on any given project. I have found that by asking the organic marketers and community marketers here at the company what they are working on, I can better plan for my paid projects. If we are contracting a copyeditor for a content piece, I can slip in a request to revisit some ad copy headlines in the same contract. I can also repurpose design resources for banners, and landers. By knowing what your inbound team is working on, all of us can push out more faster. This is a huge benefit to connecting the to teams in both goals and resource planning.

#3: Fuel the Fire
I am a big fan of the halo effect as it applies to marketing. The halo effect, for those that might not know, is when customers show a bias to a product or brand based on some favorable or pleasant experience they have had previously. The beauty of it as it applies to today's marketing efforts is there are so many opportunities for a brand impression, and most of which are free.

A positive conversation a brand representative has with a user on a Facebook page may be enough to persuade a user to click a retargeting banner when faced with the brand's logo. Those two combined may build enough trust to persuade them to take a free trial. I call this "fueling the fire." While paid marketing may be measured on a CPA basis, there is a lot that happens prior to an action that influences the likelihood of a conversion. Inbound marketing offers mutiple opportunities to positively bias a potential customer. The goodwill a customer has in a brand often has very little to do with push marketing efforts, but has everything to do with these more organic experiences.

#2: Prequalify a Message
At the heart of it, marketers are story tellers. We love to persuade. As a paid marketer I spend most of my time coming up with ways to message my audience. Sometimes it's a new audience and sometimes it's my current audience, but either way I need to constantly be testing new ways to capture their attention. Prequalifying a message can be time consuming and can cost a lot of money depending on how I test it.

In the past I may have run a banner campaign on a relevant blog post and looked at metrics like CTR and CR. I may have also thrown money at a focus group (and whoa those can cost a lot) to see how people responded to a story we had crafted. These days I can use the power of social to test messages in record time. I can put together a presentation or a white paper and see how many times it gets shared, viewed, and downloaded. By counting these "social votes" I go beyond just clicks as a means of pre-qualification. It's a really great way for me to collect good data fast.

#1: Strengthen the Brand's Story
While the other nine ideas are great, this is my favorite. Nothing is more powerful than a consistent marketing message. Over the years I've worked to connect retargeting banners, paid search ads, landers, affiliate banners, and social advertising to send a strong and cohesive message. You know what stinks about that? All of those cost me money...which is no fun. Keeping money is fun. Spending all your money...not fun.

For promotions or time sensitive messages, if I really wanted to see an impact, I had to have serious budgets. There has to be a better way. Aligning some of these paid efforts with some inbound efforts makes for an even more compelling story for half the cost. As you push out new things and try to create buzz, you need to be asking yourself, "Is this the best use of my time and money?" I think as a paid marketer we can often forget to take that pause. We rest on the channels we know well but we need to push for more.

In Conclusion

Rand was right. In fact, all of my SEO friends were right. While paid marketing has a role to play in all of this, the direction the web has taken demands more from us marketers. While I am not sold that inbound marketing is all any marketer needs, I do believe there is a synergy between the two that can be very powerful. If we share resources, connect data, and collaborate rather than compete I think both teams win. I'm super excited about what this means for the future of paid search marketing. If you do paid and you aren't connecting with your organic marketing and social teams, you really are making your job harder than it needs to be. 

I'd love to hear from you guys if there are other ways you have seen the teams connect and work more effectively together. Where do you see this all going as social marketing and content marketing continue to take more of our time as marketers? Where does paid fit into this? 
 


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Video: President Obama Launches a Marshmallow Cannon

The White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, February 8, 2012

 

Video: President Obama Launches a Marshmallow Cannon

Yesterday, President Obama hosted the second-ever White House Science Fair, featuring robots in the Blue Room, rockets in the Red Room,and marshmallow cannons in the State Dining Room, showcasing the talents of next generation of scientists, engineers, inventors, and innovators.

President Obama got the chance to shoot a marshmallow across the State Dining Room using 14-year-old inventor Joey Hudy’s "Extreme Marshmallow Cannon":

President Obama Launches a Marshmallow

In Case You Missed It

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

Harnessing Science, Technology & Innovation to Promote Global Development
Answering President Obama’s call to harness science technology, and innovation to spark global development, Administration officials announce initiatives from across the government to generate new solutions to long-standing development problems.

Protecting Taxpayer Dollars by Strengthening SNAP
The USDA has launched the Fighting SNAP Fraud website to root out abuse in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Don’t Mess With Texas … Science Students
At the White House Science Fair, two Texas teams epitomize the President’s call for “hands-on” learning to help up America’s game in STEM education.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Standard Time (EST).

10:30 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

11:00 AM: The President meets with senior advisors WhiteHouse.gov/live

12:45 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

2:00 PM: The President attends the Democratic Senate Caucus Retreat

4:00 PM: The President and the Vice President meet with Secretary of State Clinton

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

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The Challenge of Selling SEO & Forgetting the ‘Human Ranking Factor’

The Challenge of Selling SEO & Forgetting the ‘Human Ranking Factor’

Link to SEOptimise » blog

The Challenge of Selling SEO & Forgetting the ‘Human Ranking Factor’

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 04:31 AM PST

As with selling any service, selling SEO services is an extremely challenging task. Here are my observations of two opposite ends of the spectrum of what SEO consultants often experience with selling SEO services.

Give me a two day optimisation strategy

We'll often get contacted with the following, "We want a two day web optimisation strategy implemented." Many neophyte consultants lick their lips and pounce on the 'opportunity' with alacrity. They start shooting off proposals, buffing up their hallowed methodology, and more.

A more sane, measured and customer-serving response to the request for a two day optimisation precess is, "Why?"

That always stops people in their tracks. "Why do you want a two day strategy implementation for your website and how do you know that's the right thing for you?"

In the act of asking that question, you start actually consulting. And if you engage in a real dialogue on the basis of those questions you will gain bracing insight into the real issues, challenges and aspirations of the potential client. You may also get a bracing introduction to the assumptions they're making — many of which are potentially untested.

It may well be that a two day implementation process is like a relatively empty vessel, into which (after suitable diagnostics and appropriate design) you can pour content that will actually serve their needs and best interests. But it may also be that a half day audit would suffice, and the real action needs to take place at their organisational levels, or with a different group of people, or may require preliminary contact with customers or other stakeholders. It could be that a six month process is needed.

My recommendation to companies who put out a request like the one above, and get a proposal back in response, is to disqualify the person or agency from further consideration, as the request has no meaning without further exploration.

And if you are an agency or a freelance consultant and receive a request like the above, differentiate yourself meaningfully by helping to get to the core of what's driving the request, rather than getting infatuated by the format proposed.

Avoiding the panacea of empty process

Here's another common challenge. An organisation decides they need to create a SEO strategy or a digital marketing strategy and manage its roll-out. They get an agency with a strategy implementation process, anchored in the balanced scorecard or some other framework. As they proceed, courtesy of this framework, they are deluged with meetings, with process charts, with communiques, and eventually they arrive at what they perceive to be ‘The Holy Grail’. Namely, they have a clear map. All inconsistencies are removed (at least on the charts anyway), and the path forward glitters like a mythical ‘Yellow Brick Road’.

The problem in the map is not the territory, and it never has been. The problem is that underlying the process clarity are dysfunctional relationships, misguided leadership behaviours, poorly aligned teams, social networks that don't operate well, departmental practices that may be out of kilter with strategic aspirations, information hoarded rather than shared, a culture that is ossified with past practices rather than vitalised by future aspirations. And eventually the 'knowing/doing gap' will become that much more profound.

My humble advice is that once you have process clarity, you have to convert that into a more human map: of behaviours-in-action, team composition and alignment, presence of vibrant or nullifying relationships, communication and network effectiveness, leadership role-modeling and relevant efforts at culture-shifting in order to make the processes actually manifest. Until these adaptive elements are infused into the process steps, to humanise and actualise the processes, we run the risk of trying to run the world from an operating manual.

It doesn't work. In fact, most of us don't even run our computers from a manual. We get some hands-on experience while drawing on some guidance, then tinkering and adapting based on results. Alas, in an organisation there are many more moving parts, and my 'tinkering' can have expensive consequences if not synergised with the learnings and efforts of others.

Process clarity and human engagement must march together. You can see an organisation as a collection of processes and plans. Fair enough. But you can even more meaningfully see it pulsating with human performance. In other words, the subtotal of all the actions, interactions, behaviours, collaboration and communication between all the people who make a difference to the success or failure of the organisation. You can see the organisation as a patchwork quilt of teams, conversations and acted upon commitments. These are human dimensions, or as I’d like to call it, the ‘human ranking factor’ and if not addressed, all the gewgaws and trinkets of process clarity will be fallow and leave your strategic marketing vision unfulfilled.

Image credit: mootown

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. The Challenge of Selling SEO & Forgetting the ‘Human Ranking Factor’

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  2. Is Reading Level a Google Panda Algorithm Factor?
  3. 30 (New) Google Ranking Factors You May Over- or Underestimate

Seth's Blog : How do they know you're not a flake?

How do they know you're not a flake?

Before your link gets clicked or your proposal gets read, a busy person is going to triage it to find out if it's even worth glancing at. Since everyone is now connected, the new permeability has created a deluge of noise, and just about everyone worth contacting is taking defensive measures.

  • Do I know this person?
  • Did someone I trust send them over?
  • Where does she work? (Ideo? the FDA? The New York Times?)
  • Has she won an award? Is she famous?
  • Are there typos and is the design sloppy?
  • Are they pestering me?
  • Do I already follow this person online?
  • Does music play when I visit the website?
  • Will my boss be pleased when I bring this project up?
  • Who else is pointing to/referencing/working with this person?
  • Is it too good to be true?

Notice that all of these questions get asked before the idea is even analyzed. Doesn't matter that this might not be fair, it's a hurdle you have to cross.

Not all good ideas are pre-proven, sophisticated and from reliable sources. That's not your fault. Doesn't matter. In a noisy world filled with choices, you can't blame your prospects for ignoring you. I know that you're talented and have a lot to offer, but do they?

 

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