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marți, 22 februarie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Headsmacking Tip #17: Use Your Bio as an SEO Advantage

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 08:12 AM PST

Your online identity is going further, faster and with more impact than ever before, yet many of us miss out on the seemingly obvious SEO power of our personal and company biographies. It may be a headsmacker, but it's a good one - use your bio!

Personal/professional bios appear most frequently in four types of online sources:

Your Company/Personal Website - for example, I have a bio on SEOmoz and here on my personal blog
Events, Conferences and Webinars - here's my profile on the Searchfest site, on OMS and SMX
Content or Causes you Author/Contribute to - here's an old piece on the Y! Advertising Blog, some content I contributed for Brightedge's blog and an interview I did with Mixergy
Social/Web Profiles that Enable Full-Featured Bios - here I am on TED Conversations, on LinkedIn and Quora and

In many of these scenarios, I've not been strategic or smart about making the bio sections more useful for readers or optimal for SEO.

The image below shows some of the potential opportunities you can capture:

SEO for Bios

There's a few best practices to take away:

A great bio should have links - it's not just for SEO; users want to know, too! If I love a post or a piece of content or am inspired/interested by a line I read about someone, I should have the opportunity to learn more. That's why those links exist.
Co-citation is potentially important here. If I use the words "SEOmoz" and "SEO Software" together, there's a much better chance that over time, I'll get Google/Bing to recognize that the two are related. Currently, thanks to our history, they're much more likely to think that SEOmoz is a consulting company (I almost made "consulting" an image, just to over-emphasize that point).
Quantity of links and where they point is up to you. In the example above, I've got a lot of links - maybe too many, but because they're not aggressive with anchor text or clearly just there for search engines, it doesn't come across poorly (plus, as an SEO guy, folks might get suspicious if I didn't try linking in my profile!)
Length is often flexible - you may wish to work on several versions from the very short, one sentence snippet to the several paragraphs often afforded you on some sites/spaces.

I'm certainly not suggesting that we should all go stuff our profiles with obviously-SEO-intended links, using idealized anchor text for search engines to the point where it's barely readable. But, I would suggest that having an SEO review the strategy of evangelists, speakers and contributors of folks across your organization is likely a great idea. This is one of the most white-hat, natural and powerful forms of link building -- it's just poorly executed much of the time.

Recognize the opportunity - be as aggressive as you feel is appropriate with third parties who post your bio (to get the description you want) and be sure to think carefully about branding, co-citation and keywords.

p.s. Linkscape's web index just updated! New stats are below:

Pages: 41,806,430,494
Root Domains: 111,479,320
Subdomains: 387,061,888
Links: 423,876,083,081
% of Links that are Nofollowed: 2.18%
Average # of Links/Page: 61.69
% of Pages w/ Rel=Canonical: 7.02%

Check out the new data in OpenSiteExplorer, the Web App, the MozBar and our Labs Tools.

p.p.s. It's been a while since I did the last headsmacking tip (#16) way back in November of 2009! Hopefully this will spur me to re-visit the series more often.

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WANTED: Software Engineers REWARD: $12,000

Posted: 21 Feb 2011 10:14 PM PST

Posted by randfish

In 2010, SEOmoz's software business grew from 4,000 - 7,000 subscribers and $3.1mm - $5.7mm in revenue (more transparency on details coming soon). Our customers have been loving our products (our web app now supports nearly 30K campaigns) and our data (over 250 companies use our API), but we're nowhere near satisfied.

SEOmoz Software Revenue 2007-2011

(*note: consulting revenue, which ended in 2009, is not included; 2011 revenue is estimated)

It's our belief that growth is limited only by how much we can surprise, delight and reward our customers with software that rocks. We want to build more, faster and that's why today, we're announcing a new effort in bringing talented software engineers to the SEOmoz team.

Have Engineer Friends? Send 'Em Our Way

Why should you send your engineer friends to SEOmoz? Three big reasons:

They'll be joining an amazing team at a great company earning top salaries at a place that values their contributions (see below)
You'll get $12,000 in cash* (OK, probably a check, but still!)
They'll also get $12,000 in cash**

We're seeking 4-5 very talented engineers (possibly more) with experience handling large-scale problems like machine learning, web crawling, building and optimizing web services (APIs), coping with large quantities of data and dealing in massively distributed systems. You can learn more about the job requirements here.

Engineers: Challenging Problems, Brilliant Co-Workers & Some Cool Bonuses Await You, Too

As part of this process, we're making things interesting for talented engineers, too:

If you refer/apply yourself, you'll receive a $12,000 cash hiring bonus**
If you're not in the Seattle area, we can offer up to $10,000 to help you (and your family) move to the area
If you make it to our final interview round (for a chat with our full team), you'll walk out with a free iPad
Start your new job right with a $5,000 shopping budget to spend on the hardware/software/accessories of your choice (for either home or office!). Need a new desk and chair set for you spare bedroom to work those odd hours in comfort? Go for it. New laptop? No problem.
Salaries for engineers at SEOmoz are substantively above the average/median for Seattle (according to Payscale, Glassdoor, SimplyHired). We'll be on par with the offers you get from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. in cash, and we're even better on stock.
Benefits at SEOmoz rock - we have a great health and dental plan (for you and your family / S.O.), we'll cover your home Internet and your cellphone bill, 20 days of vacation time annually, transportation options, 401K plans and more.

That said, we should all be picky about where we work and where we interview. It's not just about the salary, the bonus, the iPad or the shopping spree - there are other things that matter to us (and likely to you) when considering where to work:

Will I be working on fun, interesting problems that will challenge me professionally and grow my skills?
Will I learn from my co-workers and influence them positively?
Does the company compensate generously and appropriately?
Does my work make a recognizable impact on the company and the world?
Am I contributing to a mission I believe in and a company whose core values I respect?

It's my belief that SEOmoz does a solid job on all of these:

The problems we face include "web scale" challenges - crawling, indexing and building metrics on billions of pages; collecting, filtering and making sense of millions of pieces of social data from Facebook, Twitter and other platforms; serving massive amounts of data to thousands of paying customers in a performant environment.
The engineering team at SEOmoz is a remarkable and talented group. You'll be side-by-side with engineers with impressive backgrounds and serious accomplishments on the product and technology side.
We are in the top quartile of compensation for software engineers in Seattle and our benefits, stock options and perks are considerably above the average.
What you build will have a direct, measurable impact on our subscribers - and you'll be able to see it in the membership statistics and hear it directly through our many feedback channels (we get more than 300 messages about our products each week!). And, you won't just be helping SEOmoz customers - our mission of making it easier for ideas to be shared on the web is carried out every day, and we have tons of great stories and feedback to show it.
We think it's great that Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the entire web ecosystem have built such remarkable platforms for sharing information. But, it's hard to get noticed in all the noise and hard to know what will help make your ideas scale and spread. That where SEOmoz comes in - our software is meant to help companies and organizations of all sizes and shapes to better spread their messages in organic, white hat ways. It's a mission we've found incredibly rewarding and we think you will, too.

Why Do We Need So Much Engineering Talent?

Because SEOmoz is taking off.

Today, we provide some of the web's best and more popular software to help marketers understand, evaluate and improve their SEO efforts. In the months to come, we're expanding to help marketers conquer all of organic marketing - from SEO to social media to blogging, local campaigns, content marketing, PR/media and more. This means huge challenges like increasing the size, freshness and quality of our web index (currently ~45billion pages, moving up to 100 billion), building a "mention" index on our Blogscape platform that lets marketers see where their brand names are being used across the web (even if no direct links exist), scaling analytics, improving our machine learning algorithms, exponentially growing our data storage while simultaneously making things faster.

And, unfortunately (or fortunately), our requirements for engineering talent are extremely high. We interview a lot of candidates and need not only the best and brightest in challenging fields (machine learning, large-scale crawling, natural language processing, large-scale distributed systems, etc.), but folks who fit with our core values of TAGFEE.

We owe it to our customers and our mission to build amazing software and that means recruiting remarkable engineers. It's great to be a profitable startup, but money sitting in the bank won't do us, or our community any good. We want to put these dollars to work and build something revolutionary - we're aiming to be the future of organic web/inbound marketing software.

Top 10 Reasons Why Should You Join SEOmoz

Because a post like this wouldn't be complete without a top 10 list!

Interesting, Challenging Problems (strategic and technical, and often on a very large scale)
Engineering Centric Company (development and software are the core of our company's product and the largest team - you won't be in the "IT department," you'll be a key member at the heart of SEOmoz)
Customer Focused Roadmap (we don't just build things that sound interesting, we build things we know our customers want, need and use - and when we do, we get great feedback directly from thousands of paying members)
Transparency (you'll always know how the company is doing week-to-week and quarter by quarter. Virtually every metric except salaries are shared throughout the organization)
Profitability (we're in the black - no burning runways or panicked cries for venture capital. We've got a proven business model and we've been doubling our revenue for 3 years)
Excellent Compensation (We pay in the top range of salaries for software engineers in Seattle based on experience + skills. You won't have to sacrifice pay to work at a great startup vs. a behemoth)
Amazing Co-Workers (Ask anyone in the Seattle tech, marketing or startup community and they'll tell you - SEOmoz's people aren't just talented, they're truly good people who care about each other and are a pleasure to spend time with)
Flat Organization (If you struggle against the politics and bureaucratic inefficiencies of a big organization, you'll love it here. We have smallish teams, 30 people in total, and only a single layer of management - you'll report directly to the VP of Engineering)
We Listen (Our engineers have contributed substantively to the product roadmap, to new ideas we implement, even to how we decorate the office)
Great Benefits, Perks + Fun Stuff (we play Xbox Kinect on Friday afternoons, snacks in the office, 401K plans, flexible and generous vacation time, a great health/dental plan and more on the way)

We hope you'll send your friends, family members and fellow Venture Brothers addicts our way :-)

* NOTE: The referrer will receive this bonus only after the engineer stays employed at SEOmoz for at least 90 days after his or her start date. The referrer must also complete and return a w-9 in order to receive the bonus. The referrer is responsible for paying taxes on the referral bonus. Also, to qualify for the referral bonus, the successful candidate must have accepted our offer of employment within four months of your referral.

**NOTE: The $12,000 signing bonus applies to all new engineering candidates, but must be paid back if you leave the company prior to 12 months.

One more note: Candidates must be eligible to work in the US (citizenship, green card, visa, etc). While we'd love to recruit more from out of the country, it's not yet something we have the resources/connections to provide.

p.s. We also want to acknowledge our friends in Cambridge and the crew at EnergySavvy, who are both offering a $10K referral bonus currently (it's a great time to be, or know, an engineer!)

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Live from Cleveland: Winning the Future Forum on Small Business

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011

Live from Cleveland: Winning the Future Forum on Small Business

Today, President Obama is travelling to Cleveland, Ohio for the Winning the Future Forum on Small Business. You can watch portions of the event throughout the day at WhiteHouse.gov/live.

Here's the lineup:

11:35 a.m. EST: President Obama's opening remarks
1:00 p.m. EST: Live discussion with Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, responding to your questions and comments submitted via Advise the Advisor
1:55 p.m. EST: President Obama's closing remarks

Watch live.

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama meets with members of the Boy Scouts of America in the Oval Office, Feb. 16, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

SEOptimise

Blaming SEO for Bad Search Results is like Blaming Mechanics for Bad Roads

Posted: 21 Feb 2011 05:15 AM PST

For most people, SEO still is either a complete unknown, magic or the scapegoat for almost everything that doesn’t work on the Web. In particular, bloggers seeking attention, publicity and links love to leverage all the ignorance and prejudice and launch attacks on SEO as a whole again and again.

Recently, another popular blogger, who leads one of the most important technology blogs (which uses all kinds of SEO techniques) did it again. This time it was not the average “SEO is rubbish” attack; it was a broader “search sucks” attack where of course not search engines themselves are guilty of being broken but the scapegoat: SEO.

Before we go on, let me define SEO again for all those who still don’t understand it: SEO is the craft of fixing and improving websites so that they can be found in search results, among others. Of course, good SEO is also good for the users. I know this SEO definition is still kind of abstract, so let me use a metaphor to explain it even better:

Imagine the Web as a virtual world, where search engines provide the transport infrastructure to move from A to B.

Most websites are like buildings, while some are more like cars, buses, trains or even planes. A blog like ours at SEOptimise is like a bus: it has lots of outgoing links and thus leads to lots of places many people want to go to. Whereas a site like Microsoft.com is like a huge building complex or a skyscraper. People need cars and buses, and of course they need an infrastructure to get to where they want to go. Google is like that infrastructure; it has a road, rail and airport system leading to all kinds of destinations. So people need car-like or bus-like sites to get there.

The SEO specialist is like a mechanic.

The SEO specialist doesn’t build the road system or control the airports, but he allows you to get to where you want to go by fixing your car or bus. An SEO may be an architect as well. You may ask an architect to refurbish a home or a shop, or to build one. Now imagine blaming mechanics for harassment by TSA on airports, for dilapidated public transport systems in US cities or the broken railroads in both the US/UK. Did the mechanics repair too many cars, so that the streets are jammed with traffic? Are they guilty of repairing cars? Are there too many planes in the sky because mechanics have fixed them? Are there too many buildings out there because evil architects have refurbished them?

Likewise, blaming the SEO industry for bad search results is nonsense and absurd. Let’s take a recent example from the “increasing spam by SEO means” debate: content farms. Content farms are the Walmarts of the Internet. One stop shops for everything. It may be low quality, cheap and Made in China but people flock there by the thousands. Do you hate Walmart? Why do you go there then? I have read lots of criticism of Walmart but I’ve rarely heard the idea that it’s evil architects who brought us Walmart to pollute our environment. And it’s not evil mechanics fixing your cars who have allowed the public rail or road system to deteriorate.

The only thing you can blame mechanics and architects for is that they broke cars instead of fixing them, or that they built houses that break down or shops that don’t sell.

Incidentally, Techcrunch, the tech blog which has published the nonsense article about SEO being to blame for bad search results, uses outdated SEO techniques such as PageRank sculpting (using the nofollow attribute on internal links). Effectively, they mark their own internal links as untrustworthy. They should blame their own mechanic for being bad at SEO.

* Image by Jeffrey Smith.

Seth's Blog : Asymmetrical mass favors, a tragedy of our commons

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Asymmetrical mass favors, a tragedy of our commons

If the farmer and the baker make a trade, both win. The farmer benefits from having someone turn his wheat into flour and bake it, and the baker gets money from the bread he sells that he can use to buy things he needs (like food).

This sample math of the transaction (Pareto, et. al.) created the world we live in. It also is connected to the idea of a favor.

A favor is the first half of a transaction. I ask you to do something for me today, something where I will probably benefit a lot in exchange for a small effort on your part. Inherent in the idea of a favor, though, is that one day soon, the transaction will be completed. One day, I will do something for you that gives you a benefit.

As Pareto and any economist will tell you, we willfully engage in this transaction because we'll benefit. Maybe not right now, but soon.

By spreading the idea of the trade over time, the favor makes trades more likely to occur, and also makes sure that they are even more efficient. If I'm already holding open the heavy door, holding it two more seconds for you is easy for me. And then, the next time you're holding open the door, you'll be more likely to hold it for me.

If I recommend you for a job, it doesn't take much effort on my part, but you might get three years of gainful employment out of it. And of course, you're happy to complete that transaction as soon as you can, because no one wants to walk around owing favors.

The efficiency caused by this sort of exchange is so extraordinary that we built it into the social contract. I'm not just selfish if I let the door slam as you walk toward the elevator--I'm rude. I'm risking becoming an outcast.

Favors are so ingrained that the next step was inevitable: Mass Symmetric Favors. Halloween is a great example: How else to explain a hundred million people buying half a billion Snickers bars? We give away the candy because it's expected, and because people gave us candy when we were kids, and because people are giving our kids candy as well. To opt out is uncivilized.

School taxes create a similar obligation. If you don't pay when you're childless, there will be no one to pay when your kids are in school. (And you have to live in a world with uneducated people). And so the transactions are spread out over time, everyone giving and taking, not so much keeping score as knowing that a key part of civil society is to participate in these mass fungible favors.

But!

There's a big but. The internet and other connecting tools now make it easy to create the asymmetrical mass favor--in which one person can ask a large number of people, some of them strangers, some friendlies, some friends--for an accommodation that may very well never be repaid.

The simple example is the person running for the Metro North commuter train that leaves at 5:20. She's only 2 minutes late. If she misses it, she's delayed half an hour. Surely the people on the train can wait a hundred and twenty seconds.

Not really. Not if there are 300 people on the train. That's a one-hundred hour penalty on the passengers, and if there's no reasonable expectation of each of them somehow finishing the transaction one day in the future, the entire system will fall apart. No, in the abstract, we WANT the conductor to say 'sorry.'

It gets far more dramatic when we think about spamming 10,000 or a hundred thousand people with your resume or plea for help.

The problem is that under the cover of the social contract, under the guise of doing what's civilized, what some people are doing is beginning exchanges that they and those they engage with know will never be consummated. She's not transacting, she's taking.

And people resent her for it. "It can't hurt to ask," is almost never true, but here, especially, it hurts a lot. What the person looking for the favor is doing is actually undoing the tacit agreement we all live by, by seeking a favor when the recipient has no real (social) choice in the matter.

The favor is too important to be discarded, but the internet is making things that look like favors (but are actually asymmetrical takings) more and more common. It's putting pressure on people who are usually open to a favor to do the difficult thing and just say no.

[Tomorrow: the other side]

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marți, 22 februarie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Have Engineer Friends? Send 'Em Our Way

Engineers: Challenging Problems, Brilliant Co-Workers & Some Cool Bonuses Await You, Too

Why Do We Need So Much Engineering Talent?

Top 10 Reasons Why Should You Join SEOmoz

Live from Cleveland: Winning the Future Forum on Small Business

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Seth's Blog : Asymmetrical mass favors, a tragedy of our commons

Asymmetrical mass favors, a tragedy of our commons

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marți, 22 februarie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Have Engineer Friends? Send 'Em Our Way

Engineers: Challenging Problems, Brilliant Co-Workers & Some Cool Bonuses Await You, Too

Why Do We Need So Much Engineering Talent?

Top 10 Reasons Why Should You Join SEOmoz

Live from Cleveland: Winning the Future Forum on Small Business

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Seth's Blog : Asymmetrical mass favors, a tragedy of our commons

Asymmetrical mass favors, a tragedy of our commons

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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