miercuri, 1 februarie 2012

White House Hangout: Startup America

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

White House Hangout: Startup America

On Thursday, February 2nd at 5:30 p.m EST., Steve Case, Aneesh Chopra, and Gene Sperling are joining a conversation with Americans across the country in a special White House Hangout focused on Startup America. Will you join them?

Startup America is a White House initiative that was launched to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. In honor of its one-year anniversary, we’re hosting a special White House Hangout, a live multi-person video chat, through Google+ to talk with Americans across the country about the initiative and answer questions about President Obama’s new proposals to accelerate startup and small business growth.

Joining the Startup America Hangout will let you engage with one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs and Senior Administration officials:

Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council (read more)
Steve Case, Chairman of the Startup America Partnership (read more)
Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer (read more)

We hope you’ll Hangout with us on Thursday, February 2nd at 5:30 p.m. Here’s how you can get involved:

What’s you question for Gene, Steve, and Aneesh? Starting now, you can ask your questions on the White House Google+ page, and you just might be invited to join the live Hangout.
Watch the Hangout live at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 2nd on WhiteHouse.gov/Live, YouTube.com/WhiteHouse or the White House Google+ page.

And in case you missed it, President Obama participated in the first White House Hangout from the West Wing earlier this week. In the first completely virtual interview from the White House, the President sat down with people from across the country to discuss his State of the Union Address.

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The SEOmoz Help Team: How We Do Customer Service

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 12:51 PM PST

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

If you're reading this blog, congratulations! You are a customer of SEOmoz. I've probably personally spoken to at least a few of you, and provided help and support to many more of you. Have you ever wondered how SEOmoz supports 15,000 PRO members and over 250,000 free members and blog readers? After all, Roger can't personally answer every email we receive here. He's not Santa Claus! Instead, the six mozzers that make up the Help Team answer all of the emails, phone calls, and chat requests we get every day. I want to tell you a little bit more about them and give you a look at the way we've built the SEOmoz support channels to meet our overall goal: to provide the best customer service on the planet. It's a hard goal to reach, but I can't think of any more worthwhile endeavor.

The Help Teamsters

Crissy Hall

Crissy is old school! She came to SEOmoz in the spring of 2010. Back then, the Help Team was just Sarah Bird (our COO) and Crissy, and I joined soon after. She loves the fact that she’s been able to watch our team and SEOmoz grow since she started. Things are always changing with our site and tools, and as she says, it keeps us on our toes! Her favorite part of working at SEOmoz is the balance between fun and productivity that makes our team and company such an amazing place to work. Crissy spends her time helping users with their tool and billing questions, planning kick-ass Help Team outings (we made terrariums together last month), and helping the Marketing & Ops teams keep track of our weekly membership reporting.

When she’s not in the office, Crissy likes to take her son Sam on adventures around Seattle. She likes to sew up a storm, particularly to make clothes for her toddler (instant gratification, according to her). In the "warmer" Seattle months she rides her bicycle, named "Tom Selleck," to work and back.

Megan Singley

Megan's been a help teamster for a little over a year now and loves connecting with our users. With several years of experience in customer service, she really strives to make every interaction with SEOmoz users a positive one. Besides responding to emails, calls, and chats, Megan plans and organizes our weekly software demos and investigates billing issues to keep any possible fraudsters at bay. She's also been known to do some writing, whether it be on the SEOmoz blog or in product messages throughout the site.

When not at the MozPlex, Megan likes to watch The Daily Show and Battlestar Galactica with her cat, Lily, and her awesomely-cool-fun-amazing neighbor across the hall, me! (Those are her words of course.) She also enjoys reading anything she can get her hands on (lately, it's been The Hunger Games series) and even started a library for the office. On weekends, she hangs out with friends (including lots of fellow Mozzers), goes dancing to anything from funk & soul to 90's hip hop, and cooks as much as possible.

Kenny Martin

Kenny joined up last year and is one of our few Washington natives! He grew up in a small, sleepy Northwestern town, thus is afraid of the sun. He compensates for a lack of natural energy sources by drinking copious amounts of black coffee. Kenny spends most of his time pursuing the TAGFEE dream by diagnosing tough technical issues, getting his hands dirty with a little web design, and filming each week's Whiteboard Friday.

He never wanders off too far away from his MacBook and for this reason alone his girlfriend mistakenly thinks he loves it more than her. It's probably because most of his spare time is spent designing websites or leaning about some fantastic new technology on the internet. He also loves the Daily Show, puppies, pizza, and tacos.

Nick Sayers

Nick joined our team in September last year and got up to speed lickety-split! Like the rest of our team mates, he answers customer emails, phone calls, and live chat questions. Nick has also spear-headed our new help documentation project that gives customers the resources learn anything about SEOmoz's tool set. This effort makes our company more scalable by answering customers' questions before they call, write, or chat with us, which gives them more instant gratification, as well. Needless to say, he spends a lot of his time creating screencasts and typing up FAQs. Nick has a passion for educating and helping others, so is constantly looking for new resources to show SEOmoz's customers.

Nick enjoys film, video games, reading, and cooking. He is an avid reader of anything from Eastern Philosophy to some of the nerdiest sci-fi/fantasy novels ever written. When not at work, Nick is usually spending time with his wife and partner in crime, Becky. On most nights, they cook new recipes together, play an unhealthy amount of Left 4 Dead 2 or Skyrim, and watch movies. On the weekends, Nick and Becky explore Washington and go to retro theaters. Nick is also involved in independent film-making and has produced, written, and directed a feature film and many shorts. On the sci-fi geek front, Nick has a huge collection of memorabilia from the Alien(s) films. He also has a cat named Ash after Bruce Campbell's character in the Evil Dead series. Of course, this means Nick calls her Evil Ash when she is bad.

Chiaryn Miranda

Chiaryn is the newest edition to the team, having been here for about two months. Don't let that fool you though: she's caught up real quick-like! She's been doing customer service for a long time and is working on learning new things about SEO every day. What better place to learn, eh?

When she's not in the office, she likes to make art and take photographs. She's been working on a sketchbook that will be going on a national tour. She also likes to take trips around the beautiful Seattle waterfront with her camera. When she can, she tries to take candid portraits. Check out some of her artwork on her Art House Co-Op page. She's also an avid movie fan, with a particular love of horror movies, and reads as much as possible. In her words, she'll gobble up pretty much any nonfiction book you put in front of her. That's why we call her Turkey Miranda! Just kidding - that's not why we call her that.

Aaron Wheeler

If you've made it this far, you've probably figured out that this is me! I started at SEOmoz in the summer of 2010 and am loving every minute of being here. A couple months ago I became the manager of the Help Team, which means I do what I can to support the lovely members of our team, and provide our customers with the best service on the planet. It's a tough goal - we have very discerning customers - but a goal I think we can eventually fulfill. Some background: I studied sociology and cognitive science at UC San Diego, but starting doing SEO after graduating. Turns out that ranking for attorneys in San Diego is tough work! I left San Diego early 2010 for Seattle, and eventually found my way at SEOmoz.

Besides working at a place I love, I enjoy reading (currently Steve Jobs), watching great shows (currently my third run of Deadwood), and seeing my favorite bands in Seattle's historical music venues (this month: Junip, Nada Surf, and The Asteroids Galaxy Tour). I also enjoy trying out vegan recipes with my girlfriend, Holly Haymaker, who has the coolest name in the world and a whimsical interactive e-cards site, to boot!

What Do We Do?

You know how, sometimes, you have a question about our site and tools? Or about your account or payment? We're the people you call, email, live chat, and post to our help forums for. Unlike huge companies with call centers and many tiers of support and different people doing phones and chats, though, everyone on our team does everything. It's a great way to keep everyone fully informed about site issues and keep our support fresh and agile. That's not all we do, though! Let me show you all of the ways we keep our customers happy:

Email: Using a Robust Ticketing System

When you send an email to help@seomoz.org, it gets forwarded to our ticketing system. We use ZenDesk, the same help desk software used by companies like Groupon and Box.com. ZenDesk allows us to manage customer emails, assign them to specific people, and easily share them with engineering and product so we can get answers to questions quickly! This is important because we receive over 2,000 emails a month: way too many to respond to from a single email address effectively.

How Does It Work?

When we receive an email, the sender gets an email back with a ticket number. As you see, it gets added to our queue of tickets to reply to. We try to answer 80% of tickets within 8 hours, but if it's a situation where someone has a billing problem or can't access their account (lost password, etc.), we try to answer even faster than that. Our goal is for each member of the Help Team to answer 20 tickets per day. If we don't have the knowledge to answer a question, we'll send the ticket to our engineers and product managers to get an answer. If it's a bug, we let the customer know and open a bug fix with our Triage team. They assign the bug to an engineer, who fixes it and lets them know. Triage sends it back to us when it's fixed, and we email the customer and close the ticket.

When we close a ticket, we send a one-question survey through SurveyMonkey asking how happy we made a customer with our customer service. We try to make 90% of our customers happy, and 30% of our customers delighted. Sometimes, though, we fail to satisfy a customer. When this happens, we ask for the customer's email address and ticket number so we can get in touch and make it right. I've found that when a customer has had a bad experience, reaching out to them to make it right almost always turns the situation around.

Phones: Not a Phone Bank

We get a relatively small amount of calls at SEOmoz: about 100 to 150 a week. Makes sense, as most SEOs do their research online. =) We don't have a sales team and don't do phone marketing, so the only employees that really have phones here are in Operations or the Help Team. We get a lot of calls from potential customers asking about what we do, though we do get a few from PRO members, too. Here's a chart with our phone stats for last week:

How Does it Work?

When a person calls in to SEOmoz, they usually start out talking to Hillari, our fantastic office manager. She makes sure they're not a spambot and, when they're a lovely customer, transfers them to the Help Team pool. The first available person picks it up and starts helping! Pretty straightforward process, as you telephone users know. After the call is over, we try to create a ticket and follow up with the customer to make sure they had all their questions answered. If it's an SEO question, we refer them to the Q&A or to our list of recommended SEO consultants.

Live Chat: What You Need, When You Need It

When potential customers are browsing our software sales pages, they often have questions they want answered now. Same thing goes for existing customers with questions about a payment or their account status: these are the kinds of questions people want to know the answers to quickly. Live Chat comes to the rescue! Instead of requiring a customer to call or send in an email, we usually keep someone logged into Live Chat throughout the day so customers can get help immediately. This leads to happier customers and cuts down on our ticket and phone levels. We use the awesome chat widget SnapEngage, and installed it to a few choice pages.

How Does it Work?

Kenny coordinated with SnapEngage to create a custom view of the widget. When you click "Chat Now," it pops up a dialog box that displays three FAQs, and has a field for the email address of the customer and the question they have. When they've typed those in, all they have to do is click "Message" to open a ticket, or "Live Chat" to start talking! Interesting point: we didn't always have those three FAQs. Adding them reduced chats about these topics about 90%. Yay for preemptive answers!

After we finish chatting with a customer, the chat transcript is automatically added to ZenDesk as a ticket, where we can save it for future review and for long-term tracking. We can also follow up with a customer there. If we're offline, or if a customer chooses the "Message" option instead of the "Live Chat" option, it creates a ticket from the get-go instead.

We can also track the types of computers and browsers people are using when they chat with us, which helps us diagnose the issue faster and get an idea of what our average customer needing immediate support looks like. The chart to the left is a look at last month's chatters.

Forums & Documentation: Help More People More Quickly

We maintain both our customer service and API forums through the SEOmoz help desk. We've also started adding all of our tool documentation, videos, and walkthroughs here to make them all available in the same place. This makes our Help Desk a one-stop shop for looking at frequently asked questions, checking out known issues with the site or tools, and just generally getting more knowledgeable about how to use a PRO subscription to its fullest. It's also where we ask customers to submit feature requests.

How Does it Work?

When a customer has a question, they can go to our Help Desk and do a search for the answer, or browse existing questions and documentation. Many of the forums are straight-up questions and answers, but a lot of them are longer-form pages that are part of our documentation project. We want to document the bejewels out of our tools! Yes, there will always be questions from customers, but the more information you can put in their hands early on, the more happy they'll be, and the more scalable our service becomes.

One cool feature: the Feature Request Forum has a voting system so customers can vote on the features they want to see most. Our product team reviews this feedback to get an idea of what to prioritize and what to put further down the roadmap. It's a great way to get customers more involved in SEOmoz's future!

This, That & The Other: Events, Office Tours, Webinars, Demos, Cookies...

We do a bunch of other stuff to help our customers, and it's hard to get it all down in words! We give weekly software demos to help new customers get the most out of PRO,

represent at MozCations,

give tours of the MozPlex and help out at MozCon,

and bake plenty of cookies (you gotta help your fellow mozzers out, too!):

All in all, it's a wonderful life. SEOmoz has the best customers around, and there's no other place I'd rather be. I'd love to share more with you and hear your stories about great customer service, as well as get feedback on what you'd love to see more of in the customer service biznez. Please feel free to write me in the comments, shoot me an email, or tweet me at @aaron_wheeler. See you around the site!

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Mr. President Goes to the Auto Show

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Mr. President Goes to the Auto Show

Yesterday, President Obama made the trip across town to the Washington Auto Show to look at some of the incredible new vehicles being built by Detroit and said:

Let me just say, when you look at all these cars, it is testimony to the outstanding work that's been done by workers -- American workers, American designers. The U.S. auto industry is back. The fact that GM is back, number one, I think shows the kind of turnaround that's possible when it comes to American manufacturing.

Check out the video of the President's visit to the Washington Auto Show.

President Barack Obama is shown the American Pride Chevrolet Camaro, as Ed Welburn, Vice President of Global Design for General Motors, explains design and manufacturing details of the car during a visit to the Washington Auto Show at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., Jan. 31, 2012. Gerard Murphy, President of the Washington New Automobile Dealers Association, is at left. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

HTML5 & SEO

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 04:56 AM PST

It would be fair to say that pretty much every major change to the online environment is greeted with the same two questions by the vast majority of the SEO community –

What is it?
How can I use it to boost my SEO campaigns?

So with adoption of the next major evolution of HTML becoming more common, and having a growing feeling that it was about to come up in more client meetings, I decided it would be a good time to check how I can potentially make the most of HTML5.

I won't go into a whole explanation of what HTML5 is now – I will leave that for the web design blogs – but the highlights as I understand them are:

A more descriptive set of markup tags; for example, nav, article, aside and footer
The introduction of Canvas element could be used for rendering graphs or images dynamically without the need for browser plugins
A Video element which will allow videos to be embedded without the need for third-party plugins; for example, Adobe Flash
Sites will be able to geolocate users without having to use IP address detection

It is apparent from this list that there are some pretty big changes between HTML4 and HTML5. For example, I'm guessing that every SEO will spot the third bullet point – video without the need for Flash – and realise the obvious content indexing benefit this will offer as a result.

But will you get any direct benefit from being first to the party (so to speak)? Will changing your site to HTML5 be a quick route to top spot in the rankings? Well, the simple answer is no! And you don't have to just take my word for it either; Googler John Mu left the following responses to related questions on the Google Webmaster Central Help Forum:

In general, we work hard to understand as much of the web as possible, but I have a feeling that HTML5 markup is not yet as widely in use (and in use correctly) that it would make sense for us to use it as a means of understanding content better. As HTML5 gains in popularity and as we recognize specific markup elements that provide value to our indexing system, this is likely to change, but at the moment I would not assume that you would have an advantage by using HTML5 instead of older variants.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2d4592cbb613e42c&hl=en

and

In general, our crawlers are used to not being able to parse all HTML markup – be it from broken HTML, embedded XML content or from the new HTML5 tags. Our general strategy is to wait to see how content is marked up on the web in practice and to adapt to that. If we find that more and more content uses HTML5 markup, that this markup can give us additional information, and that it doesn’t cause problems if webmasters incorrectly use it (which is always a problem in the beginning), then over time we’ll attempt to work that into our algorithms. With that in mind, I definitely wouldn’t want to stand in the way of your implementing parts of your site with HTML5, but I also wouldn’t expect to see special treatment of your content due to the HTML5 markup at the moment. HTML5 is still very much a work in progress, so it’s great to see bleeding-edge sites making use of the new possibilities.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=1d3850aec4e3dd96&hl=en

Although both of these comments date from late 2010, there doesn't seem to have been any further opinion put forward to suggest that this is not Google's current view, or not that I have found anyway.

So does this mean that you should ignore it all together? Well, no. This may sound odd having seen the opinions offered by Google, but there do seem to be some credible theories of the indirect benefits of implementing HTML5.

First, due to the fact that HTML5 is still a relatively "new" technology, a number of people will link to other sites that are using it. This means that an HTML5 site or piece of content (an infographic for example), if implemented well or uniquely, will accumulate links and social signals naturally. Check out this music video from Arcade Fire, which makes use of HTML5 and Google Maps to personalise the video to you. I'm not a fan of their music but I shared the link. Obviously this will only be a benefit until HTML5 becomes commonplace.

As well as this, it is believed that HTML5 will reduce the volume of code required to render a page, so it therefore has two indirect benefits. The first is that it will improve page load speed, which is a minor ranking factor, as well as having an effect on conversion. Secondly, it should increase the likelihood that information would be found by the search engine bots, as a result of them being able to process more site pages (if you believe that the search engines expend a limited amount of resources on a site).

Finally, you will be 'future proofing' your site. Even though Google's current position is that it will not aid rankings, the Webmaster Tools responses imply that it may do in the future once it is more widely adopted.

When HTML5 becomes a web standard, I believe that at some point it will be worked into the algorithm as a result of its wide use. Being an early adopter means there should be an immediate boost if and when it is added to algorithm. It is also safe to assume that this change wouldn't be publicly announced, so you will get a short competitive advantage until everyone else catches on.

Anyone who has read some of the other posts around on HTML5 and SEO are probably thinking I have missed out one of the most obvious benefits – the new markup. From what I have seen, a lot of people believe that it will indicate to the search engines what type of content is on a page and how important it is, meaning you are really able to draw attention to content.

While this may be the intention, I personally believe the ease with which this may be manipulated to promote low quality sites is such that it is likely only ever going to be a low value ranking factor, if it is one at all. It is very similar to the keywords metatag, which was so easily abused that Google finally discounted it as a ranking factor. If all you have to do is to put content within a certain tag to boost its rankings, everyone will do it.

So overall, while I personally wouldn't recommend that a site change to HTML5 as some kind of SEO silver bullet, there are enough incidental SEO benefits to make it worthwhile to work into new builds or redesigns, or to use for content generation (such as infographics).

Android Fails to Render URLs with Dashes Via Bit.ly

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 05:41 AM PST

Android platform is not able to render URLs shortened by bit.ly, which include dashes in blog post titles. To guarantee all users can read your posts via mobiles, be sure not to utilise dashes in blog post titles.

Last week, a client flagged up to us that their site wasn't getting Android traffic on certain posts. True, Android traffic is never high, but when it slips to 0 visits, there must be something wrong. When the client looked into the posts, it was evident the titles of these blog posts each had a dash (-) in them. The majority of traffic to these posts comes from Twitter via Bit.ly links.

With the help of my local Orange Shop (HTC Hero Graphite anyone?), and some rigorous testing by @spamhendricks, it can be concluded that Android is not rendering bit.ly links which have dashes in certain instances. Specifically, when a blog post title utilises a dash, a bit.ly link won't render on the Android platform.

Example

For example, here is an SEOptimise blog post with a dash in the title.

The URL for this blog post is:

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/01/did-google-just-roll-out-panda-3-2-2012-edition.html

As you can see, dashes are utilised in the URL for two reasons. First, the dash between "roll-out" appears in the URL. Second, all spaces in the title are also accounted for as dashes.

This link is then bit.ly-fied to appear as:

http://bit.ly/xgR9xq

If you have an Android phone, this bit.ly link will not render.

Significance

This issue is most likely to affect blog promotion across the social media sphere. But it can also affect press release promotion, news stories, and essentially anything where a dash is included in the H1, and then promoted via the popular link shortening service of Bit.ly.

Inconsistencies

What I'm struggling to understand is why this Android rendering issue is only valid if the title of the blog post has a dash; the issue is not reflected in the URL.

This URL from the earlier example for the blog post "Did Google Just Roll-Out Panda 3.2 (2012 edition)" includes one dash in the title of the blog post.

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/01/did-google-just-roll-out-panda-3-2-2012-edition.html

This second URL is for the blog post without any dashes "Foursquare 2012 | Experience, Thoughts and 6 Immense Tips for Your Business".

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/01/foursquare-2012-experience-thoughts-and-6-immense-tips-for-your-business.html

In this second example, the URL still utilises dashes to make up for the spaces in the post title. And yet, in this second example the bit.ly link renders on Android platforms just fine. Why?

What do you think? Why does the title of the blog post equate to Android users being able to view the post or not view the post? Is this enough reason to stop utilising bit.ly?

miercuri, 1 februarie 2012

White House Hangout: Startup America

The SEOmoz Help Team: How We Do Customer Service

The SEOmoz Help Team: How We Do Customer Service

The Help Teamsters

Crissy Hall

Megan Singley

Kenny Martin

Nick Sayers

Chiaryn Miranda

Aaron Wheeler

What Do We Do?

Email: Using a Robust Ticketing System

Phones: Not a Phone Bank

Live Chat: What You Need, When You Need It

Forums & Documentation: Help More People More Quickly

This, That & The Other: Events, Office Tours, Webinars, Demos, Cookies...

Mr. President Goes to the Auto Show

HTML5 & SEO

HTML5 & SEO

Example

Significance

Inconsistencies

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

miercuri, 1 februarie 2012

White House Hangout: Startup America

The SEOmoz Help Team: How We Do Customer Service

The SEOmoz Help Team: How We Do Customer Service

The Help Teamsters

Crissy Hall

Megan Singley

Kenny Martin

Nick Sayers

Chiaryn Miranda

Aaron Wheeler

What Do We Do?

Email: Using a Robust Ticketing System

Phones: Not a Phone Bank

Live Chat: What You Need, When You Need It

Forums & Documentation: Help More People More Quickly

This, That & The Other: Events, Office Tours, Webinars, Demos, Cookies...

Mr. President Goes to the Auto Show

HTML5 & SEO

HTML5 & SEO

Example

Significance

Inconsistencies

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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