| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
vineri, 3 februarie 2012
A Blueprint for American-Made Energy
Why Google Thinks SPYW is a Good Idea and You Probably Don’t Graywolf's SEO Blog
Why Google Thinks SPYW is a Good Idea and You Probably Don’t Graywolf's SEO Blog |
| Why Google Thinks SPYW is a Good Idea and You Probably Don’t Posted: 03 Feb 2012 10:34 AM PST
In a recent statement Larry Page said if you don’t get SPYW then maybe you shouldn’t work at Google. To understand why he thinks this is such a good idea–and why the rest of the world thinks it isn’t–we need to revisit the concept of filter bubbles and why they are such a bad idea. Last year Eli Pariser released the book the Filter Bubble (see my review of the the Filter Bubble). As part of the promotion, he was asked to speak at TED. While I wasn’t there, I understand from people who were in attendance that it made several Googlers in the audience … lets go with “uncomfortable” … When your friends aren’t Google employees, using your social graph to influence your search results is somewhere between stupid and insane … Here’s the problem in a nutshell: when you work at Google, your fellow employees, friends, and people you connect with on social networks like Google Plus are going to be some of the smartest, technologically savvy, and Google-centric people in the world. This is not true for the rest of the online population. Using SPYW to take the collective wisdom of your social network of Google employee/friends to influence your search results is a really good idea. When your friends aren’t Google employees, are not the smartest people on the planet, and in some cases are narcissistic and generally a lot more self interested, using your social graph to influence your search results is somewhere between stupid and insane. We come back to the basic concept of filter bubbles. Using filter bubbles only works if everyone in your filter bubble is smart, worldly-wise, and open minded to different view points and perspectives. Paradoxically, this is self-defeating logic. If your filter bubble is “good” and you don’t realize that everyone else’s isn’t, you’ll never get why filters bubbles and ideas like SPYW are such bad ideas. There is only so long you can serve inferior results and distract people with cutesy holiday logos before they decide to try another search engine… To be clear, this isn’t a case of sour grapes. All of my sites that I care about are doing better since SPYW went into effect. I’m playing the “social game”: broadcasting, engaging, and sending Google the signals it’s looking for so my websites benefit from SPYW and personalized search. However, I can tell you thatwhen I use Google as a regular user looking for answers to questions I don’t know and things I need to buy, I see the results are more polluted by the efforts of other marketers like myself who are playing the same social engagement games I do. The search results aren’t better. It’s nice to sit in the ivory tower of the GooglePlex and say this will teach people to choose wisely who they interact with on social networks. But, in reality, that type of thinking shows they are in a filter bubble: people have a tendency to act in their own best interests. Thousands of years of human history prove that people are really good at reacting to short term dangers like a lion or wolf who starts hunting near their home, but people are really bad at reacting to long term dangers like wildlife conservation, widespread deforestation, climate change, energy consumption, financial responsibility, worldwide poverty, and global starvation. As regular users notice a decline in the quality of Google results, most of them won’t understand or quite frankly care that the people in their friend network are to blame. There is only so long you can serve inferior results and distract people with cutesy holiday logos before they decide to try another search engine. photo credit: Shutterstock/NemesisINC No related posts. This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Graywolf's SEO Blog To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
The Hidden Factors in Accomplishing Your Online Marketing Goals - Whiteboard Friday
The Hidden Factors in Accomplishing Your Online Marketing Goals - Whiteboard Friday |
| The Hidden Factors in Accomplishing Your Online Marketing Goals - Whiteboard Friday Posted: 02 Feb 2012 12:42 PM PST Posted by randfish In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we go underneath the surface and bring to light some hidden factors in online marketing. These often overlooked details can have a huge impact in helping us accomplish our goals as online marketers. Please enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below. Video TranscriptionHowdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk about the goals that we try to get people to accomplish on the Web, the things that we're trying to accomplish as online marketers, and what we're trying to optimize for, things like: click-through rate from search results; getting people to subscribe to RSS and e-mail; getting them to click links that are posted on social networks; getting them to share things on social networks, on blogs, on websites of all kinds; getting them to convert from browsing to buying; completing a free trial or downloading a white paper and giving you their information; staying a customer of a subscription product. These goals that we have are traditionally done through optimization tactics that we've talked about many, many times here. But there are hidden factors. There are things that hide beneath the surface that impact and affect all of these, all of the success rates and the conversion rates and the goal rates that you have. They can be so subtle sometimes and so hidden beneath the surface that we don't even realize what's going on. That's what I want to talk about today. Video transcription by Speechpad.com 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! |
| Are Your Titles Irresistibly Click Worthy & Viral?! Posted: 02 Feb 2012 05:01 AM PST Posted by evolvingSEO This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. The 80/20 Value of TitlesRecently, Rand did one of the best Whiteboard Fridays I've seen in a while (I do watch all of them) about increasing the likelihood of your content going viral. He touches briefly upon the importance of your title for click through rate and sharability, but in this post I'd like to take a more in depth look at titles and how they help spread your content. (By the way, this is my first YouMoz - woohoo!) In my opinion, the elements of writing click worthy titles deserve more attention. In the wonderful marketing book "Made To Stick", the Heath brothers note that any good news or editorial writer may spend 80% of their time crafting the title (or "lead") and then whatever time they have left on the body of the content. For those familiar with 80/20, what this means is, the size of the title compared to the actual content (and time spent crafting it) disproportionately affects the success of that content. It's one small piece of text with a lot power! Note: to clarify, I am not necessarily referring to the title tag exclusively. I'm referring to simply the title of a page, post, article... which as you will see below can be the same as your title tag, but doesn't have to be. A Quick Analogy: The Internet As a HighwayIf your webpage was a store on the side of a busy highway, the title's job would be to capture attention and get people in the door. As many of the right people as possible. If you've ever driven on Route 1 heading into Boston, MA, you know what I mean (see photo). Lots of people may pass by your links, tweets and shares, but few may actually stop to come in and check things out. I hope this little analogy illustrates the extreme importance of crafting a clickable title - and that you will join me as I suggest some ideas for making your titles more clickable. Let's go!!! 7 Ingredients of a Click Worthy TitleAssuming all other factors neutral for the moment, let's look at what I think are 7 most important ingredients of your titles;
Ingredient 1: CuriosityYour title should be clear enough that people know what they're going to get when they click, but also leave an element of curiosity - so you almost can't help but to click. You just have to find out what's on the other side. Some examples of elements that can entice curiosity; Curiosity A: Unexpected How do you make something unexpected? Combine two things that usually do not go together, like this; "Diet Coke" is not something you usually expect to see in a post about SEO. 77 thumbs up. Curiosity B: Incomplete Thought or Question Pete's title here makes me curious, because he asks an open question, which I wonder how/if it will be answered within the post. Curiosity C: Present A Conflict (Plot) Rand does a great job here of introducing curiosity because there is an inherent conflict; a choice requiring resolution. Which one will he choose and why? Which do I choose and can I offer an alternative opinion? Will I agree with him? Curiosity D: State What Something Isn't I'm left thinking; It isn't? What Is? Do I know them? What's John going to say? Ingredient 2: Highlight The Benefit Benefit is congruent to differentiation. On the whole, people will visit a page because there is some sort of benefit to them. Useful content, entertainment, or even content that will make them look good if they share it. Why should someone click and visit your page? What are they going to get out of it? Some examples that imply benefit;
These are all common elements of a title that hint at benefit. Like this; Providing a clear benefit is also a way to differentiate your content from others, in that you're implying it holds unique value that can't be found elsewhere. I also like "face-off" - there's a lot of meaning (visual, emotion, tension, etc) packed into those two words. Ingredient 3: Elicit Excitement/EmotionPeople also act on emotion - excitement, fear, hope. Your title should conjure the right emotion in viewers. I don't think people always click purely on emotion, but emotion can certainly support the other ingredients. Things like; Thanks for the tweet Tom :-) I think the emotional aspect (as in this case) can apply more to social media - the title you might craft in a tweet of something, such as Tom's "ridiculously awesome" text here. Some other emotional words are;
You get the idea :-) Note that adverbs (ending in "ly") are quite popular. Honestly, I'm just using the thesaurus for a lot of those :-) But if you're fine with describing your own work in such glamorous words, go for it! I typically reserve this for something I'm really confident about, or if I'm referring to something else, like a product review. Also;
Just remember that not all special type characters work well across different platforms (social, blog themes etc) so use carefully. And they can also get annoying quickly, so use sparingly. Ingredient 4: Make It TangibleThe Health Brother's book "Made To Stick" talks a lot about making your ideas concrete or tangible. I highly recommend going to this page of resources and downloading the free PDF "Made To Stick Success Model" (and read their book!) Great example here though by Mike King; I'm sure we all get an instant clear picture in mind of the "Cat In The Hat", as it's a familiar tangible graphic. Also keep in mind that, in Mike's case especially, a great post can naturally lend its self to a great title. Ingredient 5: Appearance & LengthAlthough, in my opinion, not as important as 1-4, but if you can get your titles to look aesthetically pleasing, even better. Like this; I like what Neil has done here, however intentional or not. The title fits on one line. It looks pleasing graphically, and its seven words long (which is supposedly the recommended length of a title or headline). Ingredient 6: SoundI don't know about you, but I "hear" myself saying the titles in my head. Just like appearance, this is of secondary importance, but if you can put an artistic touch to your titles, it makes them that much better. I'm going to use Neil's title (noted just above) again as an example here. It sounds nice. It has a poetic ring to it.
Can you tell I am a musician? Again, the appearance and sound of your title is secondary, I believe, to the first four ingredients, but in my mind if you can get all 7 elements into a title, you're a freakin' genius. :-) Ingredient 7: ExpectationsDon't advertise "the best burger in town" and then have it be a veggie burger. It could be the best veggie burger that ever existed, but you set the wrong expectation. This is where you need to have some serious alignment and harmony between what you promise in the title and deliver with the content. For this, I'd like to cite an example where the wrong expectation may have been set; While honestly, I've only skimmed this post, the 17 thumbs down and people's comments (some about the title directly) illustrate the point that you don't want misrepresent the content of your post. Whether intentional or not, this post unfortunately seemed to do that. But conversely it did get quite a bit of attention (101 thumbs up and promotion to main blog) so it was a well-written title, just may not have been best aligned with the content. So some questions to ask yourself to double check this;
Finally, note that you don't have to have all of these ingredients all of the time. Certain content may be more inherently exciting, or other content more controversial and thus evokes more curiosity. Breaking The RulesThere are, of course plenty of exceptions to these ingredients in the real world: Exception 1: Created By Influential Person/BusinessIf Rand or Danny Sullivan or Avinash posts a new article, there is an inherent trust and reputation built in. I think the concept of authority is explained well in Rand's post about thought leadership. Along those lines, when Roger (@SEOmoz) tweets out the newest blog post, since this is coming from a popular SEO company, Roger's reputation can boost up click worthiness and thus, the title is not quite as important. Exception 2: Extremely Noteworthy or Newsworthy ContentDuring the time of SOPA or the Google (Not Provided) dilemma or now SPYW, if you were to post something with a decent title that was timely, this would be more likely to get clicks, just by nature of it being a hot topic. Exception 3: Rebellion / Pure Artistic Liberty / Don't CareObviously there are sectors of the web or moments where you just want to throw your hair down and crank out an over the top, creative, artistic, rebellious title. Of course, as I'm now typing this, those sound like they'd get some good clicks as well! They just won't follow the "formula". I shamelessly use my own example; When I was first getting my SEO blog going, I didn't care so much about getting tons of traffic, because I knew I was just starting to blog about SEO, and thus it wouldn't be my best content. It was more for practice, and to have some content there to build upon. So why not have some fun right? And as I imply, the "ingredients" as described above do not always have to follow this formula, depending upon your audience and industry and even goals. Where / How The Title Appears Around the WebWhen you come up with a great title, where do you put it? Should it always go in your title tag? Header? Most often, some version of your title is going to be in three places;
But there are exceptions and considerations. A balance needs to be found between what will appear on-site, in the SERPs in social media or even bookmarking. Some things to keep in mind about each; 1. The SERPs1.The title tag IS the anchor text in the SERPs (unless Google decides to change it). I know this is basic, but SO important to remember when we're composing the title tag not only for rankings but CTR. Doesn't help if it ranks but no one clicks! 2. (In My Opinion) The Title Tag Should Be 50% for SEO and 50% for clicks What do I mean by this? Good practice technical SEO (for ranking) says to put your most important keyword/keyphrase in the title tag, and as close to the front as possible. I'm speaking more about blog posts in this case, but I feel that if the keyword needs to be towards the end, or split up/modified in some way, to create a click worthy title, this is essential. Obviously if you're trying to rank a page for an extremely competitive keyword in the e-commerce space for example, this is going to differ, but that case may be extreme. 3. URLs - This is where you can win for rankings!! Look at the URL in Avinash's post; His TITLE (with "change or perish" is click worthy) but his URL does not need "change or perish". Keep your URLs as clean, focused and optimized as possible. This again is simply my opinion and experience and what I would recommend to clients in most cases. I even recommend switching the order of your words in the URL to get the keywords in the front of the URL, if this was not possible in the title tag. The header will likely NOT appear in the SERPs, unless it ends up in the description. 2. TwitterWhat I find unique about Twitter is, the link anchor text is not the title, which differs from most other places on the web. Thus why I like Twitter as a tool for experimentation, because you can change the headline easily just by writing a new tweet, but it is important to know where the title can come from. Via The Tweet Button Normally, what will auto-fill by default is the title tag; Yet another reason to optimize your title tag for CTR!!! You can of course control to an extent what text auto-fills via the tweet button, and I recommend starting with the Twitter documentation for this. What The User Inputs Often it's the case that people will create their own text to tweet a link, but in many cases they will just copy your page header (this is what I do anyway if just sharing quickly) because it's the easiest thing to do. In many cases, your CMS (WordPress for example) will make your title tag and header the same thing by default (and also add the website name at the end of the title tag). Twitter and URLs This is an interesting and outlying example that Rand pointed out, where the URL can potentially help CTR. That is, when you hover over most URLs in Twitter, you can see the full URL as you hover; Very useful, and this for me will make or break a click 100% of the time. I always hover before clicking. Obviously this is limited to desktop/laptop devices :-) But here you can see that is not always the case, and in this case I am much less likely to click; 3. FacebookAhh... Facebook and the Open Graph. This is where things get interesting for sure. I remember when I first was learning about the Facebook like/share/recommend buttons, I was confused how it all worked. In short though - you have to properly add the Facebook open graph meta tags to your site to control what appears when people use Facebook share buttons, and even to an extent, when people simply cut and paste a link into Facebook. And I would highly recommend reading this post and especially ---> this post by Aaron Friedman on Search Engine Land for more details on controlling your Facebook titles around the web. 4. Google PlusAs expected, Goolge Plus uses your title tag for the title of a link when sharing; It's OK to share stuff about Facebook on Google Plus right? So to conclude for implementation, in general:
Analyzing The Effectiveness Of Your TitlesWhile an in depth technique for measuring CTR is out of the scope of this post (it still seems CTR is one of those Holy Grail metrics for SEO - deceptively hard to calculate average CTR and even actual CTR for specific sites. Not just in SERPs, but everywhere around the web. If SEOmoz developed a way to truly and accurately measure this, I would use it! Do you agree?) .. I can however point you to a few resources, which can help you get a basic feel for how your CTR is going; Bit.ly DataThere are many options for URL shorteners, but I personally use and like bit.ly, so we'll focus on that here. First, I recommend reading bit.ly's documentation on how they capture data and display metrics. Secondly, Rand mentions how if you add the + (plus) sign to the end of any bit.ly URL, you can see the stats for that link. This is awesome!! For instance, take someone like Tim Ferriss, who has a relatively high amount of followers on Twitter. I can take a link he's shared on Twitter and see how many clicks its received. Not only that, I can look through his entire list of publically shortened URLs. That said, I'm sure there are technical geniuses who can figure out a more robust method to measuring and using publically available data like this, but just eyeballing it is worthwhile, to study what titles have been effective. External ResourcesClick Through Rate For Twitter - Rand wrote a great post, which attempts to measure Twitter CTR in conjunction with some other interesting metrics. SERP Turkey - The new tool by Tom Anthony, which allows you to test CTR in the SERPs. Admittedly I have not tried it yet, but would also like to say it deserves more attention! Richard Baxter wrote about it here in a fantastic post about how search intention may influence CTR. Practice Writing Titles!A/B Test TitlesAgain, using bit.ly, you can;
This isn't to be scientific, as much as to practice and have fun!! Re-Write Other People's TitlesI love this one. I regularly will compose tweets to other people's content and write my own title, use bit.ly and measure the clicks. Again, we're just having fun and practicing here, not necessarily being super scientific. Write Ten Titles in 60 SecondsSometime you just have to get those ideas moving. Try setting a timer and jot down ten titles as fast as you can!! Just do it!! The creative moment can be a powerful thing. Study Non-Web SourcesAs Gianluca pointed out in his comments to Rand's post, look at how newspapers and editorial print publications compose titles. This is not a new concept, in fact as you'll learn in Made To Stick, the idea of crafting a lead has been around a long time!! You can gain a lot of inspiration from non-web sources. Try Identifying the "Ingredients" Of Any Given Title;
Inspiration & ResourcesThe Class I'd Like to Teach - 37Signals - Love this little piece by co-founder Jason Fried. He talks about writing a "one sentence paper" but the spirit of it certainly applies to titles. 6 Tips for Improving Twitter CTR - Get Elastic - Fantastic article with a wide variety of suggestions for improving CTR in Twitter (not just Titles), but things like link placement, length, word types etc. Irresistible Headlines - Jonathan Fields - I confess, a few of my "ingredient" ideas for titles came from this post, and although Jonathan's SEO tips are pretty basic, there's some fantastic idea in this post. One interesting suggestion he makes is that the use of numbers, specifically the number '7' has shown highest success. Anything You Want - Derek Sivers - Founder of CDBaby, Derek Sivers (I think) is brilliant at tangible little headlines. His work in general is of inspiration. But specifically, in his book "Anything You Want" he tells an interesting story about the value of user feedback when sending out huge bulk emails to their mailing list. If one sentence was slightly unclear, they'd get thousands of confused replies back, that would take $5,000 of man-hours to respond to. Many of us do not get this type of feedback loop from our webpages and titles. If something is unclear or uninspiring, all we get is silence. He makes the point - imagine you were to email thousands of people your webpage/article - would you get lots of confused replies back? To that I'd add - imagine your title was the subject of the email. Would it get opened? Made To Stick Resources - The Heath Brothers - Previously mentioned a few times in this post, I probably learned the most about crafting a good title and making your words and ideas stick from their book. Highly recommend you check it out! The Thesaurus - One of my favorite SEO tools!! Helps you find that perfect word. Final Thought: Titles Are TimelessPerhaps what I love most is the skill of crafting a click worthy title is timeless. While so many things in SEO change so fast, this is at least one facet that is deeply rooted in the past, and will thus endure for a long time. To me, it's worthwhile and inspiring to step back and identify these timeless elements in a field that changes so rapidly. And it helps me remember that, despite the strong technical aspects to SEO, there is plenty of room for art and humanity. That, and we'll still all have jobs in 20 years :-) What Did You Think?As mentioned, this was my first YouMoz. *Wild Applause!!* Perhaps a bit overdue by my standards (I'd drafted and scrapped two posts prior to settling on this one). I would LOVE to hear your comments, suggestions and questions below: I will respond to all, promise :-) You can also hit me up on Twitter. 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! |
| You are subscribed to email updates from SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
Postări
