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Getting On-Page SEO Right in 2012 and Beyond - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 07:59 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Many of you are already familiar with our On-Page Reports. Keyword targeted On-Page SEO is still important, but as algorithms change, so must your On-Page optimization strategy.

This week, Rand looks at the future of On-Page and how to move beyond the keywords to drive traffic and delivery for a better experience.

Video Transcription

"Howdy, SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about getting on-page SEO right in 2012, the modern era and beyond. Old school SEO, on-page SEO is still very much in the forefront of people's minds.

In fact, if you're an SEOmoz Pro subscriber, you're actually seeing a lot of the kind of classic, old school stuff that's easily measurable, the keyword targeted optimization inside your on-page SEO reports, and that stuff is important. It still matters. I'll talk about that. But there's a lot of new stuff that we need to be thinking about as SEOs in terms of what true on-page optimization means in the modern era.

So let's start by taking a little history lesson here. Old on-page SEO had some sort of classic best practices, like, "Oh, these things correlate best to pages that perform well in Google," which doesn't necessarily mean that that's causal. But it does mean that lots of people who are succeeding are doing these things right, and so maybe we should follow in their footsteps.

This is classic is stuff. It's keyword usage, keyword phrase usage. It's title tag one to two times and at the start of the title element. It's the keyword used maybe a few times exactly in the body content and partially in the body content. That can vary by how much, and it probably has nothing to do with density, but we do want to get it in there. We probably want to get it into the top paragraph so that people who are reading find it relevant.

We want to put the keyword in the URL if possible. We know that the URL gets put on other web pages and linked to us, which means we get some anchor text out of that. We could be putting the keyword in the H tag, H1 tag, Hx tag. We were kind of confused. We don't really know whether this actually matters.

That could be one of those very low correlation elements at least in terms of ranking. So we're not really sure whether that's important. But we do know we want to put it in the headline so that when somebody gets to a page they see, "Oh yeah, look. There's the keyword I was looking for in this article or this blog post or this e-commerce product page or this category, whatever it is, is about the thing that I want."

Keyword in the ALT attribute. We have an image, and that image has an ALT attribute and the keyword is inside. The ALT is in the code of the image tag itself, and we want the keyword in there. That looked like it had a surprising correlation with pages that do well.

We want keyword in links pointing to the page internally on our own site, those internal anchor texts phrases. People would jump through all sorts of hoops to try and get that done. Yeah, we want to throw in some related terms and phrases, kind of fitting that topic modeling stuff.

Great. Good. This stuff is not unimportant anymore. It's not like this has lost all its value. But it's definitely not the only thing that we need to be thinking about in 2012. I mean on-page optimization has grown and expanded just like all of SEO has. This is the kind of stuff that I'm talking about for the modern day on-page optimizers.

So first thing and most important is that SEO isn't that new anymore, and search isn't that new anymore. Just ranking for something used to produce a lot of value in terms of getting visits and getting brand awareness and maybe getting direct conversions in a lot of cases. But unless we do this, that we overlap the searcher intent, what users want, and the page content purpose, we're missing out on that.

People abandon search results much more quickly than they used to. Rankings doesn't necessarily lead to the traffic. We see click-through rates sometimes on position two, three, or four being higher than on position one because something is more interesting about the listing. You see abandoned rates seem to be taken into account, maybe not directly, maybe indirectly by Google and by Bing.

So something else is going on. And this, if we can solve this equation, solve this Venn diagram, I promise wonderful things will happen with your SEO. It's something that we didn't always think about in the past that we need to, and that is: What is this user looking for? That's the red circle here.

The user wants something when they do a search. Let's say I search for creative watches. I'll show you guys my watch. It's very cool. Right?
Creative watch designs, can you see that? It's my ZIIIRO watch. It's super cool. You should search for it. It's ZIIIRO. I'm going to drop this down here.

That ZIIIRO watch is very creative. They do terrible SEO on their site. I apologize for that, but regardless. So if I'm looking for creative watch designs and what the page delivers to me is watch brands that I've already heard of, that aren't particularly creative, and they're not unique or useful to me, maybe some people have that. Maybe the overlap is going to be in here for some folks. But you've got to pick.

You've got to make this bigger. Please get as many of the people who want the thing that they're typing into the search engine and what the page provides, make that overlap. If you can make that one circle in this Venn diagram, you win. You win at SEO. This is incredibly important.

All right. Make listings in the search results themselves outstanding. This means Sschema.org. This means rel=author. This means video XML sitemaps. This means all the kinds of new markup that are available to put in a search results. So I want my rel=author so that I can appear in a little picture here next to the search results because I know that having my profile picture there increases click-through rate.

I've seen it before in tests with SEOmoz stuff where we rank one and two for something. Or we'll rank number one and we'll rank number two with a rel=author listing, and we get more traffic on that one. Oh, my gosh, clearly we know that that's getting a higher click-through rate.

We want the keyword phrase in the title, but we need that title to be useful and interesting and sharable. It should be fascinating. That headline needs to sell something beyond just, "Yes, we have the keyword you typed in on the page." It has to compel and entice you. The headline and the meta description and the URL, they're an advertisement.

If you think of this the way you think of your AdWords copy or your ad copy for an advertisement that appears in print or appears in digital media somehow, that's what you're seeking. You're trying to draw someone's attention in and make them interested in clicking this. So just having the keyword targeting to try and rank well is no longer the only thing we're worried about.

Very important today, too, I wrote about this on my blog, the dot.com or the brand name of the website appearing in the URL is something that people look at very, very heavily. They bias their clicks by what appears in the URL because they're starting to recognize domain names as brands and prefer some domains over others. So you better be building up a brand name strategy.

If it's online-watches-that-rock.info as opposed to rockingwatches.com, I could imagine rockingwatches is a brand and I never head of it. Maybe it's interesting. I'll go check it out. But online-watches-that, no, I'm out. That brand is pulling me in even if I don't quite recognize it yet. So these outstanding search results are now a part of your on-page optimization.

Pages that load fast, it's almost weird. We were in this era of broadband, and it's like, "Oh yeah, things are getting so fast." But that's actually stopped. So broadband rates have expanded, especially outside the U.S. In particularly Scandinavian countries, in some parts of Europe, in some parts of Eastern Europe, some parts of Asia, Taiwan, they're getting much faster broadband than the U.S. is.

The U.S.'s broadband unfortunately due to some monopolies here and some government lobbying and all that sort of mess, our broadband rates are actually not expanding as fast. So having pages that load fast, that aren't hugely intensive, that take four or five seconds or less is really important. Having responsive design where this title and menu element and the images get shrunk down so that all that side bar content or maybe the heavy advertising and stuff makes it's way into a smaller page on a mobile device or on an iPad, or an Android tablet, or those kinds of things is extremely important.

You can see conversion rates and click-through rates, sorry, time on site and crawl rate, all these things that influence not just how search engines interact and how you rank, but also whether your index and how you perform with users. So incredibly important.

And then two last things, pages nowadays have to be socially sharable. That means if you have any content that's sort of targeted at things like Pinterest, you better have that great image that can fit in there. If you know that your posts are going on Facebook, you better have a graphic that fits the proportions, that shows up well when the URL is shared on Facebook, shared on Google+.

You want to have that special markup that makes you appear in Twitter's results like Twitpic does and Lockers is doing. SlideShare is doing this. They're all adding those tags so that content can appear directly in the body of tweets, which is really, really smart, because they know that their content's being shared there.

It also means that you have to worry about the title and the meta description tag which makes its way now into Google+ and into Facebook as the description on the side next to the URL. That socially sharing thing is something we never had to worry about in classic SEO.

But the last point is, oh yeah, all this stuff that mattered in the past
,the old on-page SEO, still matters today. A lot of it still matters today for that classic SEO kind of ranking things and a lot for usability types of stuff and even for branding. You want that keyword in the URL so that matches to the description there. You want the keyword in the title, and you want it probably at least in the headline so that when someone reaches the page . . .

All of these worlds, these worlds of usability and user experience and social and SEO, are all coming together. It's not just classic SEO anymore. It's not just social media marketing anymore. It's not just content marketing. If these practices don't work together, we don't really get optimized the way we want to.

So on-page SEO, in 2012, is a big, big broad thing. I hope these tips will help you not just to rank, but to perform.

All right everyone, thanks for joining me. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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This Week Inside the White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, October 12, 2012

This Week Inside the White House

This week, the President established a new national monument in honor of Cesar Chavez, declared Fire Prevention Week, and had a discussion with Diane Sawyer. Meanwhile, the White House honored educational innovators and 4-H and FFA Champions of Change.

We also sat down with White House Curator Bill Allman, who led us through some of the building's 200 year-old fire damage -- from the fire of 1814 that burned the White House to the ground.

Check out this week's behind-the-scenes look at the White House.

10 Tips, Tools and Resources for Online Copywriters

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 05:15 AM PDT

Web marketing is a constantly developing challenge and it can be useful to have staff who specialise in particular areas. That's certainly true with online copywriting – there's such a lot to consider that having a dedicated copywriter can make a real difference to your overall online performance.

But whether you're a writer trying to perfect your online capabilities, or an SEO exec needing to brush up, there's a wide range of issues to consider. Online copywriting poses its own challenges, from knowing the basics of HTML to understanding the ever-changing world of SEO.

So what help is available?

W3Schools

If you’re new to HTML, or you just need to double-check the correct bit of code for a particular HTML element, W3Schools is the go-to website for easy reference.

Its HTML Tutorials section covers all the basics and the more complicated stuff too, allowing you to pick up the most common bits of formatting you might need – such as the correct way to format headings, bold text and so on – and lets you try out the more advanced types of formatting and see how they look right there on the page.

Google Blogs

Google’s own blogs can help you to keep on top of developments in SEO, and Google keeps an up-to-date directory of all of its blogs. Here you can find everything from algorithm updates on Google’s search engine itself, to dedicated blogs for online marketing, advice on using Google Analytics, and other topics relevant to Google products.

Bing and Yahoo! also have blogs to help you to keep up to date with any major changes in their algorithms or the design of their search result pages, so you can be confident that the content you produce should perform well across all of the major search engines.

Scheduling

As your workload grows, you need to make sure you can keep on top of it all, and scheduling is an important part of keeping your business in order. Online calendars offer one way of doing this if you don’t always work from the same PC or laptop – Google Calendar and Windows Live Calendar are good options, especially if you have a smartphone that can sync with them.

Just be sure to get into the habit of checking your schedule at the start of each day or week – it’s no good putting things on to your to-do list if you never actually go back and check what you’ve got left to do. This might seem basic, but a blog that's never updated is worse than useless. It's like dead flowers in a vase; whatever the motivation behind it, a sparse blog will actively put people off.

Inspiration

Choosing what to write about on your blog or website pages is a huge topic – so much so that we’ve dedicated an entire post to the subject – but there are a couple of simple approaches that will never go out of style.

The first is to simply write about whatever’s making headlines in your industry, or your client’s industry if you’re ghost-writing for a corporate blog. Look out for mentions of the relevant industry in the news, or for new campaigns launched by unions and professional associations, and write a response or opinion piece.

Secondly, get involved in discussions on Twitter and other social networks, and blog about the issues other people are talking about. That's a good way of making sure people out there will be searching for the subjects you write about. Just remember to keep your content original and interesting – it’s OK to court controversy in the opinions you express, as long as you don’t go too far.

Staying On Course

Building an effective blog isn’t just about one post, of course – if you’re going to attract regular readers, you’ll need to produce articles again and again that your readers will keep coming back for. There are plenty of ways to do this, drawing on the kinds of inspiration mentioned above, and some of them can help to cut down the individual effort you need to put in.

For instance, post a series of articles all touching on different aspects of the same general topic and you can easily build a sequence of posts with good SEO benefits, all based on a single set of background information that cuts down on the research time needed. The good thing about this is the consistency and repetition of key themes that you get within your set of posts. However, this could be a downside if you’re keen to provide plenty of variety on your blog if, for example, you're a news website.

If you don’t think a series of posts would suit your blog, then don’t go for this approach – there are plenty of other things to try.

Guest Posts

Invite guest posts and you could publish content from authority figures within your industry area without having to write anything at all. The pros here include the very small amount of effort you’ll need to put into the writing, assuming your guest contributor is good at what they do.

However, the potential cons include rewriting any poorer efforts from contributors whose English isn’t quite up to scratch, as well as the time you might need to spend on finding people to write for you. Don't be tempted to fill your blog with second-rate ramblings just to get a return link; you'll devalue your online presence.

Style Guides

If you’re concerned about the variation in style that might come with publishing guest posts or blogs from several different employees, consider putting together a tone of voice or style guide for your contributors. This will not only let your guest contributors know what they can and can’t say on your blog, it can also give you a rule of thumb for your own future posts. This can help to keep your blog cohesive as time goes on.

Copify

When you take on more work than you can handle, something’s got to give – but it needn’t be your client relationships that take the strain. Instead, consider hiring a copywriter to work for you, and they can take some of the strain during your busier times.

Copify is just one place where you can hire freelance writers quickly and easily. Alternatively, you might want to do the same thing on a less formal basis, by sharing any excess work around copywriters you already know. You could even ask for recommendations via Twitter.

Either way, don’t compromise on your usual standards – give the completed copy the once-over when you get it back, and make sure it’s up to scratch before sending it out to your client or publishing it on your corporate blog.

Promoting Your Content

Once your content is written, optimised, formatted, and published, you need to make sure it reaches the largest possible audience. SEO can help to increase the number of people who find your new post through their search results, but social networks are also a good way to spread the word.

Take a look at FeedBurner for ways to have your new blog posts automatically tweeted out to your followers. FeedBurner also gives you more control over your blog’s RSS feed: a way for your regular readers to be alerted when a new post is published, and a great way of sustaining an audience for the long term.

The Virtuous Circle

Finally, a piece of advice that is often given to writers, but which is still as good as ever: read. Simply by reading fellow bloggers’ efforts you can stay aware of developing trends within your industry, and position your article topics so that they fill any gaps that your colleagues and competitors may have left unfilled.

As you read well-written articles you can also maintain an awareness of the prevailing style of blog posts or formal news articles online and adapt your own tone of voice accordingly. By including this positive feedback loop in your everyday activities, you’re designing-in self-improvement, a kind of continuing professional development for freelancers and independently minded copywriters everywhere.

Image credit: JoelMontes

Seth's Blog : Beauty vs. specs

Beauty vs. specs

There are two kinds of users/creators/customers/pundits.

Some can't understand why a product or service doesn't catch on. They can prove that it's better. They can quote specs and performance and utility. It's obvious.

The other might be willing to look at the specs, but he really doesn't understand them enough to care. All he knows is that the other choice is beautiful--it makes him feel good. He wants to use it.

Acura vs. Lexus, Dell vs. Apple, New Jersey vs. Bali...

You can have both specs and beauty, of course, but only if you work at it.

• Email to a friend •

joi, 11 octombrie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

So Much For Today's Surprising "Drop" In Weekly Jobless Claims; California Forgot to Report 30,000 Claims; What We Learned Today
Secessionist Candidate Will Overwhelmingly Win Mayoral Race in Antwerp, Belgium
$210,000 Cow Milking Robot; Presenting the "Astronaut A4 - A Natural Way of Milking"; How Far Off is the Completely Robotic Farm?

So Much For Today's Surprising "Drop" In Weekly Jobless Claims; California Forgot to Report 30,000 Claims; What We Learned Today

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 04:50 PM PDT

For the second time in less than a week surprising jobs numbers came into play. This morning the Labor Department reported a four-year low of 339,000 first-time claims.

Some claimed this validated last Friday's jobs report, a silly notion because the two are not that closely related and a single week of data is meaningless.

I still think Friday's jobs report will be revised away, but I am positive today's "surprising" report will be (for the simple reason California forgot to report 30,000 claims).

Please consider Jobless Claims Data Skewed Downward.

Initial jobless claims, which are a measure of the number of people recently laid off, fell by 30,000 to a seasonally adjusted 339,000, the lowest level in more than four years.

But the Labor Department spokesman said the numbers were skewed by one large state that underreported its data. The spokesman declined to identify the state, but economists believe California is the only state large enough to have such a significant impact on the overall numbers.

According to the spokesman, the reason that state's claims numbers fell short was because the state left out a pile of unprocessed claims related to seasonal factors around the beginning of the fourth quarter, which began Oct. 1.

In a research note, Stephen Stanley of Pierpont Securities summed up the data: "In short, this reading is worthless in terms of informing on the general economy."

Actually, the report isn't worthless, it's simply erroneous. Add back in 30,000 claims and the number is 369,000 right about where it has been for some time.

Is there a conspiracy here? Once again the answer is no.

This large state has a history of reporting "volatile" numbers at the beginning of quarters and that the Labor Department has complained and tried to work with the state to more accurately report its claims but with little success.

"There is no explanation" for the volatility. "We have tried and tried to work with them. It's like playing hardball with them," the spokesman said.

The spokesman said that the unprocessed claims are likely to show up in the numbers in the next week or two. "We should see some sort of catch up."

What We Learned Today

The labor department did not confirm the state was California but who else can it be?

We did learn one useful piece of information today: The first couple weeks of every quarter are likely to be seriously messed up by under-reporting of claims from California.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Secessionist Candidate Will Overwhelmingly Win Mayoral Race in Antwerp, Belgium

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 11:46 AM PDT

With every down-tick in the European economy (and many more will follow) eurosceptic and secessionist candidates pick up support.

Consider Antwerp Belgium where secessionist candidate Bart De Wever seems untouchable in Antwerp.

Antwerp is the biggest Flemish city outside Brussels has half a million inhabitants. The present Mayor is the socialist Patrick Janssens, who faces a fierce battle against the popular Flemish nationalist leader Bart De Wever. If the polls come true, Mr De Wever will take it with ease.

The N-VA has been credited with 37.2% of the votes, against 27.7% for the list of Patrick Janssens, a joint venture between socialists and Christian democrats. An individual poll also puts Bart De Wever ahead, leading Mr Janssens by 10%.

Antwerp Politician Rides Secessionist Wave

The Financial Times reports Antwerp Politician Rides Secessionist Wave.

The moderate nationalist leader of the New Flemish Alliance party (NVA), Mr De Wever has turned a local ballot in Belgium's business heartland into a referendum on independence for Flanders and the latest polls suggest there is momentum behind his call for secession.

Mr De Wever believes victory in Europe's second largest port city will revive the call for Flanders' secession from Belgium just as Spain's economic crisis has done in Catalonia.

Lex Moolenaar, a veteran political analyst for the Gazet Van Antwerpen, the city's daily, said an NVA victory would be a historic event in Belgium: "It would enlarge NVA's power at the regional and national level . . . the next natural step would be towards seeking the independence of Flanders."

Mr De Wever wants to exploit Flemish resentment at subsidising poorer parts of Belgium and believes the upsurge in secessionist sentiment in Catalonia will help his cause.

As I have said many times ...

Eventually, there will come a time when a populist office-seeker will stand before the voters, hold up a copy of the EU treaty and (correctly) declare all the "bail out" debt foisted on their country to be null and void. That person will be elected.

Antwerp is just a mayoral election. But we have seen the same sentiment in numerous regions in Spain. Eventually, something major will happen at the national level.

Moreover, when sentiment does change nationally, that change will be sudden, unstoppable, and of course "unexpected" by the bureaucrats now in charge.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

$210,000 Cow Milking Robot; Presenting the "Astronaut A4 - A Natural Way of Milking"; How Far Off is the Completely Robotic Farm?

Posted: 11 Oct 2012 09:02 AM PDT

Farmers seeking to eliminate nearly all labor associated with milking cows can take a look at the Lely Astronaut A4 system.

Cows walk into a chamber attracted by higher quality food, the machine attaches itself to the cow, measures output quality, temperature, and when finished the cows walk out. There is no manual labor or oversight. Farmers can sleep in or do other chores.

Bloomberg reports on the $210,000 Cow-Milking Robot

The A4 does not require a human being at any point in the milking process, leaving farmers free to cook dinner, work the books, or play Parcheesi. That's because no one has to move a cow into the milking box. The animal goes there on its own because it knows there is feed there (the cows are fed traditionally, but the A4 contains higher-protein food, and cows are really good at knowing what they're eating and, more important, what they want to eat). The front of the box has a trough where a cow can eat a measured amount of grain while it's being milked.

The A4 scans a cow's collar to determine which cow it is. The machine has a full history of that cow's milk production and feeding habits, based on previous visits, and can tailor the amount of feed the cow receives and the rate of pulsation at the teat to produce the most milk.

The A4 also knows the cow's milking schedule: If a cow tries to come back for milking too soon after the last session, the feed trough swings away, the gate opens, and the cow will walk out of the box. If a cow hasn't come through the system in a while, the A4 will alert the farmer.

Once a cow is in the box, a carbon-fiber and stainless-steel robotic arm moves under the cow, scans it with lasers to find the teats, and attaches four teatcups in a matter of seconds. A video camera mounted above the cow measures the animal's position in three dimensions. Should the cow move in any direction, the robotic arm will move in concert.

The A4 can handle about 180 milkings a day, which usually translates to 60 cows milked three times daily. Total cost for a single unit, installed, is around $210,000. And the crazy thing was this: After seeing this fully automatic, 3D-camera-enabled, laser-scanning, carbon-fiber-equipped, spectral analyzing system, $210,000 didn't seem all that much to me.

Completely Robotic Farms

The A4 is described as a "Natural Way of Milking". I fail to see anything "natural" about it. However, it certainly looks like a fantastic way of lowering labor costs and increasing productivity.

How far off is the completely robotic farm where driverless machines till the soil and plant crops, and driverless combines harvest the corn, wheat, and soybeans?

In many respects, for some crops, it's already here.

Farm and Ranch Guide reports Combine 'speaks' to driverless tractor pulling grain cart

September 30, 2012
Corn and soybean harvest is gearing up at farms throughout the Midwest.

At a few farms in Iowa and Illinois this harvest season, there will be less manpower than usual operating the big machinery out in the fields.

At first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary going on. But look closer and you'll see there's no one driving the tractor.

Driverless tractors are becoming all the rage these days. A few companies are developing their own driverless tractors, realizing that harvesting and planting are labor-intensive and there isn't always labor available these days.

But many of the driverless tractors being manufactured are small single units. Kinze Manufacturing, based in Williamsburg, Iowa, is the first company to have complete autonomous planting and harvesting technology utilizing regular-sized tractors and combines that communicate with each other, said Rhett Schildroth, product manager for Kinze Manufacturing.

"This is really state-of-the-art technology that works in real time to seed or harvest a crop," Schildroth said.

The Kinze driverless technology is placed in the combine and tractor and both machines communicate with each other so harvest runs smoothly, he said.

The Kinze system can plant, fertilize, and harvest crops. It operates by GPS and comes with sensors that can detect objects (hopefully like children, dogs, deer and the like).

This is an over-simplification of course but let me ask: Farm workers? Who needs em?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

vineri, 12 octombrie 2012

Email-Photos added you back on Google+

Getting On-Page SEO Right in 2012 and Beyond - Whiteboard Friday

Getting On-Page SEO Right in 2012 and Beyond - Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription

This Week Inside the White House

10 Tips, Tools and Resources for Online Copywriters

10 Tips, Tools and Resources for Online Copywriters

Seth's Blog : Beauty vs. specs

Beauty vs. specs

More Recent Articles

joi, 11 octombrie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

vineri, 12 octombrie 2012

Video Transcription

More Recent Articles

joi, 11 octombrie 2012

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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