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Real-World Panda Optimization - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 31 Jul 2014 05:16 PM PDT

The Panda algorithm looks for high-quality content, but what exactly is it looking for, how is it finding what it deems to be high-quality, and—perhaps most pressingly—what in the world can we do to befriend the bear?

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Michael Cottam explains what these things are, and more importantly, what we can do to be sure we get the nod from this particular bear.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Michael Cottam. I'm an independent SEO consultant from Portland, Oregon and have been a Moz associate for many years.

Today we're going to talk about Panda optimization. We're going to talk about real world things you can do, no general hand waving. We're going to talk about specific tactics you can use. We're going to talk about first of all what does Panda measure, secondly, how might Panda actually go about measuring these factors on your site, and then lastly, what are you going to do to win based on those factors.

What does Panda measure (and what can we do about it)?

To start off, this is the list of the major factors we're going to talk about for Panda: thin or thick content; the issues around duplicate or original content; the top heavy part of the Panda algorithm; how do you come up with fabulous images and how is Panda going to measure how fabulous they are; and rich interactive experience pieces.

Thin (thick) content

First of all, thin/thick content. Certainly, a lot of sites got penalized when Panda first came out where the site design had basically broken the content out into a lot of pages with just a few sentences on it. Here we're talking about how much text is there per page? How might Panda actually go about measuring this? This is probably the easiest piece to measure of everything on here. It's very simple programmatically to strip all the HTML tags out and then just do a word count.

There was a study done -- I think it was last summer by serpIQ, and there'll be a link to that in the notes -- that showed that for reasonably competitive terms you needed 1,500 to 2,500 words on a page to rank on page 1. They average this over ten or twenty thousand different keyword searches. Stripping out the HTML tags, count the words, what do you have left? Analyze your own pages and see if you're up near that 1,500 mark.

How do we win on that? Well, this is all about size matters. At least 1,500 words, push to 2,000 or 2,500 if you can. Sometimes that may mean going through your site and condensing four or five pages of content all into one page. You might think, well, that might make a giant long page, terrible user experience. But you can solve this with tab navigation so all the content is on the page. When you click a tab, JavaScript changes the CSS style of the various tabs to make one part show versus the other part. Google's going to see everything in all those tabs when they crawl the page, because it's all in the HTML before you click.

Duplicate/original content

The second thing let's talk about is duplicate and original content. Now there's been a ton of stuff written about duplicate content and penalties and how does Google check this, that, and the other.

Lately we've seen a bunch of different blog posts from different places talking about press releases and how press releases, well, they're evil. The links don't count. Google didn't spot them all. Google is much better at it than they used to be. But still, if you do a Google search on any e-press release you've done, you generally find if you search the first sentence or so of the press release, you'll find four or five indexed pages containing that. But that's way better than it was 3 years ago when you'd get 60 pages all be indexed still with nothing else in it.

The press release piece is probably the easiest piece for Google to measure for original content, because if you think about what happens when a press release is republished, you've got the site template from whichever news site or industry site is going to run it, header/footer, maybe some sidebar and some ads, you have the press release as one contiguous chunk, and that's really it. If Google's going to do page chunking to try to pull out the template, and the header and the footer, and things like that and see what is the core content of the page, that's probably the simplest case for them to do.

If you're interweaving bits of text you got from different places with your own text, customer reviews, things like that, that aren't going to be the same as other sites, then it's much harder for Google to spot.

What might Google be doing to try to decide does this block of text on your page exist on a hundred other sites? There are various techniques like hashing, or there are ways to record a thumbprint vaguely of what the word patterns are and things like that. That's not the hard part. There's lots of talk about the thumbprint and hashing.

The difficult part is if you've got a page that's got content from 12 different places and it's not just all the manufacturer's product content or whatever, you've got you've got your own customer reviews or your own intro sentence at the top, things like that, if you interweave that, that makes it very difficult for Google to go and chunk the page up into meaningful pieces, know when the chunks start and end, and then compare that to what they found on all the other sites that happen to be selling the same product that you've got to put the product description on from your site, etc.

What do you do to win there? You really want to interweave the original content that you've created. That might be your overview, your customers' reviews, things like that, your ratings. Interweave that with the stock text and photos. Break it up a bit. What you don't want is one giant block of text that is exactly the same as that giant block of text that's on the other hundred sites that are selling the same product you're trying to sell.

Top-heaviness

Let's talk about top heavy, a pretty important part of the Panda algorithm. Mostly when people talk about the top heavy algorithm, the example they give is ads above the fold. But if you actually read what Google said about it when they launched it, the description of what they're trying to solve, it's not really just about ads above the fold. It's about anything that's not content above the fold and your structure of your website pushing that content down, so that when the user lands on your page, they can't get anything useful without scrolling. That's what it's really about.

How might Google be going about measuring whether your site or your page is top heavy? Certainly, if you look at the tools that are built into the Chrome developer tools, Firefox developer tools has similar sorts of things where they can render the whole page there and give you the dimensions and highlight that on top of the page for you. So certainly it's very easy for them to go and render the whole page.

They're not going to read through the HTML and assume the first X number of words is above the fold. No sites render that way any more. So they're going to have to be rendering it to determine above the fold. There's just too much CSS positioning happening today.

So render and measure the pixels. Then how do you know whether it's ads or template or content? Now with a lot of the stuff I'm saying here we don't know absolutely what Google is doing to measure these things, but we can guess and infer based on how we see it behave, what ranks and doesn't, and also just knowing how parsers are written, how crawlers are written, things like that, what's possible.

The simplest way, if I were Google Panda, the way I would decide whether something was content or not is I would see if it was clickable. It's very easy to tell whether a given element there is linked to anything else. This is not going to be a foolproof thing, but your menus are going to be clickable, ads are going to be clickable for sure, navigation buttons are going to be clickable.

There are going to be some false positives with things like photo carousels that may be clickable to advance and things like that. But in general, if you're trying to do a quick and dirty analysis and say what above the fold is content, if you wipe out everything that's clickable and wipe out everything that's white space, you should be left with various blocks around the screen which is probably going to be content. That's probably what they're doing. I pretty much bet on that.

How do you win? First of all, minimize your header. If your header has a lot of white space and things are stacked, that's going to push the content down further on every single page on your site. Look at: Does the width of your main menu bar really have to have that much space above and below it? Has your logo got a lot of white space before the top of the page? Are you putting your share buttons down in a way that pushes everything down? Look for those sorts of things, because a little bit of win there moves a lot of content up the page above the fold on every page of your site.

Another question might be: Okay, so what's above the fold? Obviously, we don't know for sure, but we can guess since the vast majority of people are running browsers that are better than 1280 by 1000, that's probably a good benchmark. If you're analyzing your own site, look at it with 1280 by 1000, and that's most likely about the kind of dimensions that Google's looking at for above the fold.

Image fabulosity

Images are certainly rich content. Everybody loves images rather than text. It makes a much more engaging experience. How is Google going to go and measure how fabulous your images are?

If you've got great, fabulous original images, then that's probably great content to show the user. If you've got the same product photos that the other hundred websites all have, then not so much.

What's Google likely to be doing? First of all, if you've never played with Google reverse image search, give it a shot. It's incredibly powerful. I do a lot of work in the travel industry, and the problem with the travel industry is if you're brochuring hotels on your site, really your only source for hotel photos, unless you travel to all the destinations and shoot them yourselves, very expensive of course, is you're going to get the hotel's image library.

You could take those images. Maybe they show up as 5 mg photos in TIFF format. You can change them to JPEG. You can shrink them down to maybe 1000 pixels wide from the original 5000. You can do a little sharpening. You can convert the formats. You might change the contrast. You might even overlay some text, save it with a different file name. Google will still spot those.

If you do a reverse image search on a hotel photo from pick any site you want, you'll find hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other sites that all have the exact same photo. They're all named differently. They have different dimensions. Some are JPEG, some are PNG files, etc.

Google reverse image search is really good. To think that Panda isn't using that to decide whether you have original images I think is crazy. If they're not doing it, they'll be doing it next week. Don't think that just because you renamed a file or cropped it or resized it a little, that you now have an original image. You do not.

Image dimensions are undoubtedly another factor that Google's going to be looking at. Nobody really wants to decide to go to overwater bungalows in Bora-Bora by looking at little tiny, postage stamp size thumbnails. If you've got big thousand pixel wide pictures of these things, that's fabulous content. You've got to expect Panda is going to like that because users are going to like that. Size and originality.

How do you win? Go big. Be original. Okay, you say, "But how do I be original? I've got X number of hundred or thousand products on the site. It all comes from manufacturers. I can't shoot my own photos."

Consider for your major search targets, like category pages, so not necessarily individual product pages but category pages, make up an image that's a collage of some of those other images. Take those pieces, glue them together, use whatever Photoshop kind of software you want, but make up a new image that consists of images that are from the manufacturers of the products in that category, and that can be your new image header for that page. Make that category page, which is probably a better search target for you anyway, rank better.

Interactive experience

Certainly, a more engaging page is one where there's a video to play, or a map you can zoom in on and browse around and see where the hotels are and click on and things like that. Undoubtedly, part of what Panda's doing is measuring your site to say how much fun is there here to play with for the user.

How's Google going to measure that? Well, this is an interesting issue, because if you look at how YouTube videos are embedded, by default it's with an iframe. If you look at how a lot of the mapping tools are embedded by default, it's with an iframe.

Why is that bad? Let's think about how Google has considered iframe content in the past in terms of links and on page content and things like that. If you iframe it in, Google has been considering it as belonging to the page it was iframed in, not the page that is embedding that content. So the risk you have here is if you're using iframes to embed maps or videos, things like that, not sure that Panda's going to be able to spot that and realize you've got embedded rich content.

Chances are with YouTube, Wistia, Vimeo, and a few like that Google's probably done a little bit of work to try to spot iframed in videos. But you know what? There's a better solution there. With Wistia, you've got the SEO embed type that creates an embed object, not an iframe. YouTube, there's the little checkbox, after you click Share Embed, that says "use old embed code." So you can do that.

The other thing you can consider is where you don't have a video already and you want to add rich content, make an introductory video for a category, for your company, for a product. It can be the same stuff that you've already written as content for that category or about your company, about us, that sort of stuff. Just talk to the camera and do a 30 second introductory video for that category, that product, or read your review out basically from a whiteboard behind the camera. Then use the transcript of that video as that extra text content on the page.

When we talk about maps, I really prefer to use the Google Maps API. It's a JavaScript API. You might have some questions. Can Google follow the JavaScript? Well, I think in the case of maps it's their own product, and certainly Google's interested in knowing whether a page has a map embedded.

If you screenshot a map and then turn it into a JPEG, well that's nice. It's another big image, and it's probably original now or looks original to Google, but it's not that extra rich interactive content that a map is.

My advice is use the Google Maps API. I think they're on Version 3.0. It's actually a lot easier to use, once you've seen an example, than you might think. That seems to work very well for producing that other piece of interactive content.

I've talked a lot here. How much does this work? Links are still very important for ranking. Two or three years ago, I would say links were 80%, 90% of what it took to get something to rank. Panda has changed that in an insane way.

Here's the test example. Go to Google and do a search for best time to visit Tahiti. You'll find my little site, Visual Itineraries, up there at number one for that, ahead of TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, USA Today, all these other sites. These other sites have between 10,000 and 250,000 domains linking to them. My site has under 100. I rank number one for that.

Now, in case you think okay, yeah, it's internal link anchor text or page title match, things like that, here's the other proof. Do a Google search for "when should I go to French Polynesia." The only word in that that matches the page title or any anchor text is the word "to." It's a stop word, that's not going to count. I'm still like number three or number four on page one, up with all these other guys that have tens or hundreds of thousands of domains linking.

Please click through to my site, because I don't want bounce rate stuff happening, and actually have a look and see what I've done. See the thin header I've got at the top. Have a look at the images I've got in there. Some of them I created by screenshotting Excel charts. I've got embedded video. I've got an embedded Google Map.

There we go. Thanks everybody, and take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Be TAGFEE when You Disagree

Posted: 31 Jul 2014 05:00 AM PDT

Posted by Lisa-Mozstaff

On being TAGFEE

I'm a big advocate of the TAGFEE culture at Moz. It's one of the big reasons I joined the team and why I stay here. I also recognize that sometimes it can be hard to practice it in "Real Life."

How, for instance, can I be both authentic AND fun when I tell Anthony how angry I am that he took the last two donuts? I can certainly be transparent and authentic, but, anger and confrontation...where does that get fun?

But those times when you need to be authentic—those are the times when being generous and empathetic matter the most. It may seem more generous and empathetic to just withhold that difficult feedback, but it's not. Giving that feedback can be scary, and most people imagine things going horribly wrong and leaving everything in ruins when you really just wanted to help.

Having a little bit of self-awareness and a whole lot of hold-on- there-a-minute can really help with this. I've been sharing with other Mozzers a way to be Transparent AND Authentic AND Generous AND Fun AND Empathetic AND Exceptional. And I thought I'd share a little bit of it with you too.

Conflict can be productive

Why it's important to have productive conflict

Why it matters

If you read about the psychology and physiology of confrontations, you'll realize that our brains aren't at their best when we're in a confrontation.

When threatened, our bodies respond by going back to our most basic, primal instincts, sometimes called the lizard brain or (cue scary music) "amygdala hijack." Blood and oxygen pump away from your brain and into your muscles so you're equipped to fight or run away.

However, having your higher-order thinking functions deprived of oxygen when confronted by an angry customer or coworker isn't such a good thing. Your lizard brain isn't well-equipped to deal with situations diplomatically, or look at ways to find common ground and a win-win solution. It's looking to destroy or get the heck out of there (or both), and neither of those approaches work well in a business environment.

To really communicate,*everyone* has to feel safe. If you are calm and collected and using the collaborative parts of your brain, but the person you're talking to is scared or uncertain, you can't communicate.

Fighting the lizard

Control the physiological and psychological reactions of fear

When you're in a confrontation, how do you control the physiological and psychological reactions of fear so you can choose to act rather than react?

To bring your brain back, you need to force your brain to use its higher-order thinking functions. Ask yourself questions that the lizard brain can't answer, and it'll have to send some of that oxygen and blood back up into the rest of your brain.

Once you've freed your brain from the lizard, you have access to your higher thinking functions - and the resources to have a productive confrontation.

Questions to fight the lizard:

Find benevolent intent. Ask yourself what you really want from this interaction. Find an intention that's benevolent for both you and the other person. Draw on your Empathy and Generosity here.
Get curious. Ask yourself why you or the other person is emotional and seek to understand. The lizard brain hates "why" questions.

Lizard in the desert
This lizard has no choice, but you do! (Image by Lisa Wildwood)

What does productive conflict look like?

Giving up "winning" to win

Give yourself permission to try something new. Even if you don't do it perfectly, it's better than the lizard.

These steps assume you've got some time to prepare, but sometimes, you find yourself in a confrontation and have to do the best you can. Give yourself permission to try something new. Even if you don't do it perfectly, it's better than the lizard taking over. And the more you practice these, the easier and more natural they'll feel, and the more confidence you'll have in the power of productive confrontations.

Once I've walked you through all of these steps, I'll talk about how to put it all together. Also note that these steps may be contrary to how you are used to behaving, particularly if you come from a culture that values personal success over teamwork. It may feel strange to do this at first, and it may feel like you're giving up the chance to "win"... but it's worth it.

Steps to productive conflict:

Change your story.
Talk about the right things.
Get curious.
Inspire and be inspired
Follow up.

Create a benevolent story and a positive intent

The first step to Productive Conflict is to change your story. And to do that, you first have to realize you're telling stories in the first place...

We're all amazing storytellers

We all make up stories every time we see something happen. It's human nature.

Here's my story:

This is Anthony, stealing my donut. He saw me coming and grabbed it before I could.

He's munching on my donut while I despair of ever getting a donut.

I don't get why he's so selfish that he took two donuts. I mean, didn't his mama raise him right?

Imaged cropped from an image courtesy of Stéfan under Creative Commons license

My story is one we all make up sometimes. We paint ourselves as helpless victims thwarted by an evil villain. Sometimes we don't see them as stories, however, but as reality, and that's where we get into trouble.

The victim/villain story may get you sympathy, but it takes away your power. During a confrontation, it helps if you remember that it *is* a story, and it's also:

Internal - Something you made up based on what you've seen, assumed, or experienced in the past in a similar situation
Of questionable validity. It could be true, partially true, or completely bogus
Mutable!

"Mutable?" you ask. Why, yes, it is!

Changing the story you're telling yourself is the key to having a productive (and powerful) conversation.

Make a happy story

You can read body language really well. And so can the person you're talking to.

If you're going to make up a story, make one up that helps you resolve an important issue and maintain your relationships.

Change your story to the most kind and generous one that fits the facts you've seen, and then believe it. Why? Because non-verbal cues, state of mind, fear or anger, and judgments and stories affect your reactions and approach to the conversation.

If you've planned your words out carefully but the intent doesn't match, the other person can tell. If your intent isn't good, the interaction won't be good either. At best, you may appear to be trying to do the right thing but not really managing it. At worst, you appear insincere and manipulative.

Here's your benevolent story, just waiting to hatch
(Image by Pon Malar on Wikimedia under creative commons license)

How to change your story

To help change your story, ask yourself these questions:

Why might a reasonable, intelligent, courteous, kind person do that?
Could there be circumstances I'm not aware of that could be contributing?
What if it was me? How would I explain what happened from my perspective? Be as lenient/forgiving as you can to your imaginary self

Review the facts... what you've seen and what you've chosen to pay attention to. They may all appear to support a nasty story, but you don't know for sure. Think of the Rorschach tests... people see different things depending on how they're feeling and their unique view on life, so find a benevolent story.

My new story

So, let's try this on my story. I'll start with the facts, remove my emotional devastation at not getting a donut, and create a benevolent story:

My facts are: I saw someone take the last two donuts.
My new benevolent story is: Anthony didn't see me, and didn't know how much I was craving a donut.

What do you see? (Image by Hermann Rorschach (died 1922), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

But my story is true!

Let's assume for a moment, your not-so-nice story is completely, 100%, bonafide TRUE. This is hard, but consider this carefully... It Doesn't Matter!

Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is the best way to motivate them to change. By creating a benevolent story, you give the person a way to improve AND save face. It's magic!

Assuming the worst can severely damage your relationships, even if it's true! Getting caught it a mistake makes people immediately defensive, which will hinder the conversation. Give them a chance to just fix things and they'll be grateful to you and more inspired to make the change stick.

And then there's the flip side... what if your story is partly or all wrong? This situation, as you can imagine, is much worse.

You'll probably never find out what truly happened, and may find yourself arguing about the parts you got wrong rather than the real issue. It also damages the relationship, and here's the key point: even if the person can get past their anger and hear your message, they will likely not like you, trust you, or want to work with you. And I've heard crow tastes really bad.

The power of a benevolent story and positive intent

The last part of changing your story is figuring out what you want from the conversation.

Think about what you want to happen, but also what you want from the relationship. The power of a benevolent story and positive intent is that it fosters a better relationship based on trust . That is huge and I recommend that it be part of the intent of all conversations.

Judgment doublecheck!

When you're done, go back through what you've got down and make sure a not-so-nice story hasn't crept back in:

Remove judgment
Check that the issue matches your intent

Some examples

Here's some examples where I take a nasty story, break it down to the facts, and then create a new, benevolent story and a positive intent for a discussion.

Judgment & Nasty Story	Fact	New Benevolent Story	Positive Intent
What a jerk, he just cut me off! Are you trying to kill me?	A car changed lanes in front of me in a way that I found uncomfortable.	Wow, he must not have seen me.	Let him know a head check was needed.
Sue doesn't respect me enough to respond to my email. She thinks it's a stupid idea.	Sue didn't answer my email when I expected.	Sue's busy and either hasn't seen my email or hasn't had time to respond.	Follow up with Sue on what she thinks
What an idiot! That report Bruce turned in didn't even try to answer the questions I had. It's useless!	Bruce turned in a report that didn't have the information I expected and needed.	Bruce wasn't aware or misunderstood what information I needed.	Let Bruce know what I need in the reports.

Remember that stories spread...all storytellers love an audience. So make sure your story is spreading positivity

Get clear on what the conversation needs to be about

What do you want from the conversation?

The next step is to think about what the real issue is. What exactly needs to happen? Who is involved? Who is impacted? Which facts are known? What information is available?

In TAGFEE terms, this is where transparency and being exceptional come in. Make sure that you're talking about the right issue.

Ask yourself:

What is the impact to you and others?
What are the facts?
Scope – is this the first time? The second? The umpteenth?

Can you spot the judgment?

I just broke my own rules... can you see it?

I'll give you a hint...it's that last word in the Scope point... it sneaks in, so check!

Are you talking about apples when the issue is really oranges?

Scope is important:

If it's the first time something has happened, you talk about what happened.
If it's the second or third, talk about how it keeps happening.
If you can't remember how many times it's happened, talk about how the behavior is affecting your relationship.

Orange

Ask questions to understand and get to the root causes

Be an information maniac

Find out how the other person sees the situation.

Before you trip too far down that happy path, get more information. Seek to understand. Use Empathy and Generosity, and be Authentic. Ask neutral questions to create safety, and give the other person a chance to respond – you might find out something you didn't know.

Asking neutral questions can create a space of collaboration, where you are both on the same side trying to figure out how to solve an issue you both agree needs to be resolved. It's not always possible to turn a conflict into a collaboration, but you'd be surprised how many times it does work that way.

Another benefit of asking neutral questions is that it puts off conclusions and judgments until you have talked to the person involved and heard what they have to say. This is critical to keeping the conversation safe and collaborative.

Questions to ask:

What is your perspective? What do you see going on?
What's important to you? Tell me more about that.
Here's what I notice... What do you notice?

State conclusions tentatively

You can state a conclusion tentatively, making it clear you're looking for their input on whether that conclusion is valid or if they have more information.

Listen carefully and continue to put off judgment until you've heard what they have to say.

Putting off judgment makes it easier for *you* to admit that you've been wrong. You may find what you thought was going to be a difficult conversation instead opens up a new level of authenticity and collaboration in your relationships.

Make sure anything you state definitively are only facts, devoid of judgment.

Be open to being wrong!

Or being surprised by more information that turns your story on its head.

Just maybe it wasn't Anthony I saw "stealing" donuts in the stormtrooper outfit...

Create a mutual purpose or common goal that inspires everyone to move forward

It's all upside

Why inspire others? Well, why not? There is no downside to inspiring people: it benefits everyone.

The earlier steps talk about getting clear of the negative. This is where the good stuff happens. The Fun in TAGFEE! If you start from what felt like a conflict and end up with a mutual understanding with someone about what an issue is and how to resolve it, all things are possible. It can feel like magic! You move from confrontation to collaboration and win-win thinking that can help you both step outside the box.
Here's a chart that's totally made up, but it communicates a key point in communication. Collaboration happens when you both trust and respect the people you're talking to!

True collaboration

You need both a willingness and freedom to disagree, and mutual trust and respect to get into the "Collaboration Zone." The key to inspiring others is to seek to understand their point of view and their goals, and work together with them to find common ground.

Start the collaboration engine by asking some powerful questions and seeing what you can agree on and brainstorm solutions.

Collaboration engine questions:

What's working?
What do you think?
What can we agree on?
What are we both interested in achieving?
What's important about resolving this?
What can we try?

A rainbow of solutions

Solutions often go from the black and white "my" vs. "your" choice to a synergistic combination of mine and yours and other ideas we brainstormed along the way.

You may disagree on how to do something, but if you can agree on a common goal, you're one step closer to a win-win solution.

Instead of accusing Anthony of taking the last donut and demanding that he promise to never do it again, or be reported to Team Happy for a happiness "adjustment," my conversation is now about fair access to donuts at Moz. The entire conversation's focus has shifted from "I want Anthony to know how angry I am he stole my donut" to "how can we make sure no-one at Moz is donut-deprived?" Magic!

Fair Access to Donuts at Moz - Possible solutions:

Work with Team Happy to make sure there's enough donuts for everyone who wants them
Ask everyone at the company to only take one
Get a fresh donut machine where we can all make our own donuts on demand

5 - Follow up

Agree on what to do next and circle back around
This is a little step with a big impact. Make sure you've captured your conversation and everyone is on board to take action to make your solutions a reality. Being Exceptional and Authentic come into play here. You're collaborating on a solution and then making it happen.

Once you've established a shared understanding of an issue that needs to be resolved, it's time to figure out how. Solicit ideas for how to solve the problem. Listen, acknowledge feedback and discuss pros and cons on the solutions until you both agree the solution is a good approach.

Make sure everyone is in agreement on:

Goals. How will you measure success?
Due dates. Who will do what by when?
When to check in: What time will we check to see how we're doing?

Wrapping it up

Have productive, inspiring conversations, whether you agree or disagree

Before you talk to someone

At first, it may help to write down what you're planning on saying.

I've broken this down into discrete before and during steps, but it doesn't always end up being that way in practice. Use these steps to plan and practice until it comes naturally.

Steps to prepare:

Calm down! Lizard brain begone!
Create a happy story
Make sure you're talking about the right thing
Write out what you want to say and check for your old story & judgments
Remember your benevolent intent

Have the conversation

Steps:

Ask if the person has time to talk
State your benevolent intent
Keep to the facts
State conclusions tentatively
Get curious - seek to understand their point of view
Be open to being wrong. Change your mind if needed.
Aim toward collaboration.
Finish with summarizing what you've discussed, and who will do what, when.

Remember the conversation may dictate you take a different path.

If the conversation starts to get heated, re-establish safety:

Restate your intent
Explicitly state what you're not trying to do. For example, "I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm trying to help us come to a solution that works for both of us."

When conflict finds you

If you find yourself in a conversation unexpectedly, these steps can still help. Get curious, find out what they want, how they're feeling, and tentatively state your perspective and ask for feedback. Some other ideas:

Accept the input and acknowledge the emotions but don't reciprocate. Ask yourself "what do I want from this interaction" to rescue your brain from the lizard.
Do your best to establish safety for you and the other person by establishing a positive intent. It can be as simple as "Wow, Lisa, I can see you're really upset about not getting a donut. I'd like to figure out how I can fix this - can I ask you a few questions?"

Don't hesitate to take a break

If the conversation is heated, it may be better to step away and take the conversation up later. You might say:

"I can see this is an subject we both care deeply about. I'd like to take some time to prepare for a productive conversation, can we take a break and meet back here in an hour."

An example conversation

So, my side of the conversation with Anthony about the donuts might go like this:

"Anthony, do you have time to talk?"

"I'd like to talk to you about making sure everyone at Moz has the opportunity to get a donut. "

"I saw someone taking the last two donuts this morning, and I was disappointed that I didn't get one."

"I thought it might be you, so I wanted to talk to you to see what happened."

"I'm not accusing you of taking the last two donuts. I'm trying to figure out what happened and then work on how to make sure the donuts are evenly distributed at Moz"

"Oh, so you were grabbing a donut for Crystal too! Wow, I totally misinterpreted what I saw!"

"Can you think of ways we can ensure everyone gets a donut?"

"Great, so I'll contact Team Happy about getting a donut machine tomorrow, and you'll approve the expense report on Friday."

Image from Nostalgia Electrics

Perfection not required

Not everything will always turn out wonderful, but at least you've approached the problem and given feedback in a way that has the best chance for a positive outcome for everyone involved.

Maybe you're a little closer to what the real issues are, or you've agreed to disagree; even those outcomes will keep miscommunication or confusion from being a source of problems.

If I really feel that donut was mine, and Anthony really thinks that donut was promised to Crystal, we may not agree, but at least everything is on the table where we have the chance to deal with it. And, we're not telling our nasty stories to everyone but the person we need to talk to.

Feedback is a gift

Annette Promes, our CMO, said to me, "Feedback is a gift," and it is.

Most folks want to know, and are truly interested in being better… better coworkers, friends, and humans. So let's all resolve to give that gift in the best way we can. And receive it gratefully when it comes to us.

Oh, and that donut conflict… totally made up. I'm gluten-intolerant girl, so you can always have my share, Anthony! :)

Give me feedback

I experimented with converting a training class into a blog post, and would love to have your feedback on what works for you and what could be better.

You can also download this blog post in slidedoc format. It's a communication technique that's halfway between presentation and documentation. I learned about it at Write the Docs this year. You can read more and get the free slidedoc ebook at their site. What do you think?

Other resources

You may find these resources helpful too:

5 Rules for Productive Conflict (TED talk)

6 ways to make conflict productive

Building a new website? 10 reasons why you should consider SEO from the start!

Building a new website? 10 reasons why you should consider SEO from the start!

Posted: 31 Jul 2014 08:11 AM PDT

Whether you're just starting out and building a website from scratch, or you're looking to give your current website a makeover, pulling your SEO team in from the start will save you time in the long run.

I see it time and time again. A website is built, then the SEOs are pulled in to get to work…backtracking and undoing to do it again properly. I’m not saying that all SEOs are great at building sites, but most developers only have a basic knowledge of SEO, so getting experts from both sides working together from the planning stages is crucial.

One of the most frustrating things about being left out until the later stages is that often extra work is required to fix the SEO holes, so the client has to make sacrifices due to budget restraints, which often leads to problems further down the line.

Here I cover some of the most common issues that can be easily avoided by pulling in your SEO experts as early as possible.

#1 Disallow robots

This is one of the most common issues that I see – the site being developed is left open for Google to crawl it and list in the search results. If you have a live site with much of the same content, this could cause a huge duplicate content issue.

Adding the disallow instruction to your robots.txt file will prevent it from being crawled and indexed by the search engines. Don't forget to remove the disallow line when you're ready to go live!

#2 Test Pages

When a site is being developed, it is common practice to include example text to demonstrate how content will appear on the pages. However, another common issue occurs when test pages are not blocked from the search engines, sometimes causing them to be found by the crawlers, indexed and pulled into the search results.

These pages provide no value and several of them could bring down the overall authority of a site. Placing a 'noindex' tag on test pages will prevent the major search engines from accessing them.

#3 International Sites

If your website targets more than one country and/or language then you need to be sure that the right version of your pages are displayed to your visitors in the search results. The 'hreflang' tag allows you to specify all of the alternate versions of your pages, highlighting which version should be displayed based on location and language. It also helps to prevent duplicate content issues, where the same or very similar content is used across the regional versions. A great tool for generating the correct code is the hreflang tags generator tool, created by Aleyda Solis.

The 'hreflang' tags can be placed within the code on each page, or within the XML sitemap. A default version can also be specified to highlight which version to display if users are searching with a language or country that has not been targeted, using rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”.

It is also recommended that you use the 'geolocate' option within Google and Bing's Webmaster Tools to specify the country that the site is targeting. If you're using folders to split up regions (example.com/en; example.com/de; example.com/it etc.) then you can create separate Webmaster Tools accounts for each, and then change the associated country settings to match.

Be careful when considering automatically redirecting users to the appropriate version of your site based on their location. This can cause all sorts of problems, including search engines being redirected to a single version of your site, causing only this version to appear in search.

#4 Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most useful and eye-opening tasks of all. It can help to shape your site and provide insights on where best to focus your efforts.

Understanding exactly which terms are being used to search within your industry and the associated volumes can help you to make informed decisions, allowing you to decide which keywords to target. Plan exactly which keywords you wish to target for each page and avoid optimising several pages for a single keyword, as this will confuse the search engines and dilute your efforts.

There are a number of tools that can help you with keyword research, including Google's Keyword planner, Webmaster Tools and SEMRush to name a few.

#5 Site Architecture

The golden rule when planning your site architecture is to make it as easy as possible for both users and search engines to navigate through your pages, while keeping the number of clicks required for users to find what they are looking for to a minimum. This is not only to give the user a good experience, but also to prevent authority from being diluted. Each step in the tree passes less value to the next level, leaving pages at the bottom of the tree with little authority.

The search engines are also less likely to crawl through multiple levels of a site, so some of the deeper pages may not be indexed at all and therefore not appear in the search results.

The keyword research will help you to decide which words to focus on when building your pages and categories, but it will also allow you to see which pages are more likely to attract higher search volumes. Based on these findings, you can draw up a navigation plan in order to pass the most value to your key pages.

#6 URL Structure

A clean, consistent URL structure will help users and search engines to understand what to expect from your pages while preventing potential duplicate content issues.

A few rules to follow:

Hyphenate URLs and only ever use lower case.
End all URLs with a trailing slash and make sure all internal links use this format.
Set up server-side 301 redirects to force the correct versions of URLs to load – this will prevent broken links, loss of PageRank and stop duplicate pages from being indexed.

It is also important to note that using the primary keywords assigned to each page within the URL will help the listing to stand out in the search results, as keywords appear in bold when they match the users search query.

#7 Navigation & Internal Linking

Navigation is not only useful for helping users and search engines to quickly navigate through the site, but it's also an effective tool for distributing value between pages. It's important to build up authority to your main pages, so including them in your navigation will result in them being linked to from every page on your website, with each link passing value.

As I mentioned earlier, you should use the findings from the keyword research to decide on the category names.

While you're unlikely to include links to every page on your site within the navigation, your internal linking strategy must take into account that every page that you want to appear in search will need to be linked to from somewhere.

#8 Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content happens, but the problem is that often people aren’t aware of it. In my experience, the most common causes are:

URLs – as mentioned in #6, it's important to set up server-side redirects to force all versions of a single URL to resolve to the absolute version. If a single page can load using more than one URL, it can be treated as separate pages with duplicate content.
Parameters – these are commonly used for tracking and sorting, but while the URLs change, the content often stays the same. You can handle parameters in webmaster tools to make the search engines aware of them, but you can also use rel=canonical to highlight the correct version to ensure duplicate pages don't end up in the search results.
Pagination – used to segment results across several pages, pagination is commonly used on blog and news sections. However, these pages list chunks of content that already appears on other pages on the site (the post or article pages). Club this together with duplicate title tags and you're likely to have duplicate content (or simply thin pages that should not be appearing in search). There are several ways to handle this, including the use of the 'noindex' tag, rel="canonical" or using rel="prev" and rel="next".
www Vs non-www & http vs https – another common issue is when you're able to load your pages with or without the www, and/or with or without https:
>example.com
>www.example.com
>https://www.example.com
>http://www.example.comAgain, 301 redirects and rel=canonical can fix this. You can set your preferred domain (www or non-www) in the site settings in your Google webmaster tools account, but it is still recommended that a server-side redirect is added to handle this.

#9 Google Tag Manager

This is a useful tool that can reduce the amount of work required from your developers, speed up tag implementation and prevent your site from being slowed down by unnecessary code.

Simply create a Tag Manager account then add a snippet of code to your template. Now you can manage all of your tags from a single account, rather than having to call on your developers to add them manually.

#10 Migration Strategy

This only applies to existing sites that are being updated, involving changes to the location of your pages. This can be moving to a completely different domain, or simply updating the structure and design on your current domain.

A redirect strategy should be put in place to map the old pages to the new. Using 301 (permanent) redirects is generally the best way to handle redirects. This is because the 301 is the only redirect that passes value from one page to another. Generate a list of every page on your current site – export live pages from your CMS or crawl the pages (this doesn’t always pull back every page). Using a spreadsheet, map all old pages to the new pages, then use this to build your redirect strategy.

If there is no exact equivalent page to redirect to, try to find the most relevant page instead, e.g. a retired product could redirect to its category page.

Remove redirect chains – These are commonly caused by redirects being added each time a URL moves, causing crawlers to jump between all of the old pages before arriving at the new page. This can slow down load times and leak value passed through links. By removing the unnecessary steps in the chain, you can link straight to the source.

An easy way to identify redirect chains is using Screaming Frog's redirect chains report – simply click 'Configuration > Spider' then under the 'Advanced' tab, tick 'Always Follow Redirects'. Now crawl your site then select 'Reports>Redirect Chains' to export the report.

Hopefully you're now sold on the idea that SEO isn’t just something that's bolted on once a site is built, but rather a core feature that can help to guide and inform you through the planning and implementation stages, right through to launch and beyond.. So next time you're looking to build a site, you know who to call!

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