Twitter Gives Advice On How To Drive Sales In The 2014 Holiday Season by @mattsouthern

According to a Twitter study, 54% of users said promotions on Twitter were what motivated them to make a purchase. For businesses looking to capitalize on the sales potential of Twitter this holiday season, the company has recently released consumer insights and recommendations for how to use the social network most effectively. Twitter Consumer Insights The ideal audience for Twitter users are retail advertisers, the company explains, because they start shopping “early and heavily” and are prone to impulse purchases. According to the study, Twitter users also intend to spend more over the holiday season versus non-Twitter users. Here’s what’s […]

The post Twitter Gives Advice On How To Drive Sales In The 2014 Holiday Season by @mattsouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

What SEOs Need to Know About Topic Modeling & Semantic Connectivity - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers' intent—what we mean to search for, even if that's not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It's incredibly complex, but in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected in search.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking topic modeling and semantic connectivity. Those words might sound big and confusing, but, in fact, they are important to understanding the operations of search engines, and they have some direct influence on things that we might do as SEOs, hence our need to understand them.

Now, I'm going to make a caveat here. I am not an expert in this topic. I have not taken the required math classes, stats classes, programming classes to truly understand this topic in a way that I would feel extremely comfortable explaining. However, even at the surface level of understanding, I feel like I can give some compelling information that hopefully you all and myself included can go research some more about. We're certainly investigating a lot of topic modeling opportunities and possibilities here at Moz. We've done so in the past, and we're revisiting that again for some future tools, so the topic is fresh on my mind.

So here's the basic concept. The idea is that search engines are smarter than just knowing that a word, a phrase that someone searches for, like "Super Mario Brothers," is only supposed to bring back results that have exactly the words "Super Mario Brothers," that perfect phrase in the title and in the headline and in the document itself. That's still an SEO best practice because you're trying to serve visitors who have that search query. But search engines are actually a lot smarter than this.

One of my favorite examples is how intelligent Google has gotten around movie topics. So try, for example, searching for "That movie where the guy is called The Dude," and you will see that Google properly returns "The Big Lebowski" in the first ranking position. How do they know that? Well, they've essentially connected up "movie," "The Dude," and said, "Aha, those things are most closely related to 'The Big Lebowski. That's what the intent of the searcher is. That's the document that we're going to return, not a document that happens to have 'That movie about the guy named 'The Dude' in the title, exactly those words.'"

Here's another example. So this is Super Mario Brothers, and Super Mario Brothers might be connected to a lot of other terms and phrases. So a search engine might understand that Super Mario Brothers is a little bit more semantically connected to Mario than it is to Luigi, then to Nintendo and then Bowser, the jumping dragon guy, turtle with spikes on his back -- I'm not sure exactly what he is -- and Princess Peach.

As you go down here, the search engine might actually have a topic modeling algorithm, something like latent semantic indexing, which was an early model, or a later model like latent Dirichlet allocation, which is a somewhat later model, or even predictive latent Dirichlet allocation, which is an even later model. Model's not particularly important, especially for our purposes.

What is important is to know that there's probably some scoring going on. A search engine -- Google, Bing -- can understand that some of these words are more connected to Super Mario Brothers than others, and it can do the reverse. They can say Super Mario Brothers is somewhat connected to video games and very not connected to cat food. So if we find a page that happens to have the title element of Super Mario Brothers, but most of the on-page content seems to be about cat food, well, maybe we shouldn't rank that even if it has lots of incoming links with anchor text saying "Super Mario Brothers" or a very high page rank or domain authority or those kinds of things.

So search engines, Google, in particular, has gotten very, very smart about this connectivity stuff and this topic modeling post-Hummingbird. Hummingbird, of course, being the algorithm update from last fall that changed a lot of how they can interpret words and phrases.

So knowing that Google and Bing can calculate this relative connectivity, connectivity between the words and phrases and topics, we want to know how are they doing this. That answer is actually extremely broad. So that could come from co-occurrence in web documents. Sorry for turning my back on the camera. I know I'm supposed to move like this, but I just had to do a little twirl for you.

Distance between the keywords. I mean distance on the actual page itself. Does Google find "Super Mario Brothers" near the word "Mario" on a lot of the documents where the two occur, or are they relatively far away? Maybe Super Mario Brothers does appear with cat food a lot, but they're quite far away. They might look at citations and links between documents in terms of, boy, there's a lot pages on the web, when they talk about Super Mario Brothers, they also link to pages about Mario, Luigi, Nintendo, etc.

They can look at the anchor text connections of those links. They could look at co-occurrence of those words biased by a given corpi, a set of corpuses, or from certain domains. So they might say, "Hey, we only want to pay attention to what's on the fresh web right now or in the blogosphere or on news sites or on trusted domains, these kinds of things as opposed to looking at all of the documents on the web." They might choose to do this in multiple different sets of corpi.

They can look at queries from searchers, which is a really powerful thing that we unfortunately don't have access to. So they might see searcher behavior saying that a lot of people who search for Mario, Luigi, Nintendo are also searching for Super Mario Brothers.

They might look at searcher clicks, visits, history, all of that browser data that they've got from Chrome and from Android and, of course, from Google itself, and they might say those are corpi that they use to connect up words and phrases.

Probably there's a whole list of other places that they're getting this from. So they can build a very robust data set to connect words and phrases. For us, as SEOs, this means a few things.

If you're targeting a keyword for rankings, say "Super Mario Brothers," those semantically connected and related terms and phrases can help with a number of things. So if you could know that these were the right words and phrases that search engines connected to Super Mario Brothers, you can do all sorts of stuff. Things like inclusion on the page itself, helping to tell the search engine my page is more relevant for Super Mario Brothers because I include words like Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser, Nintendo, etc. as opposed to things like cat food, dog food, T-shirts, glasses, what have you.

You can think about it in the links that you earn, the documents that are linking to you and whether they contain those words and phrases and are on those topics, the anchor text that points to you potentially. You can certainly be thinking about this from a naming convention and branding standpoint. So if you're going to call a product something or call a page something or your unique version of it, you might think about including more of these words or biasing to have those words in the description of the product itself, the formal product description.

For an About page, you might think about the formal bio for a person or a company, including those kinds of words, so that as you're getting cited around the web or on your book cover jacket or in the presentation that you give at a conference, those words are included. They don't necessarily have to be links. This is a potentially powerful thing to say a lot of people who mention Super Mario Brothers tend to point to this page Nintendo8.com, which I think actually you can play the original "Super Mario Brothers" live on the web. It's kind of fun. Sorry to waste your afternoon with that.

Of course, these can also be additional keywords that you might consider targeting. This can be part of your keyword research in addition to your on-page and link building optimization.

What's unfortunate is right now there are not a lot of tools out there to help you with this process. There is a tool from Virante. Russ Jones, I think did some funding internally to put this together, and it's quite cool. It's  nTopic.org. Hopefully, this Whiteboard Friday won't bring that tool to its knees by sending tons of traffic over there. But if it does, maybe give it a few days and come back. It gives you a broad score with a little more data if you register and log in. It's got a plugin for Chrome and for WordPress. It's fairly simplistic right now, but it might help you say, "Is this page on the topic of the term or phrase that I'm targeting?"

There are many, many downloadable tools and libraries. In fact, Code.google.com has an LDA topic modeling tool specifically, and that might have been something that Google used back in the day. We don't know.

If you do a search for topic modeling tools, you can find these. Unfortunately, almost all of them are going to require some web development background at the very least. Many of them rely on a Python library or an API. Almost all of them also require a training corpus in order to model things on. So you can think about, "Well, maybe I can download Wikipedia's content and use that as a training model or use the top 10 search results from Google as some sort of training model."

This is tough stuff. This is one of the reasons why at Moz I'm particularly passionate about trying to make this something that we can help with in our on-page optimization and keyword difficulty tools, because I think this can be very powerful stuff.

What is true is that you can spot check this yourself right now. It is very possible to go look at things like related searches, look at the keyword terms and phrases that also appear on the pages that are ranking in the top 10 and extract these things out and use your own mental intelligence to say, "Are these terms and phrases relevant? Should they be included? Are these things that people would be looking for? Are they topically relevant?" Consider including them and using them for all of these things. Hopefully, over time, we'll get more sophisticated in the SEO world with tools that can help with this.

All right, everyone, hope you've enjoyed this addition of Whiteboard Friday. Look forward to some great comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

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!

What SEOs Need to Know About Topic Modeling & Semantic Connectivity - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers' intent—what we mean to search for, even if that's not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It's incredibly complex, but in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected in search.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking topic modeling and semantic connectivity. Those words might sound big and confusing, but, in fact, they are important to understanding the operations of search engines, and they have some direct influence on things that we might do as SEOs, hence our need to understand them.

Now, I'm going to make a caveat here. I am not an expert in this topic. I have not taken the required math classes, stats classes, programming classes to truly understand this topic in a way that I would feel extremely comfortable explaining. However, even at the surface level of understanding, I feel like I can give some compelling information that hopefully you all and myself included can go research some more about. We're certainly investigating a lot of topic modeling opportunities and possibilities here at Moz. We've done so in the past, and we're revisiting that again for some future tools, so the topic is fresh on my mind.

So here's the basic concept. The idea is that search engines are smarter than just knowing that a word, a phrase that someone searches for, like "Super Mario Brothers," is only supposed to bring back results that have exactly the words "Super Mario Brothers," that perfect phrase in the title and in the headline and in the document itself. That's still an SEO best practice because you're trying to serve visitors who have that search query. But search engines are actually a lot smarter than this.

One of my favorite examples is how intelligent Google has gotten around movie topics. So try, for example, searching for "That movie where the guy is called The Dude," and you will see that Google properly returns "The Big Lebowski" in the first ranking position. How do they know that? Well, they've essentially connected up "movie," "The Dude," and said, "Aha, those things are most closely related to 'The Big Lebowski. That's what the intent of the searcher is. That's the document that we're going to return, not a document that happens to have 'That movie about the guy named 'The Dude' in the title, exactly those words.'"

Here's another example. So this is Super Mario Brothers, and Super Mario Brothers might be connected to a lot of other terms and phrases. So a search engine might understand that Super Mario Brothers is a little bit more semantically connected to Mario than it is to Luigi, then to Nintendo and then Bowser, the jumping dragon guy, turtle with spikes on his back -- I'm not sure exactly what he is -- and Princess Peach.

As you go down here, the search engine might actually have a topic modeling algorithm, something like latent semantic indexing, which was an early model, or a later model like latent Dirichlet allocation, which is a somewhat later model, or even predictive latent Dirichlet allocation, which is an even later model. Model's not particularly important, especially for our purposes.

What is important is to know that there's probably some scoring going on. A search engine -- Google, Bing -- can understand that some of these words are more connected to Super Mario Brothers than others, and it can do the reverse. They can say Super Mario Brothers is somewhat connected to video games and very not connected to cat food. So if we find a page that happens to have the title element of Super Mario Brothers, but most of the on-page content seems to be about cat food, well, maybe we shouldn't rank that even if it has lots of incoming links with anchor text saying "Super Mario Brothers" or a very high page rank or domain authority or those kinds of things.

So search engines, Google, in particular, has gotten very, very smart about this connectivity stuff and this topic modeling post-Hummingbird. Hummingbird, of course, being the algorithm update from last fall that changed a lot of how they can interpret words and phrases.

So knowing that Google and Bing can calculate this relative connectivity, connectivity between the words and phrases and topics, we want to know how are they doing this. That answer is actually extremely broad. So that could come from co-occurrence in web documents. Sorry for turning my back on the camera. I know I'm supposed to move like this, but I just had to do a little twirl for you.

Distance between the keywords. I mean distance on the actual page itself. Does Google find "Super Mario Brothers" near the word "Mario" on a lot of the documents where the two occur, or are they relatively far away? Maybe Super Mario Brothers does appear with cat food a lot, but they're quite far away. They might look at citations and links between documents in terms of, boy, there's a lot pages on the web, when they talk about Super Mario Brothers, they also link to pages about Mario, Luigi, Nintendo, etc.

They can look at the anchor text connections of those links. They could look at co-occurrence of those words biased by a given corpi, a set of corpuses, or from certain domains. So they might say, "Hey, we only want to pay attention to what's on the fresh web right now or in the blogosphere or on news sites or on trusted domains, these kinds of things as opposed to looking at all of the documents on the web." They might choose to do this in multiple different sets of corpi.

They can look at queries from searchers, which is a really powerful thing that we unfortunately don't have access to. So they might see searcher behavior saying that a lot of people who search for Mario, Luigi, Nintendo are also searching for Super Mario Brothers.

They might look at searcher clicks, visits, history, all of that browser data that they've got from Chrome and from Android and, of course, from Google itself, and they might say those are corpi that they use to connect up words and phrases.

Probably there's a whole list of other places that they're getting this from. So they can build a very robust data set to connect words and phrases. For us, as SEOs, this means a few things.

If you're targeting a keyword for rankings, say "Super Mario Brothers," those semantically connected and related terms and phrases can help with a number of things. So if you could know that these were the right words and phrases that search engines connected to Super Mario Brothers, you can do all sorts of stuff. Things like inclusion on the page itself, helping to tell the search engine my page is more relevant for Super Mario Brothers because I include words like Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser, Nintendo, etc. as opposed to things like cat food, dog food, T-shirts, glasses, what have you.

You can think about it in the links that you earn, the documents that are linking to you and whether they contain those words and phrases and are on those topics, the anchor text that points to you potentially. You can certainly be thinking about this from a naming convention and branding standpoint. So if you're going to call a product something or call a page something or your unique version of it, you might think about including more of these words or biasing to have those words in the description of the product itself, the formal product description.

For an About page, you might think about the formal bio for a person or a company, including those kinds of words, so that as you're getting cited around the web or on your book cover jacket or in the presentation that you give at a conference, those words are included. They don't necessarily have to be links. This is a potentially powerful thing to say a lot of people who mention Super Mario Brothers tend to point to this page Nintendo8.com, which I think actually you can play the original "Super Mario Brothers" live on the web. It's kind of fun. Sorry to waste your afternoon with that.

Of course, these can also be additional keywords that you might consider targeting. This can be part of your keyword research in addition to your on-page and link building optimization.

What's unfortunate is right now there are not a lot of tools out there to help you with this process. There is a tool from Virante. Russ Jones, I think did some funding internally to put this together, and it's quite cool. It's  nTopic.org. Hopefully, this Whiteboard Friday won't bring that tool to its knees by sending tons of traffic over there. But if it does, maybe give it a few days and come back. It gives you a broad score with a little more data if you register and log in. It's got a plugin for Chrome and for WordPress. It's fairly simplistic right now, but it might help you say, "Is this page on the topic of the term or phrase that I'm targeting?"

There are many, many downloadable tools and libraries. In fact, Code.google.com has an LDA topic modeling tool specifically, and that might have been something that Google used back in the day. We don't know.

If you do a search for topic modeling tools, you can find these. Unfortunately, almost all of them are going to require some web development background at the very least. Many of them rely on a Python library or an API. Almost all of them also require a training corpus in order to model things on. So you can think about, "Well, maybe I can download Wikipedia's content and use that as a training model or use the top 10 search results from Google as some sort of training model."

This is tough stuff. This is one of the reasons why at Moz I'm particularly passionate about trying to make this something that we can help with in our on-page optimization and keyword difficulty tools, because I think this can be very powerful stuff.

What is true is that you can spot check this yourself right now. It is very possible to go look at things like related searches, look at the keyword terms and phrases that also appear on the pages that are ranking in the top 10 and extract these things out and use your own mental intelligence to say, "Are these terms and phrases relevant? Should they be included? Are these things that people would be looking for? Are they topically relevant?" Consider including them and using them for all of these things. Hopefully, over time, we'll get more sophisticated in the SEO world with tools that can help with this.

All right, everyone, hope you've enjoyed this addition of Whiteboard Friday. Look forward to some great comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

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!

How to Master The Art of Social SEO by @JCorriganSEO

The idea that social media influences organic search success is still very much up in the air considering the debate between correlation and causation. While some camps stand firmly behind Google’s head of Web Spam Matt Cutts’s strong assertion that the world’s leading search engine will never use social signals to dictate visibility and rankings, there are others who prefer to pay attention to the reputable studies and tests that are demonstrating a direct association between volume of social shares and premier search listings. Regardless of what side of the aisle you stand on, there is reason to believe that Social […]

The post How to Master The Art of Social SEO by @JCorriganSEO appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

10 Tips for an Awesome and SEO-Friendly Blog Post

Writing a blog post -like all other writing- is a skill. In order to keep your reader interested, you should think about structuring your text and writing in an appealing style. You should help your readers to grasp the main idea of your post by providing headings, subheadings and clear paragraphs. If people understand and like your text, they are much more likely to share, like, tweet and link to your post. And that will increase your rankings! So, in order to improve your ranking in Google, you should definitely try to maximize your writing skills! For some, writing for […]

The post 10 Tips for an Awesome and SEO-Friendly Blog Post appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

8+ Courses to Diversify Your Marketing Strategy Without Feeling Overwhelmed by @seosmarty

Learning to become a better Internet marketer is a challenge: There’s so much information to discover and so many techniques to try! My list of free (or cheap) marketing courses aims is designed to diversifying your list of learning resources. Many of them will be absolutely new to you. Another important criteria for this list has been productivity. All of these courses are strictly to the point, comprehensive, yet clutter-free. Enjoy! 1. How to Start a Blog Have you ever come across Moz’s beginners’ guide of SEO? First Site Guide is the same caliber, but strictly for beginner bloggers. It’s detailed enough to […]

The post 8+ Courses to Diversify Your Marketing Strategy Without Feeling Overwhelmed by @seosmarty appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

How to Include Influencers in Your Content Strategy

Posted by Amanda_Gallucci

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 Moz, Inc.

The first thing most people think when they hear "influencers" is promotion. Important people with an engaged following can amplify the reach of whatever idea, content or brand they choose to share. If you only weave influencers into your content strategy when your finished product is ready to be promoted, however, you're missing out on the full potential of having respected experts on your team.

Knowing when and how they can best be engaged at different stages is critical to moving these leaders from outside influencers to brand partners.

Measure an influencer's true value

In order to find the right influencers to give your content strategy a boost, you first should understand what makes a person an influencer and how influence will play a role within the larger content landscape.

Whether you're looking to build brand awareness or drive traffic, what matters is not sheer numbers of followers, but the amount of engaged followers.

Twitalyzer's analytics provide a good start to assessing who is influential on Twitter. The tool measures not only the potential impact users have based on their number of followers, but also the likelihood that other Twitter users will retweet or mention a particular user. 

Beyond finding an influencer who's engaged enough to spread your message, also consider how this person became influential in the first place. Whether he or she has years of experience, brilliant ideas, cohesive arguments or all of the above, consider how you can harness these strengths to maximize your potential for creating a successful relationship. Asking influencers to tweet out a link might give you a bump in traffic, but asking for their opinions, advice and time in different ways will be infinitely more valuable.

Lead with strategy

How influencers fit into your campaign should be determined according to audience research and campaign goals. Know what platforms your target audience interacts with, what interests are strong enough to drive them to take action and who they trust. The more naturally these insights are woven into your content, the easier it will be to find influencers in this segment who will appreciate what you have to share.

Campaign goals are equally crucial because depending on what you want to achieve, you might change the angle of your messaging or favor different platforms. Not every influencer has the same level of activity and reach on every social channel, so identify influencers who are stars on the right platforms. Similarly, tailor your message for each influencer so that anything they share on your behalf looks organic alongside their other content.

Once you have a solid foundation for your strategy, start looking for influencers and begin your outreach process. With enough lead time to send along a beta version or rough draft, you can tweak content based on their feedback. You'll also need allow time for them to collaborate with you on original content, create any sponsored or guest content or write a review or give a quote that you can use on your content's release.

Don't ask for too much of an influencer's time, however, especially if you are asking for offhand feedback and not entering into a paid engagement. Build a relationship before you ask for favors, and even still, make the ask as easy as possible by providing the right amount of background and simplifying what you want the person to do. Rand's Whiteboard Friday on earning the amplification of influencer walks through the importance of the relationship-building aspect and enticing influencers with what's in it for them.

Find influencers

With a clear understanding of the role influencers play within your overall strategy, you're ready to identify the right candidates.

Countless tools are available to help you find influencers in different verticals, so choose based on the action you want the influencer to take. If you are searching for a thought leader who can write engaging content, a tool like ClearVoice will help you find credible authors who focus on a particular topic. For each writer, you can view a list of articles he or she has written on that subject.

When you need social influencers who can help you amplify content, Buzzsumo is a great tool. Through their Influencer search, you can find people who frequently share content on a given topic and can click through to see what these links are.

Another approach to finding social influencers is to search Twitter bios using Followerwonk and sorting by Social Authority. 

Engage influencers at different stages

Outreach

Outreach ideally starts with organically following influencers and engaging with them over time. Then reaching out to them via email or social media is less about introductions and more about the specific project you want to pitch to the influencer.

There will also be times when you find an influencer who aligns with your strategy but you don't have the relationship-building lead time. For this cold outreach, write a succinct introduction that includes goals your goals for the content and the benefits the influencer will receive by working with you. Then make your ask. Personalization and quality are key. If you find outreach challenging, this guide from Portent is a great place to start.

Make outreach easier for yourself by using a tool like BuzzStream that automates and tracks the process. It will help you find contacts at certain publishers—giving you the twofold opportunity to pitch your own content as well as get in touch with influential authors. It also generates templated, customizable outreach emails.

Just remember, even if you already have a solid relationship with an influencer, show that you value his or her time. Do as much of the groundwork as you can in advance. For instance, if you want people to share something on social, draft one to three example social posts specifically crafted for each influencer and platform.

Start of relationship

Once an influencer agrees to work with you, provide just the right amount of background information and instruction. This will vary by project and influencer.

For an influencer creating content, define the basics (e.g., article, ebook, video, etc.), in addition to length and editorial theme. Find a good balance between leaving room for the influencer to share his or her expertise, while setting up key points and takeaways you want the content to achieve. You should also create and send an abbreviated style guide. There's no need to disclose every internal note you have, but if you can provide the basic stylistic do's and don'ts, product or company background, audience information, and voice and tone guidelines, you will spend less time on edits and back-and-forths with the influencer. Set clear expectations and schedule benchmark dates where you can check in on progress and make revisions where necessary.

In the case of engaging influencers to amplify content, you won't need to give quite as much guidance on how to craft the social message, but you can still offer suggestions on angles that would work well or any topics or phrases your brand wouldn't want to be associated with. It's also important to provide summaries of any piece of content you are asking influencers to share so that a) if they don't have time to read every word, they still feel comfortable with the concept and b) there won't have to be any guesswork in deciding what part of the content is most important to share.

Relationship maintenance

If your experience with an influencer is mutually beneficial and you know you'll want to partner again, make sure to check in periodically. Don't ask for something new every time you reach out. Keep in touch by sending along interesting content or company updates the influencer might find useful. Better yet, always extend a congratulations on a promotion or a new position.

To ensure you remember to engage with the right people, use tools like Commun.it, which identify the influential people you interact with on Twitter, and prompt you to re-engage with people you haven't @ mentioned recently. 

LinkedIn Contacts is also a handy way to keep track of conversations and check on any updates on the influencer's end to look out for opportunities to get in touch.

As you continue to grow existing influencer relationships, adjust your overarching strategy to incorporate more key industry leaders. Create new roles for influencers to play in shaping your content and its promotion.

Always be strategizing

The best way to include influencers in your content strategy is to involve them at every stage of the process, including:

1. Creation: Plan out what types of influencers will be helpful and the role they should play based on the target audience and campaign goals.
2. Implementation: Share a strategic brief with onboarded influencers and leave flexibility for changes based on the influencer's feedback.
3. Measurement: Factor in the reach of influencers as part of the success of your campaign.

Over time, integrating and managing influencer relationships will become second nature, and they will seem more like team members and partners.

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!

How Link Building Has Changed In 2014: Interview With Prashant Puri by @johnrampton

As part of our coverage from the sold-out Searchmetrics x Search Engine Journal conference in San Francisco on SEO, content marketing, and analytics, I caught up with Prashant Puri of AdLift to discuss how link building has changed over the past few months. What’s going on with link building, and what can you do to keep up with the changes? How can business owners attract better links to their website? Prashant explains in the video below. Here are some key takeaways from the video: Links are still the best way for Google to determine the overall authority of a site. What’s changed […]

The post How Link Building Has Changed In 2014: Interview With Prashant Puri by @johnrampton appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Read And Respond To Customer Reviews In Real-Time On The Google My Business Mobile App by @mattsouthern

Today, Google announced an update to its Google My Business mobile app intended to to give more control to business owners on the go by allowing them to do things like respond to reviews, and view call analytics. Previously, with the Google My Business app you could only perform rudimentary tasks like updating business information and posting to Google+. The changes announced today make the app better for both business owners and customers. Business owners get notified immediately when a customer leaves a review, which means customers can (potentially) receive an immediate response and know they’re being listened to. Business […]

The post Read And Respond To Customer Reviews In Real-Time On The Google My Business Mobile App by @mattsouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Creating Long-Term SEO Success: An Interview With Rhea Drysdale by @wonderwall7

A big thanks to our Pubcon 2014 sponsor, LinkResearchTools, your off-page SEO toolkit. Link Detox: Recover – Protect – Build. At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Rhea Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media, about how to run successful long-term SEO campaigns. At Outspoken Media, Rhea focuses a lot on SEO as a long-term commitment rather than a tactic for generating short term gains. In the video below, Rhea discusses her approach to long-term SEO and why taking that kind of approach is so important. Here are some key takeaways from the […]

The post Creating Long-Term SEO Success: An Interview With Rhea Drysdale by @wonderwall7 appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Is Ello the New Facebook Killer or a 15 Minute Fame Flame? by @LarryKim

It’s time to say “ello” to the new social network in town. Dubbed the “anti-Facebook,” the Internet is abuzz with news of the new social network creation Ello, created by entrepreneur and toy designer Paul Budnitz. With millions of users and what Budnitz calculates to be “about 50,000 sign ups a day,” Ello is worth taking note of. Is Ello unique and compelling enough to beat out long-time social champions like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr? Tough to say. And It Was All Ello Ello prides itself on a simple and clean social experience. While sites like Facebook and Twitter have […]

The post Is Ello the New Facebook Killer or a 15 Minute Fame Flame? by @LarryKim appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

It's Time to Treat Content as Part of the User Experience

Posted by wrttnwrd

Forget content marketing, SEO content, and whatever else as you know them. We need to fundamentally change our approach to content. It's not an add-on or a separate thing. It's an inseparable part of the user experience. Let's act that way.

Content: the silent epidemic

Your site's infested.

Most organizations treat content like some kind of horrific disease. They try to shove it as far away as possible from the "real" web site, like a bad case of body lice.

Where do they put it? The blog, of course:

Don't worry, this isn't another put-the-blog-on-the-site-dammit rant. Hopefully, you already understand that blog.site.com isn't as good as site.com/blog.

They also incorrectly define "content." Content isn't "stuff we write to rank higher" or "infographics" or "longform articles."

Content is anything that communicates a message to the audience. Anything.

Product descriptions? Content.

The company story? Content.

Images? Content.

That video of your company picnic that someone posted to your site three years ago and shows everyone dressed as Muppets? Content.

If it says something, shows something, or otherwise communicates, it's content.

Change your approach

We all need to change our entire approach to content. Treat it as part of the user experience, instead of a nasty skin disease:

1. Integrate content that can enhance the user experience
2. Optimize what you already have

Integrate content that can enhance the user experience

Interlink and integrate related information. That includes connecting promotional to informational and showing related visuals and text on promotional pages.

"Promotional" means product descriptions or anything else that "sells" an idea or makes a call to action to the visitor.

Companies are terrified of this. They believe it'll send customers away. But it doesn't happen.

I have never seen revenue drop because of interlinking or other integration. I have seen it generate long-term customer relationships, increase referrals and increase near-term conversions.

Link to the blog

If nothing else, link to relevant blog posts. People intent on making a purchase aren't going to click away never to return. Check out how Surly Bikes does it:

(By the way, that bike's a steal at $2,700, if anyone's trying to figure out what to get me for Hanukkah this year.)

Linking to a relevant post allows really interested visitors to drill down an additional layer of detail. They can get impressions, learn why one product might be better for them than another, and maybe even (gasp) realize that the folks behind the product are just like them.

Embed related social content

Urban Outfitters does so much right. They have an amazing  Instagram account:

But, for some reason, they don't link to it from product pages.

It's OK. I'm not cool enough for their stuff anyway. But why hide all those attractive people using their products? That'll encourage all sorts of purchasers.

Also, link to related social content right from your product pages. Ideally, you want to embed examples right in the page. At the very least, link prominently to the relevant account (but seriously, embed the examples).

Here's another example. I'm definitely a Democrat, but I have to offer a tip to the other side of the aisle here: If you have someone with decent YouTube videos, include 'em. Representative DeSantis has an entire YouTube channel. Why not show a few videos here?

If you want to see someone do it right, have a look at top10.com. They're pulling Instagram images straight into their hotel information.

You can do this with any social platform that lets you: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, etc. So what's stopping you?

Optimize what you already have

Your site is already stuffed with content.

You might deny it. But it's true.

So why not optimize what you've got?

Write decent descriptions

Whatever you're selling/promoting, write a decent description. That includes category pages. I'm not sure what to say about the following top-of-category page "description," so I'll go with hysterical, bitter laughter:

By the way, for those who think this kind of content is a great SEO tactic, this site's on page 2 for "jeans."

I'm not thrilled with this one, as it's buried at the bottom of the category page and a little keyword stuffed, but compared to the previous, it's a shining light in the darkness:

That site ranks #3 for "jeans."

Even if you care only about rankings, better descriptions are a better strategy.

At this time, the #1 site for "jeans" has a description buried at the bottom of their category page that's so awful I cried. I'll dig into that another time, but I doubt that travesty is helping them much, and more importantly, it sure doesn't make me want to buy anything.

Don't be ashamed

Your content is not a zit. Show it proudly. I like the way Juicy Couture does it. I can actually read the product description:

This, on the other hand, makes me think I need bifocals.

That's actual size, by the way.

Follow the same rules of typography you would anywhere else. Make sure your type is high-contrast and readable. Put it somewhere that I'll actually see it. At the very least, don't hide it, for heaven's sake.

Guide me when I'm lost

Please don't redirect me to a category page without any explanation. I'm not bashing a pinata.

Blindfolding me, spinning me around 8 times and then sending me on my way is not entertaining. It's annoying as hell.

If I search for a product you no longer sell, and click the description:

1. Show me the product page with a "Sorry, this product is no longer available. But you might like..." and send me along
2. Or show me a note explaining what just happened

Urban Outfitters does it right:

Nice!

You might be thinking, "Hey, that's not content!"

Yeah, it is. When content disappears, send me to stuff you've got. Content UX 101.

Oh, and that technology thing...

One last step: You need to enable all of this through technology. You have to be able to do all the stuff I listed above. That requires the right tools.

This is the source of teeth-grinding frustration for many content folks. If you can't edit the site, you can't do any of this stuff, right? Weellll yes and no. Here are things I've tried, and the result:

1. Screaming. Generally a turn-off. Never gets the desired result.
2. Demanding. See screaming.
3. Asking, with a justification. Ask for the features you need, explaining why and how they might help. If you can, show competitors who are doing the same thing. This can take.... a..... long....... time. But it works.
4. Getting small wins. Can't add a new page? Edit a product description. Can't add a new chunk of content to a product page? Add a little bit to the existing description, or edit it as desired. This one works pretty well, but keep asking for the other features, or you'll never make progress.
5. Move off the site. You can set up a separate blog, social media account, whatever. I usually punch myself in the spleen right about then, but this can get results, especially for a big brand. Record the results and use that to advocate for more. Best if used in tandem with #3. Runs directly counter to half this article, but what're you gonna do?

I'm sorry I don't have an easier solution here. Just remember you're not the only person asking the IT team for stuff, or telling your boss you're being prevented from doing a good job, and proceed accordingly.

If you are the boss or IT team, and you're reading this, please: Don't sacrifice content or shove it off the site. Listen to your marketers. They want to succeed. "Helped triple revenue" looks a lot better on a resume than "Proposed worthless ideas." So they've got significant incentive.

OK, but is this legit?

I have to admit, I don't have data on all of this. Know what? Not all marketing is data-driven. But look at some real-life examples of user experience optimization through content:

In the "real world," the environment is the content:

• Starbucks doesn't just operate a bunch of walk-in, walk-out coffee shops. They provide music, comfy chairs and nice people. An experience. Not a transaction.
• New car dealers have completely transformed from big lots with cheesy pitches to mini-museums.
• Airlines attempt to sell an experience. Some do it better than others. And it's not about money. "Low fare" airlines like Southwest have been particularly successful.

Online, features and... well, content are the content.

• Amazon feels like a purely transactional site at first. But in-depth reviews, editors' comments, lists of recently-viewed items and other gadgetry transform the site.
• Woot.com lives and breathes cool content. It's their brand, and it's an intimate part of the user experience.
• And check out Surly, as I said above.

These brands all do pretty well, yes? Good content UX sure doesn't hurt.

Another example: We worked with a major fashion brand. We got them thinking about the content user experience. They integrated, and optimized their product descriptions. Our technical recommendations had to wait for release cycles. It didn't matter. They immediately hit number one for the most competitive phrases in their industry. Coincidence? I think not. So, even if rankings are your only goal, content UX is a powerful tool.

Get to work

Practice user experience optimization through content. By "optimization," I don't mean "stuffing in keywords until readers want to puke." I mean "optimal combination of promotional and informational content."

Content optimization drives interest, engagement and yes, rankings. It also takes visitors from transactional to loyal.

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