Posts tagged Whiteboard
Mobile SEO Tips For Everyone. Filmed on an iPad 2 – Whiteboard Friday – SEOmoz (blog)
May 19th
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Mobile SEO Tips For Everyone. Filmed on an iPad 2 – Whiteboard Friday
SEOmoz (blog) Facebook, Google, the SEO Blog… (I know a lot of you are watching this on a train, plane, or… well, I hope you're not watching this in your automobile!) – whatever you look for at home, you're likely looking for it while you're away from your … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Correlation Data for SEO and Social Media Analysis – Part 2 – Whiteboard Friday – SEOmoz (blog)
Apr 28th
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Correlation Data for SEO and Social Media Analysis – Part 2 – Whiteboard Friday
SEOmoz (blog) Last week, Rand discussed the importance of correlation data in general and how you can use it for SEO research. It's a lot easier to get things done if you know which tasks are high priority and which are low, and correlation data can help. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
How to Pitch SEO to Potential Clients and Employers – Whiteboard Friday
Aug 13th
Posted by Danny Dover
Update: Thank you everyone for your patience with the video issues. It looks like our video host’s CDN accidentally cached a bad request. Everything should be working now! Party on!
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday I talk about pitching SEO to potential clients and employers. This post describes the common elements that unite the successful pitches I have witnessed and describes how you can use them to your advantage. Also, I shaved my beard and now look like a 12-year-old boy. (I don’t recommend that as a pitch tactic.)
Video Transcription
Hello, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I do SEO here at SEOmoz. Today
for Whiteboard Friday, I’m going to tell you about something that I think
is extremely important, and you should, too. Pitching SEO. By pitching
SEO, I mean presenting the idea of SEO to either potential clients or to
potential employers. So when I am giving this pitch, I have a few key
points I make, and then I’m going to go through a couple of rebuttals that
people usually make back to me.The first key point that I make, and I always, always do this because it is
very important, is to acknowledge the snake oil salesman. SEO is an
industry where there are a lot of people who just kind of suck. They do a
very poor job of service and it makes the entire industry look bad. So,
you need to acknowledge those people exist so that the person who is
hearing the pitch takes into consideration what you are saying. You’re
acknowledging that, yes, they are correct. But there is also this
alternative that they might now know about. My favorite way of doing this
is you just acknowledge it and then explain why, what proof you have to
show that is not how you do your service, be it past clients or
testimonials or actual data you can show from your results. I prefer the
latter if possible.Number two. Strategies are easy but tactics are hard. A lot of times when
I am explaining SEO, I will come into contact with someone who is like,
"Oh, yeah, I get it. You’ve got to build links and content." They’re
absolutely right. That’s correct. That’s what you have to do. But what
they are talking about are strategies. Bigger ideas. Building content,
that is just a broad idea. The actual content you write and the way you do
it and the way it is formatted, those are tactics.In SEO, I think that the strategies are easy. They are easy to comprehend.
They’re big and they make intuitive sense. But the tactics are hard. My
favorite example of this is URL rewrites. The idea is yes, we’re going to
make all the URLs go from here to here. It turns out that doing that can
be very, very troublesome, and you run into lots and lots of side cases
just like anything you do with programming. So, I always try to
acknowledge that yes, the strategies are easy, but you are going to
probably want a specialist so that you make sure you nail all your tactics.Number three. PPC and SEO equals the top of the conversion funnel. To be
completely honest, there are other things at the top of the conversion
funnel as well. There’s email. There’s direct traffic. There are lots of
other things. The two that I focus on are PPC and SEO. PPC is pay per
click, which is the ads you pay for in search engines and elsewhere and SEO
being search engine optimization, of course.These are both tops of the funnel. So, you can either chose to pay on an
ongoing basis for PPC and get some traffic that way, or you can do it
through SEO and if you adhere to best practices, it can be free for you.
Just learn how to do it once, continue with the best practices, and it
costs you no money. The nice thing about this is that, while 90% of
budgets go to PPC, only 10% of clicks go there. The reverse of that is
only 10% of budgets approximately go to SEO, but 90% of clicks from users
are going to organic results and search engines. Huge opportunity here and
if you do it right, it won’t cost you a dime.The next one, rebuttals. When I am giving this pitch, there are a couple
of responses I get from people that I think are very genuine and they make
a lot of sense. These are the rebuttals they give, and then how I help
deconstruct that a little bit.The first one being SEO takes too long. They are absolutely right. SEO
does take a long time. The way I break down SEO in my head is into
popularity, which is links, and relevancy, which is onsite, although there
is an element of links in that too. I’ll write a little bit more about
this in the blog post below. The idea being that SEO takes too long.
That’s true, but not for on page. If you want to just do on page
optimizations, you can have a lot of opportunity to boost traffic quickly.
Just do on page to start with. Another trick like that is just installing
a site map if they don’t have one. I’ve seen that this is easy to do. You
can have an automated generator do it. Submit it to the engines, and within
a week or so you’ll see results on that assuming they’ve never had one
before and other variables are not acting awry.Number two, it will happen organically. This is one of my favorites.
People will say, "Oh yeah, we’re building links anyway. There’s variety in
our content. We have professional writers. So it’s just going to happen
organically." That is not true. I thought the same thing with my dating
life. Yeah, it will just happen organically. No, it’s not happened
organically. Same thing with SEO. You can try to do all these things, but
unless you have some focus, some actual goals, and some plans, it’s just
not going to happen. Search engine optimization, you’re not optimizing
anything. You’re just letting it happen. So by putting in just a little
bit extra effort, you can get a lot more results. That’s usually what I
use there.The last one is, "I’m too busy." That’s something I can totally
understand. Learning SEO is a complicated process. But, it turns out you
can have other people do this for you. If you are trading it for money,
you can just pay someone to do a little bit on it, SEO for you, do an SEO
audit, and give you some recommendations. Or you can trade, you can do
some bartering or something else. You can just make it happen. So, yes,
being busy is an excuse, but not with the potential there is to make a lot
of money with SEO and a lot of conversion on that.That’s all the time I’ve got today. I appreciate all of you paying
attention, or some of you. Not that guy. I appreciate it, and I’ll talk
to you next week. Bye.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
Whiteboard Friday – Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page
Aug 5th
Posted by Danny Dover
This week on Whiteboard Friday we pull a secret out of the SEO secrets vault. This handy strategy helps you take advantage of the specific types of results that Google chooses for people and company based searches and helps you dominate your brand search engine result page.
Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page (SERP)
Build YourBrand.com
Building a brand hub is an obvious suggestion but not necessarily for the reason you might think. Use these types of websites to promote what other domains are saying about you or your brand elsewhere on the Internet. This gives those pages (social media profiles, interviews, etc…) link juice and improves their relevancy, thus helping them rank for your brand SERP. (Hint: Use anchor text like "SEOmoz on Twitter" or "John Doe in the New York Times"). You can see an example of me doing this tactic on DannyDover.com
Build an Alternative Brand Site
After building your brand hub and linking from its homepage to the other pages you want to rank, you should build another brand site. In practical terms I recommend using a single page on a related domain. (I use this page targeting just my first name, Danny as my alternate). This helps you command a second result in the SERP because it is on a separate (and in this case, a more powerful) domain.
Create Social Media Profiles
This is obvious. Social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc…) are both great search results for people/brand searches and are on very powerful domains. This makes them great resources to fill up your brand SERP.
Do Interviews/News
Linking to relevant articles/interviews on your brand hub site is an excellent tactic for filling the remaining spots on your brand SERP. Like the last tactic, these pages are helpful search results for searchers and are usually on powerful domains.
Do PPC
This final tactic is less intuitive. Bidding on your name/brand allows you to control the ads on your brand SERP. This is helpful for branding (der…) and it actually tends to increase the click through rates of the number one result on the page as well as the ad.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less rude)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
Whiteboard Friday – Outsourcing Content Creation
Jul 29th
Posted by Danny Dover
This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin describes the methods he recommends for outsourcing content creation. Content is extremely important for SEO and users alike so these best practices are important for those of us without the luxury of an in-house staff of copywriters.
Embed Video:
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Rand starts this presentation by setting context with his favorite SEO diagram. You can read more about the SEO Pyramid here.
Step 1: Requirements Gathering
Decide what you are trying to accomplish. Are you doing this for sales? SEO? Engagement? Traffic? Brand awareness? Be clear and write down what you want to accomplish along with the metrics you will use to measure them.
Step 2: Locating Potential Resources
You have plenty of options for finding potential resources. You can go offshore, in-house or hire web contractors. For web contractors, you can use the traditional services like Craigslist, oDesk, Elance, Guru or tap into the world of writing communities and long tail bloggers. These last two recommendations while not as established can many times provide superior quality writing with lower budgets.
Step 3: Research Writing Quality & Voice Match
In order to do this, we highly recommend you set up a voice document (a written record of how you would like to sound in your company’s written communications and promotions). Give this to the writer before getting a sample and use this as the yardstick after they submit their first sample. This will help you gauge if this person is a good fit for your organization.
Step 4: Scale, Evaluate, Track
Now that you have established a process, you need to put checks into place to make sure the writer is hitting their targets. Look back at the goals you created in the first step and use them to track and improve upon the related metrics.
Remember, from both an SEO and from a human perspective, writing is about quality over quantity. Having one great article that engages readers and earns links far outweighs 100 poorly written articles.
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
Whiteboard Friday – How to Get an SEO Job – SEOmoz (blog)
Jul 22nd
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Whiteboard Friday – How to Get an SEO Job
SEOmoz (blog) (My co-workers hate me ;-p) This week's Whiteboard Friday is about how to get an SEO job. In it, I divulge the secret of how I suckered my way into how I … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Whiteboard Friday – How to Get an SEO Job
Jul 22nd
Posted by Danny Dover
Guess who’s back. Back again. Danny’s back. Tell a friend. (My co-workers hate me ;-p) This week’s Whiteboard Friday is about how to get an SEO job. In it, I divulge the secret of how I suckered my way into how I earned this job. I also do the worst impression of my life and finish with a shocking twist that I guarantee you won’t see coming!
Embed Video:
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Apply for an Internship
- Leverage Start-ups – Start-ups are particularly well suited for interns because most of them can’t afford to pay people
- Use the "Godfather Approach" – Make the company an offer they can’t refuse. (Try working for free and provide your own laptop in exchange for an internship,)
Dive Right In
- Build Test Sites – After reading the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, try building simple sites to target long tail terms.
- Offer to Help Charities – Like start-ups, charities tend to not have a lot of extra resources. Take advantage of this by volunteering.
Create a New Niche
- Leverage What You Already Know – Combine your current knowledge with what you want to learn to become the best in a given niche.
- Educate Others For Free – Earn links and share the love by teaching others about what you learn.
Join the Community
- Participate in Blogs/Social Media/Conferences – Get your name out and build your network by participating online.
- Take Advantage of Osmosis – Get into an environment where you learn simply by being in the right place.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
Whiteboard Friday – The Biggest SEO Mistakes SEOmoz Has Ever Made
Jul 15th
Posted by Danny Dover
This week’s Whiteboard Friday features the return of Rand (woo hoo!) and his self declared biggest SEO mistakes. We screw up a lot here at SEOmoz (hell, they hired me), so we feel it is only appropriate to take this opportunity to share what we have learned in an effort to prevent you from making similar mistakes. SEO is complicated. The best we can do is practice, work hard and compare notes.
1. Reciprocal Links + Robots.txt NoFollow
Back before the formal SEOmoz days, Rand used to dabble a bit is some grayer areas of SEO. The first mistake he mentions is a tactic involving offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via robots.txt/meta robots so that he could get all of the link value. This tactic didn’t really work and he ended up having to do a lot more work to get in the good graces of the webmasters he had fooled. Head smack!
2. Buying Links for Clients
This tactic also took place before formal SEOmoz days. At the time, Rand spent client budgets on paid links. This is a bad idea because the value of the links can’t be determined (was Google even counting them?). He later found out through Google employees that the links were not being counted and that they may actually be hurting the client’s site ability to rank. Oops!
3. Recommending People Use H1 Tags with Keywords
This mistake is a little bit more subtle. For years, SEOmoz recommended including keywords in the H1 of pages. After we started doing formal machine learning correlation tests we found out that this tactic didn’t actually help very much at all (including the keywords in normal text in bigger fonts worked essentially the same). This was a shame because it meant we wasted time and energy convincing our clients to update their H1s.
4. Recommending People Not To Use XML Sitemaps
When XML Sitemaps first debuted, Rand and SEOmoz recommended not using this. While the idea was sound in theory (having a XML Sitemap can make it difficult to spot information architecture problems) the observation ended up being outweighed by the impact we saw with the increased indexation rates of sites that employed this tool.
5. Incorrectly Redirecting Linkscape to Open Site Explorer
Recently we decided to 301 redirect all of the old Linkscape reports to our newer, better converting, Open Site Explorer reports in a 1-1 relationship. This was in theory a good idea but unfortunately including various tracking components on the redirect URLs resulted in us losing a significant amount of traffic. We later fixed this with rel=canonical but a lot of the damage was already done. Ouch!
Do you have any lessons you have learned after making some noteworthy mistakes? If so, we would love to hear what you learned in the comments below.
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
Whiteboard Friday – 7 Ways to Take Advantage of Google’s Site Speed Algorithm (Pop-Up Video Style)
Jul 8th
Posted by Danny Dover
Want happier website visitors and higher rankings? This week’s Whiteboard Friday is about how and why to speed up your website. It is more technical than previous videos so I tried to spice it up with an ode to one of my favorite canceled TV Shows, Pop-up Video. Can’t stand the content? At least the added commentary is entertaining. (It is the perfect plan ;-p)
7 Ways to Take Advantage of Google’s Site Speed Algorithm
The following are seven proven techniques well known websites use to boost their site speed.
1. Enable Gzip
Gzip is a open source compression algorithm that can used to compress your website’s content before your server sends the data to a visitor’s browser. This makes your servers job easier and makes pages load faster for your users. You can learn how to enable Gzip here.
2. Minify Javascript/CSS
Minify is the process (and software) for removing unnecessary formatting characters from code. This makes your files smaller and your visitors happier. You can learn all about this process here.
3. Use a CDN (Content Distribution Network)
CDNs are systems of interconnected server resources that spread content and assets around the globe to shorten the distance between server and prospective user. They are commonly used by the Web’s most popular websites. You can find a list of free CDNs here.
4. Optimize Images
You can take advantage of the countless man hours that have been devoted to image compression and make your users happier by simply saving your images as the appropriate type. As a very general rule of thumb, I recommend saving photos as JPEGs and graphics as PNGs.
5. Use External Javascript/CSS
When a browser requests a website from a server it can only download a set number of files of the same type at any given point. While this isn’t true of all file types, it is a good enough reason to host applicable files on alternative subdomains. This is only recommended for sites where the pros of speed will outweigh the SEO cons of creating a new subdomain.
6. Avoid Using Excess Redirects
While redirects can be extremely useful, it is important to know that implementing them does force your servers to do slightly more work per applicable request. Always avoid redirect strings (301 -> 301 -> 200 or even worse 301 -> 302 -> 200) and use these tools sparingly.
7. Use Fewer Files
The most straightforward way to speed up your website is to simply use fewer files. Less files means less data. My favorite method of doing this is utilizing CSS sprites. You can read how popular websites are using this trick here.
Google’s Mission to Speed Up the Web
Fueled by the massive potential of the Internet, Googlers are working on many projects in their attempt to speed up the Web:
- Rewriting Internet Protocols – Starting at the foundation, teams at Google are rewriting the protocols that run the Internet in order to get faster performance.
- Creating a Public DNS – Google recently released a public DNS resource to help speed up DNS calls.
- Providing Fiber-optics for the Public – For a select few cities in the United States, Google will soon be offering ultra high-speed broadband networks for consumers.
- Encouraging Webmasters/SEOs to Speed Up Their Sites with a New Algorithm Update – Google spilled the beans about their one new aspect of their ranking algorithms by saying that site speed is now a ranking factor. This post explains how to take advantage of that.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
Whiteboard Friday – The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Links From Bloggers
Jul 8th
Posted by Danny Dover
This weeks Whiteboard Friday is a little bit different than normal but a lot more awesome. I took the lead this week and am sharing 5 tips that beginners can use to get links from bloggers. This educational video is full to the brim with helpful tips, odd tangents and one very poor impression of a news anchor.
The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Links from Bloggers
Try all of the following tactics and focus on building upon whichever one works best for your situation.
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Make Lists of Niche Linkers (and post them) – Most bloggers are by nature marketers. Take of advantage of this by writing material that helps them market themselves. For example, if you wanted to get a link from a blog in the car space, you might make a list of the top 3 Honda Civic blogs. Remember to go niche and avoid stating the obvious (I.E. Techcrunch is the number one tech blog). "The obvious" doesn’t attract links.
Do Interviews – This tactic has two main benefits. First, by conducting interviews you get interesting content to write about. What could be more interesting than what the industry experts are talking about? (Clever interviewers will realize the answer is the stuff the experts don’t want to talk about). Secondly, by getting your name/brand in the head of an expert, you have more chances of getting links from them in the future.
Be Virtually Social – Being virtually social is easy and can provide higher short term ROI than talking to people face to face. (e.g. It is easier to get a link from someone who is in the process of writing something online than it is to get a link from someone who is not at a computer.) I use the following three avenues to do this:
- Facebook – Since Facebook replaced "Fan" with "Like", it is now easier than ever to promote your work via Facebook without being too "salesy". This won’t get you links per say (as the entire process exists within Facebook’s ecosystem) but it can help drive traffic.
- Twitter – Like Facebook, Twitter won’t necessarily help you build followed links but it does help you spread your brand/product/idea around the net. This makes it a good long term strategy.
- Blogs – One great way to get links is to find supporting evidence for a given blog post and letting it’s author know about it. If they use it, they are likely to cite you as the source.
In addition to promoting my work on Twitter, I use the platform to spread Internet awesomeness. (Thus the image above)
Make In-Person Connections – This is the best long term way to get links. When bloggers are trying to come up with supporting evidence for a point they are trying to make, they are much more likely to use a example that is already in their head than they are to go out and search for it. The best way to get into someones head (other than a chisel) is to meet them and spend time with them. (Wait a chisel? Did anyone else read that?)
Send Linkers Demos of Things (Websites, New Products, Games, Etc…) That You Want Links To and Include the Linkers Stuff In It. – This tactic is newer and has been proving to work very well. If you want coverage from a specific blogger, try including their blog in the product demo and sending it to them. This way they can promote themselves while promoting your work.
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
