maandag 27 januari 2014

Affiliate programs and added value

Webmaster level: All

Our quality guidelines warn against running a site with thin or scraped content without adding substantial added value to the user. Recently, we’ve seen this behavior on many video sites, particularly in the adult industry, but also elsewhere. These sites display content provided by an affiliate program—the same content that is available across hundreds or even thousands of other sites.


If your site syndicates content that’s available elsewhere, a good question to ask is: “Does this site provide significant added benefits that would make a user want to visit this site in search results instead of the original source of the content?” If the answer is “No,” the site may frustrate searchers and violate our quality guidelines. As with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take action, including removal from our index, in order to maintain the quality of our users’ search results. If you have any questions about our guidelines, you can ask them in our Webmaster Help Forum.






via Google Webmaster Central Blog http://ift.tt/1ebR7v3


http://ift.tt/L3XpBn

Applying Lessons from the Publishing Industry to SEO Consulting

Posted by SarahKershaw



“Search has been less and less relevant since Facebook released News Feed. Now we get the vast majority of our traffic via social, and about 1-2% from search”

– Chris Dannen from Fast Co Labs




“We benefited a ton from an early SEO audit thanks to IAC’s SEO pros, but once the right framework was in place, it’s been up to us as content creators to really dig deep into Google Analytics to determine where the opportunities lie…”

– Jordan Shakeshaft, editorial director of Life by DailyBurn



“None” was Shakeshaft’s response to a question about the role of SEO within her company. “There’s very little of actual value in it for us.” This from a respected British magazine.


In preparation for this post, I started thinking about publishers and their plans for 2014, specifically their growth strategies for the coming year. My thought was that as the publishing industry usually leads the way when it comes to new content techniques and products, it is at the forefront of publishing initiatives. As publishers blaze new trails, we as consultants have the opportunity to learn by proxy, observing what has worked and what has not. These observations can then be applied to our own clients’ content creation. In this post-panda arena, the scramble to produce high-quality, compelling content is as real as ever, and lessons need to be learned fast. Let the publishing industry be your guide; come, walk with me.


In researching this post, I spoke to a combination of editors, industry analysts and publishing company employees. The quotes are representative of my contacts and their responses, but it is in no way comprehensive for the publishing industry as whole.


As per the quotes above, the sobering reality is that, at best, publishers see SEO as just one small part of their marketing strategy. Moz’s very own legend, Dr. Pete, has been trying to tell us this for a while, encouraging the search community to look beyond rankings. Our goal as consultants is to continue to add value in this altogether more varied landscape. The good news is that we can if we leverage our technical knowledge and use this to present some of the newer ideas, beyond our usual scope, to our clients.


This post is an examination of some of the other opportunities publishers are pursuing this year, along with my dreams for what they could be doing and some tips on how to present these ideas to clients.


What are publishers doing for growth?


1) Investing in site redesigns


The internet was all aflutter earlier this month, when The New York Times launched its site redesign. That project, in addition to generating buzz, traffic, and links, was the site’s first major redesign since 2006. The main visual changes include:




  1. Changing of fonts and font colours so it more closely resembles the print edition. The links from the home page to the categories page are now black, not blue for example.

  2. Article comments now appear on the right-hand side of the article, allowing comments to receive the same level of visibility as the article.

  3. Infinite scroll, rather than pagination.

  4. A much more minimal look on article pages with more white space.



This redesign freshens up the look of the page as a whole and the cleaner, sparer UI is more in keeping with what other publications are doing. This video from Fi talks us through its process for redesigning USAToday.com, which has several design features in common with the Times’ update.


The insight: Good design matters.


Your access point: When presenting ideas of this ilk to your clients, it is important to be in cahoots with the designers. Your aim is to collaborate in these projects, ideally from initial conception. The advantage of being an outsider weighing in on a site redesign is that you are invariably not bound by the limitations of a CMS or the like; you are free to see the site and where it stands in relation to industry competitors with a detached view. You can represent SEO and call on your experiences with redesigns to offer suggestions.


2) Embracing social


You probably already know that social networks are an increasingly important means of discovery, and amongst the under-45s, they are the most popular method of finding content. Social becomes more and more important as user groups get younger. For example, 44% of 18- to 24-year-olds rely on social, versus just 19% of users over 55. This is illustrated by this graph from the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2013:



Clearly, if you wish to build long term trust with your users, social networks are critical for getting your content in front of younger users. It goes without saying that social networks are also now critical for engagement among all age groups.


What is surprising is the extent to which publishers are still missing this opportunity, whilst newer companies such as Upworthy and Buzzfeed are swooping in and winning traffic. This recent article from the Media Briefing visualizes how some of the media players are doing on Facebook, and the newsworthy part is that none of the more established players feature at all. In short, they are not getting it right. The winners in this particular data set are companies that have been formed within the last eight years (Buzzfeed was formed in 2006, Upworthy in 2012); the Huffington Post is the old guard here, and that is only nine years old.



The results are clear Upworthy and Buzzfeed have mastered the sort of content that gets people sharing. Whilst the audience may eventually tire of cats in unlikely situations, photoshop-shaming, and listicles, you can be sure that both companies are investing time and effort to evolve from their current strategy. Mark Suster expanded on this idea in a recent post, saying “I think companies like Upworthy can build really compelling businesses in the future – but I’m willing to bet serious cash … that it won’t be by sticking to the playbook [that is, writing content to generate as many social shares as possible] that has worked tremendously well to date.”


The insight: For all of the chatter about social networks, publishers are still not getting it right.


Your access point: Present working in social networks as a series of easy-to-implement A/B tests.


Using the Upworthy premise, as outlined below, clients have a quick, clean testing method that should give them confidence to test their social network content.


Upworthy produced a wildly popular slide deck back in 2012 that outlines some of their tactics, which makes for an interesting read. The key takeaway, regardless of the sort of content your client might produce, is the idea of testing multiple headlines. Upworthy writes 25 different headlines for a post, and then tests the headlines in two demographically similar cities within Facebook for an hour or so. They then push the headline with more shares.


This is both agile and data-driven; keep this example in mind, as it’s deliciously simple and reasonably easy to implement. It can also be applied to subheadings, images, and more. As consultants, A/B Testing is very much within the traditional scope of your work. By using this experience (and the client’s trust in this experience) you are moving into new terrain via a familiar method.


Let social embrace you back


To approach the opportunities of social networks from another angle, Facebook and Twitter are both making a concerted effort to woo publishers. Facebook’s algorithm tweak in August 2013 has increased the amount of traffic sent to news sites. Buzzfeed saw a 69% jump during this time, and they were not the only ones. In December 2013, Facebook gave us more insight.


“We’ve noticed that people enjoy seeing articles … and so we’re now paying closer attention to what makes for high-quality content and how often articles are clicked on …


“Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high-quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook … this means that high-quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.”


(Is this the end of memes? Maybe so if Facebook gets its way)


The insight: Facebook is working to keep its users entertained with your content


Your access: Leverage your Analytics prowess; you are an Analytics tiger!


Analyse your Facebook referral traffic comparing August-December 2013 with the previous six-month period and the same period in 2012, and assess how much impact the algorithm update had on your site. In the same article quoted above, Facebook claims that they have increased the amount of traffic to media sites by an average of 170%. If you did not see a significant jump it suggests that the site is not sufficiently integrated into Facebook. The sort of numbers referenced by Facebook (the 170%) are considerable, all publishers would love to see traffic increases in this range, let this be your approach to re-evaluate your Facebook strategy.


But wait, there’s more


Beyond sending more traffic to publishers, Facebook is also working with publishers to share the vast trove of data about what is trending so publishers can incorporate it into their stories. Facebook’s Public Feed API shares public data and is open to anyone with the functionality. A second API, the Keyword Insights API, is only available to a select number of news organisations. The Keyword Insights API allows news organisations like CNN, Today Show, and BSkyB access to programmatically search through Facebook’s public data for anonymous keyword data. This data can be sliced by gender, current city, and age range. There are no plans yet to release it to a wider audience, but it seems inevitable that (if successful) it will be rolled out in the future. (Note, an email to Facebook about this has not yet been answered. I will update in the comments if I hear more.)


The insight: other publishers are working with Facebook, if only in the sense that they are incorporating new data sources for their users.


Your access: Shaming (gently!). Depending on the size of your client. The Keyword Insights API isn’t publicly available yet, but you can present opportunities for anyone consistently producing content to get access to similar data. For example, try Mass Relevance, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, which can provide insights and trends from Facebook slicing data by a variety of metrics, including device.


What publishers could be doing


Now we have a general sense of how some publishers are trying to grow, I’ve also compiled a short list of some of the opportunities or ideas that have not been mentioned thus far. This list is based on stealing ideas from other industries, general common sense, and no small amount of wishful thinking.


1) Embracing Google products


Google’s range of products is staggering. For publishers this can lead to confusion about how to use the products available. To address this, Google has created Google Media Tools, a valuable hub designed to demystify many of the products in the roster, explaining everything from hot searches and trends to Google Earth to Google Crisis Response, and references examples of how publishers are using these products. For example, NBC Today uses Google Trends each Monday to give viewers a sense of what was popular over the weekend. At the Google For Media Summit, hosted earlier in January, attendees tweeted about BBC News’ integration with Hangouts.



Quick note: Make sure you get it right. This screengrab of a Google search for “bbc news” is from 22nd August 2013, not 2001…



Clearly, it can be difficult to implement, but do not give up. Again, referring to Dr Pete’s slide deck, as Google products increasingly appear in the search results, pure organic search results will be forced lower down the page. Embrace Google’s products to maximise your client’s chances of staying on the first page.


The insight: Competing for organic rankings is only ever going to get you so far. (Again, Dr Pete said so!) Encourage clients to embrace the suite of Google products out there, in the spirit of trying new things and also offering new products to the end users.


Your access point: Your expertise. Most people do not differentiate between Google Search, Google News, Google Local, Google Trends, etc. Anything to do with an internet search engine is your domain.


Your second access point: Training.


Offer your clients and their writers training in using these new products. As an experienced consultant, there will inevitably be a few training slide decks or “best practices” guides in your past. Use this didactic approach to showcase your knowledge and support the clients when they start to use them. As with the BBC example above, it might not be perfect immediately, but persevere.


2) Planning for change



“The pace of technological change will not abate, and to think of our current time as a transition between two eras, rather than a continuum of change is a mistake.”

– Richard Gingras, Senior Director of News and Social Products at Google



The New York Times appears to have taken this advice seriously, for amidst the redesign fanfare, the most important feature is the Times’ decision to change the back end. I interpret this as a commitment to the future; this fluidity is admirable. As referenced in this Fast Co Labs summary of the redesign:



“The new system, however, is more dynamic. “We can continually iterate on the site and take advantages of the trends as we see them happening, rather than having to do a big unveil.”



Insight: Change is the only constant. (this is probably true of more than just technology used in the publishing industry)


Your access point: this will be the toughest sell of anything else recommended in this post. Persuading clients that it is important to invest money in the backend system without any proven ROI is difficult. I’d welcome any ideas in the comments, but know this: It still has to be done. The best method I have so far is to use sites like the New York Times as a case study. The theory being that as they can present new ideas quickly, they get more press (possibly with links), and maybe even more readers. By monitoring new products on The New York Times and monitoring their search visibility using a tool like Searchmetrics, you should hopefully see traffic growth. You can then present this data to your clients. The good news is that you don’t have to manually check the Times’ site everyday; instead, sign up for the free email digests from Mediagazer, as they monitor new product developments.


3) Understanding paywall models


Paywalls are starting to work, and you can be certain that your clients will be watching how competitors are starting to use them. As a consultant, it is important that you understand the variety of paywalls out there and how to implement them. These articles from SEO Book and Mashable are excellent resources to get you started. Google also has some limited information about using First Click Free, their solution for publishers wanting to charge for their content whilst still appearing in the search results. The goal in this instance is to develop an opinion on paywalls as well as an up-to-date idea of how your competitors are using them (and if they are successful).


The insight: As paywalls are beginning to pay off, you will be asked about them


Your access point: Forward planning. By researching ahead of time, you will be ready with an opinion when asked (and you will be asked).


4) Putting their content to work


Publishers are in the enviable position of having plenty of content to play with, however now it’s a question of putting that content to work. Here are a few ideas, some riskier than others.


i) Creating new page types


Creating new page types is a classic tactic to get more traffic. If this is what your client is looking for, look at different ways of categorizing your content.


As referenced in Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Content Everywhere, the BBC Food pages tried this approach in 2011 by introducing pages organizing their content by recipe and also by ingredient. This led to an increase of 150,000 in organic traffic, and overall traffic doubled to 1.3 million visitors.


The insight: New page types lead to more traffic


Your access point: Grounding the creative task of thinking of new page types within standard information architecture best practices. Abby Covert, Information Architect extraordinaire, explains it well: there are 5 methods of categorizing. Use these as a starting point for inspiration when thinking about how to group your client’s content:



On this theme, I would love to see news publishers in particular tagging their content with zip-codes. I think it would prove a useful resource for tourists, anyone looking to rent or buy in an area, historians, and even schools. This could become even more useful on portable devices if there was an opportunity to tie news stories of particular importance into existing map products. But I’m getting carried away.


Some news organisations are already trying new page types, the AP has, frankly, had some fun experimenting with Archive page types to commemorate pivotal moments in history, and has used its own images and stories to add to the narrative.



ii) Partnering with new businesses


Partnering up with other businesses can be seen as risky because success cannot be guaranteed. One option would be to partner up with some of the newer content creation services on the market. LinkedIn has just bought Pulse, a service that pulls in news it believes will be of interest to you based on your LinkedIn profile.There is also the wistful Kennedy app, which automatically supplies iPhone users with context when taking notes and writing deep thoughts.


Insight: Your client’s content can live on in different formats.


Your access point: Introducing this and other like ideas to your client. In terms of publishers, the opportunity lies in being part of the potential newsfeed as it is a valuable branding opportunity. You might be able to generate revenue from supplying products like this with your content.


5) Looking to other niches within publishing and adapting their best ideas.


The academic eBook publishing industry is in a stage of rapid change as it moves beyond the basic eBooks into much more exciting enhanced eBook territory. The broader industry themes are:



  • Interactivity

  • Socially-connected groups

  • Adaptive eBooks


Interactivity


Bookry, a Welsh company, is just one of the many companies out there building interactive components for eBook. The company specializes in building widgets that allow eBook users to play with data tables. This allows users to see how positive coefficient correlation looks and how the data points, when changed, change the graph. By allowing users to play around with the data, you make them think about the material itself. The most obvious use is to improve educational resources, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be applied in a broader sense for all publishers.


Socially-connected groups


The idea behind this is that eBook publishers are trying to encourage commentary and interaction with the course material. Most publishers are already offering social sharing as a matter of form, however some eBook publishers are going one step further and developing products that allow all the comments, notes and questions to be stored in the cloud, all in one place. This allows the user to keep track of where she has interacted but also is useful for professors looking to grade a student on the quantity and quality of her interactions. It would be incredibly useful for users to track all comments and interactions in one place, other than on the site of the comment.


Adaptive technology


McGraw Hill launched what they call Smartbooks last year, designed to assess the reader’s understanding of the material and then adapt it based on her knowledge of the subject.


Another company, Knewton, based in New York, specialize in adaptive technology and offer education publishers the opportunity to personalise the reading experience. The effect on students’ pass rates has been impressive, which supports the idea that tailoring content to the user’s comprehension boosts retention. Any publisher or content-producing site looking to launch a body of work for a large audience of differing ages might find these developments interesting.


This is an extremely top-level summary of some of the developments in the eBook publishing sphere, as documented in the Digital Book World Conference held last week in New York.


The insight: use developments in a related industry to inspire your clients, in ebook publishing as per my example, the industry leaders are pushing ebook content in new, exciting, immersive directions, adapt these ideas to suit your customer’s content.


Your access point: Your expert curation skills. By taking the time to understand the broader industry trends, you can skim the very best ideas and present them as opportunities to your client. If you assume responsibility for industry developments, you save your clients time and headspace whilst also expanding your sphere of influence.


Have you seen new publishing products, or been involved in building them? Do you have any strong opinions about where content creation is heading next? Please share in the comments below. In terms of reading around on this subject, I’ve included a limited list of resources that I have found helpful.


Resources



People




  • Tim O’Reilly – an ebook pioneer. He’s thinking at least two years ahead.




  • Charlie Melcher – of Melcher media, founder of the Future of StoryTelling mentioned above and also involved in Al Gore’s Our Choice app, as referenced in this Tedtalk.




  • Frank Rose – Frank Rose writes beautifully on immersive content, he will inspire you to think about the role the audience plays in telling a story.




  • Tim Pool – now at Vice magazine. Tim’s livestream of NY’s Occupy Wall Street has changed the perception of citizen journalism.




  • Jeff Jarvis – this post from 2008 has some thought provoking ideas.




  • Chris Danen – Fast Co Labs, tends to write about the future of media and often brings in Fast Co examples.




Products



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!



via Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1f5DRGc


http://ift.tt/1gilWBe

zondag 26 januari 2014

Our very own Steve makes the paper

Steve Pitchford, Development Manager, at Majestic SEO, has been spending no more than £1 a day on all food and drink throughout January. He has already lost a stone and half in his mission to raise money and awareness for The Trussell Trust, which fights poverty in the UK and Bulgaria. To read more or […]


The post Our very own Steve makes the paper appeared first on Majestic SEO Blog.


via Majestic SEO Blog» Languages English http://ift.tt/1mMFgV2


http://ift.tt/1n543qo

vrijdag 24 januari 2014

How to Earn the Amplification of Influencers – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish


Marketing your products or services can be incredibly difficult when your target audience isn’t already listening to what you have to say. In those cases, influencers have an amazing ability to amplify your message and boost your brand. The only problem? They’re (rightfully) quite picky about what they share.


In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his tips for winning them over—an algorithm of sorts, to help you rank higher on the list of their priorities.






























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



Video Transcription



Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about influencer marketing in particular. I know I’ve heard skepticism from many marketers, especially sort of hardcore SEO folks who are going, “Well, influencer marketing through things like Twitter or Facebook or Google+ or outreach, these kinds of things, is this really necessary? Why am I doing it? My customers are not necessarily on these platforms. They are not necessarily influencers. What’s the point?”


I’ll try and walk you through that.


So first off, your target customers do exist somewhere, and they might be very hard to access. They could be not on any social networks, and even if they are on social networks, they might not follow you on those places. They’re not subscribed to your blog or to the places where you guest post articles or the places that are mentioning you right now. But, and this is a big one, they do have ways of getting information. They have ways that they’re learning about whatever professional or personal interests they have, and that usually leads into some form of influencer.


Now, even before the Internet existed there were journalists and writers and thought leaders, and those have continued in the web era and certainly have evolved dramatically and become a much bigger field in the era of social media. But these influencers, these people who write for big publications, own their own properties, have a big following, they’re almost certainly directly or indirectly influencing this group of customers that you’re trying to reach. You need only figure out who they are and how to reach them.


The interesting thing about influencers is they need new, unique content to share all the time. All the time, every day influencers wake up, and they’re thinking to themselves, “Gosh, what is it that I’m going to share today? How am I going to continually grow my brand and add value to my audience and be on the leading edge? Because if I’m not, I’m losing out in relevance to someone who is building that audience.”


These folks definitely, to almost 100% definitely use social media. At the very least, they’re using Twitter, which is sort of an interesting one because Twitter is used, according to the latest Pew Research, by only around 19% or 20% of online Americans. But for the influencers group, it’s 99 out of 100, and the reason being because Twitter is really a platform for influencing, growing influence, gaining that thought leadership and authority.


So even folks who are very old school, sort of old media folks, they have Twitter accounts, and they are using them. They do use other networks, things like Facebook. Certainly Pinterest has some following there, networks like Google+. But Twitter is sort of the primary one, which is interesting because Facebook, of course, is much bigger than Twitter in terms of your general population.


These influencers have two special powers. Number one, they can amplify social reach to your audience. Meaning, if you share something on a Twitter, a Facebook, a LinkedIn, a Google+, a Pinterest, a Reddit, a StumbleUpon, whatever network you might be using, the influencers on those networks have the ability to help amplify that reach. You might reach your audience of a few dozen or a few hundred. They’ll help it reach thousands, many thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands or millions.


Secondarily, they can provide links, mentions, and other kinds of signals that search engines use to rank sites higher. Meaning that even in the rare case where your target audience is not following anyone, is not paying attention to any of these influencers and search is the only channel that they use to discover information, influencers can still help you by helping you achieve these signals that will help your site, your content, your pages rank better in search, which means your target customer will find them.


The trick is this is a very, very picky audience. Nine times out of ten, when they are exposed to content, they’re going to go, “No. Not good enough. I don’t know who this person is. I don’t care about this. I’m not helping it go anywhere.” So you have to get good at earning that amplification, and that starts with answering the question: Why? Why will influencers share your content, your post, your brand? Why? If you can’t answer this question, all of this influencer targeting and marketing is going to become useless, because these people are incredibly picky.


There are a few big keys to this, and I’ve tried to enumerate them. Actually, I’m going to show it to you in an equation form. So essentially, the likelihood of earning an influencer’s amplification is related to things like the personal connection that you have with them. That can be direct, which is often less likely. As a marketer working for especially a small and midsize brand, chances are that your direct connection to large groups of influencers might be small. But indirect connections work too, and this means if you know someone who knows them, if you can get a friendly introduction, much like you would to a potential investor or a business partner, that can open the door.


If your work makes them look good. You see a lot of influencers who share content and material that makes either themselves or their brand or company, if they work for a brand or company, look good. So those types of ego baiting can be successful at times. It’s tough if it’s too overt or too flashy or not credible enough. But it can work.


If the sharing that you’re requesting that they do, the linking, the amplification of whatever kind can bring them large amounts of their own amplification. So if I say, “Hey, Seth Godin, I’d really love it if you shared this on your blog.” I know that when Seth does share something on his blog, it will also go out to many, many people on Twitter and over other social networks. Well, if Seth believes that that’s likely to earn his blog and his Twitter account a much larger audience, then he’s more likely to say yes and to want to engage in that activity.


Third, if your work is their work. If your work is their work. Meaning, rather than simply saying, “Hey, I made this. What do you think of it,” if you say, “Hey, can I get some data, some feedback, some material from you, and I’d like to transform it, modify it, turn it into something even more useful, valuable, interesting,” now you have a real hook because they’ve contributed to that work. Surveys are obviously a great way to do this. Data collection is a great way to do this. There are many other forms too.


Then the last one, if your work provides credibility or additional support, either anecdotally or data-wise, for one of their goals or beliefs. These influencers are trying to accomplish things. They have beliefs that they share. They have goals that they’re trying to accomplish professionally, usually, or personally, and if you have information that can help them, you can win.


So this is represented in the algorithm I’ve got here. Very, very simplistic algorithm. The likelihood is related to the relevance of your work to their audience, the value to their own personal brand, the opportunity they have to earn that extra amplification, the benefit to their goals or beliefs, plus some measure of the quality of the outreach you’re actually doing times the personal relationship connection.


The better personal relationship connection you’ve got, the more mediocre it’s okay for your outreach be. You can have a very simplistic message if it’s coming directly to them and you’re already friends in real life. It’s easy, right? Somebody emails me and says, “Hey, Rand, can you share this,” and it’s my investor, Brad Feld, I’m going to be like, “Yes, I will do that for you.” Of course I will. But if somebody cold emails me and I’ve never heard of them before, well it’s very unlikely. So there’s a relationship between these two that’s special.


If you take this and you find these people and you’re able to earn this additional amplification, your content of all kinds can do much more to reach your target customers.


All right, everyone, hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. 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!


via Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1eiBCgW


http://ift.tt/KW9ZDj

Time for Guest Blogging With a Purpose

Posted by jennita


Dear Readers, before getting to the meat of the post about how to make guest blogging work for you and not end up looking like a spammer, I’d like to tell you a little story. A story about when Matt Cutts single-handedly changed the course of my day. The story goes a little something like this…


It was a chilly, yet calm Monday afternoon in the Moz office, as I was having lunch at my desk and watching over all the Moz social channels (a task I rarely do these days, as we have a team of awesome ladies who usually does it). As I was checking my personal Twitter feed though, I saw a tweet from Matt Cutts pointing to his latest blog post, “The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO.”






Quickly I jumped over to read the blog and… BOOM, this was the first paragraph:



Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.



“Oh dear,” I thought to myself. “My day just got a whole lot more interesting.”


It didn’t take long before people starting asking questions about whether sites like Moz and our YouMoz blog would be in danger. People were unsure as to what exactly his post meant.


Was he saying there was going to be an algo change, as Rand predicted in last week’s Whiteboard Friday ? Was he saying that all guest blogging was dead, or that all guest blogging had become spammy? Did he mean that all links in guest posts now should be nofollowed? Essentially, the SEO world got its crazy on.





http://ift.tt/1atb0i0


Immediately I was fielding all sorts of questions, from how Moz discourages spam links in guest posts, to how it’d be crazy to ban us from Google. There were also lots of jokes going on… you know, things like letting Keri (our YouMoz manager), stay longer on her vacation.


But I digress; let me get back to Matt’s blog post. In it, he also has this to say:



“Ultimately, this is why we can’t have nice things in the SEO space: a trend starts out as authentic. Then more and more people pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate behavior remains. We’ve reached the point in the downward spiral where people are hawking “guest post outsourcing” and writing articles about “how to automate guest blogging.




“So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy.”



I giggled at the “this is why we can’t have nice things in SEO” line. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d heard it phrased exactly that way before. But what really caught my eye was this, “We’ve reached the point in the downward spiral…” Wait… hadn’t Rand said the exact same thing three days ago in his Whiteboard Friday? Wait… wasn’t it called “Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope???” Of course, others caught on to this as well.






But the point really isn’t about how Rand can see the future; it’s about how Matt wasn’t actually saying anything we didn’t already know. Right? No, seriously.




Ok, ok, so maybe it wasn’t totally obvious to everyone, or else the post wouldn’t have been written, eh? So how do you proceed if you were using guest posting as a link building strategy? (By the way, guest posting is a tactic, not a strategy.)



Guest post with a purpose


As with anything, you don’t want to be out there trying willy-nilly to get your posts on every blog for the sole purpose of building (probably bad) links. It’s important to have this tied to your business and marketing goals, as you would with any other tactic. SEO is only one piece of the larger strategy, and if you focus solely on writing posts for link building purposes, you’re missing out on a ton of other possibilities, such as:



  • Branding, branding, branding

  • Build credibility in a specific niche

  • Increased traffic (oh, HELLO)

  • Exposure to new audiences

  • Community building!

  • Authorship: The more legitimate posts you write and connect to your Google+ account, the more likely your lovely face will show up in the SERPs.



Imagine if you were to focus on writing an amazing blog post, with actionable information, relevant to the community of the blog you’re pitching. No, really—you should do that. Believe me, that’s how you’re going to get a post on YouMoz. :)


As Sir Dr. Pete (I added the Sir, because he’s older than me ;) ) so eloquently stated today in an internal thread about this very topic, “You’ve got to make sure you’re not a one trick link-building pony. I mean, any time you base 80% or more of your link profile on one tactic/gimmick, you’re going to eventually be in trouble. The problem isn’t guest-posting, it’s abuse.” People, the doctor has spoken.


But how, you ask? How do you ensure that you don’t come across as spammy or a “one trick link-building pony?” For this, I’d like to introduce you to Everett Sizemore. He’s an Associate here at Moz, and mostly focuses on helping out in Q&A. But in his real job, he’s the Director of R&D, Special Projects, and Moonshine over at seOverflow. (Hey Everett, how does one go about getting an amazing job title like that, anyway??)


Over the past few days we’ve had some email discussions about guest posting. We discussed how Google might determine a post is spammy, how they’d determine one was legit, and ways in which SEOs and all the other online marketers out there should be guest blogging legitimately.


Well, Everett had the answer that we all agreed was the best answer, so now I happily present to you…


Everett’s tips on how to be a better guest poster


He stated that seOverflow wasn’t panicking in the least because they were changing their internal guest posting guidelines to now include language like this:



  1. Develop a relationship with the publisher outside of “guest blogging platforms” in order to customize the relationship better.

  2. Pitch a series of content instead of one “guest post”.

  3. Describe yourself as an “expert contributor” not a “guest author”, explain the difference if you have to, and explain to the publisher why this is better for their site.

  4. Don’t contribute to sites that want to publish your content under a general “guest author” account. Always insist on your own contributor/author account, and markup with rel author.

  5. Work with authors who have Google profiles to which they can add contributor to links. If they don’t have one, help them get one.

  6. Go back to the same authors for similar content to develop them as experts in a specific niche (e.g. if John Smith did an article for a client on PBX solutions and you have need for another piece of content about VOIP, office phone systems, etc… go back to John Smith again)

  7. If the resident authors don’t have their bio below/above every post then our content shouldn’t have one either.

  8. Stop thinking about links. Think about traffic and exposure instead. Links are fine if they are relevant, but don’t let a nofollow policy keep you from contributing to a major site with lots of traffic in the clients’ niche.

  9. Track the right metrics, which starts with aligning our goals with the clients’.


Everett also said this in the email:



With that said, this ‘tactic’ is taking a back seat in our arsenal of options in any content marketing strategy. Our goal these days is to find the influencers in any niche and pay an expert to write expert-level content, no matter where it gets placed, to help further our clients business goals, primarily through online customer acquisition driven by good content.




That’s good stuff right there. Essentially, be a real person, write posts with purpose beyond just building links.


How can guest blogging sites stay credible?


Since we’re on the subject, let’s talk about sites like the Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, Smashing Magazine, and even the Google Analytics blog. All of those sites, along with our own YouMoz and Moz Blog, allow guest posts. One thing that’s common across all of these sites is that they have rigorous editing. They simply don’t allow for just anyone write a post about anything. They read through posts for accuracy, to ensure that links aren’t simply “link drops,” and to ensure focus on actual, good, helpful content.


But let’s say you allow guest posts, but you’re not quite as strict about things right now? Here are a few tips to make sure your blog stays credible, even with guest posts:



  1. Ensure that the content is original. We use both Copyscape and Small SEO Tools to look for plagiarized content.

  2. Make sure the author is a real person. Have people create an account on your site and link it to their Google+ page. This ensures that you’re getting real people, verifiable on their Google+ and other accounts.

  3. See if they’ve participated in the community before. This is another good way to make sure they know the type of content that your community likes.

  4. Double check the links. Now, many links are legitimate and make perfect sense, but be sure to click through to each one. Do you really want to “validate” that page? Only allow links with a purpose.


This list is really just the beginning. For a more thorough review of a good way to allow guest posts, check out Keri Morgret’s post about how to guest post on YouMoz.


Guest blogging isn’t dead


Let me wrap this up by stating again that guest blogging isn’t dead by any means. But being a Spammy McSpammer only caring about links, and not caring about real content, community building, branding, and all those other great benefits… is dead.


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!


via Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1eGi1dE


http://ift.tt/1hsHdot

Make Facebook’s Algorithm Change Work For You, Not Against You

Posted by Chad Wittman – Founder @EdgeRank Checker



Recently, many Facebook page admins have experienced a significant decrease in Total Reach—specifically, organic reach. For pages that want to keep their ad budget as low as possible, maximizing organic reach is vital.


To best understand how to make a change like this work for you, and not against you, we need to examine what happened—and what you can do about it.


We analyze and monitor this type of data for thousands of pages with a tool called EdgeRank Checker. By monitoring metrics such as reach and engagement over time, we can get a better understanding of how to advise companies to continue to optimize their strategy. We’ve collected this data over the past few months against roughly 1,000 anonymous Facebook pages.


What happened?


Facebook page admins most often run into two metrics: reach and engagement. Facebook presents this data when viewing your posts by showing the number of likes, comments, and shares, along with how many people saw the post.


What does “1,000 people saw this post” actually mean, though?


Facebook adds up everyone who saw the post, whether you paid for people to see it, people shared it with their friends, or Facebook gave you free distribution in the news feed. The people who saw it for free combine with the people who shared it to create “organic reach.” When people see your post because you paid for additional exposure, they call it “paid reach.”



  • Organic Reach = Free distribution + People who share

  • Paid Reach = People who saw it because you paid

  • Total Reach = Organic reach + Paid reach


On December 2, 2013, Facebook announced that they would be placing an emphasis on links while continuing to punish meme content in the news feed.


Around this time, we noticed a significant drop in organic reach for many pages. Page admins around the world were reporting a drastic drop in their organic reach. Not all pages were severely impacted by the change, but the majority seemed to be impacted negatively.


We’ve seen changes like this in the past. In fact, every time we’ve ever studied organic reach (we’ve been monitoring it closely for ~three years) we’ve found it has decreased over time. The reason being that the past three years have seen steady growth from Facebook, which means increased competition to get into the news feed. During this time, Facebook has continued to improve its news feed algorithm to focus on quality content—raising the bar for any page on the platform.


Examining the numbers


In the graph below, the first bar represents September 2012 (for a reference point), while the rest of the bars represent months within 2013. Over a year ago, organic reach fared much better than it does today. In the past few months, we’ve seen a decrease from 12.6% to 7.7%.


Organic-Reach-Snapshots


We specifically examined the 28 days before and after December 2nd:


Organic-Reach-Change-Before-After-Dec2-Line-Chart


When changes like this have occurred in the past, Facebook has tended to defend its news feed changes by attempting to keep engagement rates roughly equal. How did engagement data fare?


Eng-Change-Before-After-Reach-Change


In general, engagement levels for pages fluctuated within normal variations. In some cases, engagement actually increased. From Facebook’s perspective, this is a good change for their news feed; it provides a better experience for the typical Facebook user, as they are seeing less of the stuff they don’t want to engage with.


How did different content types fare?


All of the content types experienced decreases over the time period analyzed. Status updates continue to outperform videos, photos, and links for organic reach. Status updates have held strongly over the past year as the top-performing content type for organic reach.


Organic-Reach-Change-Before-After-Dec2-Post-Type


A look at individual pages


Not all pages were impacted the same. We saw some pages experience drastic decreases, while others were positively impacted by the change. We examined a few of these pages to dig deeper into theories on why they may have been impacted so extremely.


Some pages experienced significant, and abrupt, decreases in reach:


Anon-Page-A-Reach-Decline


The page above experienced a significant decrease closer towards December 5th. After the change, not a single post experienced more than 15% organic reach (compared to their previous average around 25%). This page posted mostly status updates and often asked for engagement. Take a look at their status updates when asking for engagement:


Asked For Engagement Status Updates


In the graph above, you can see a clear and abrupt change around December 6th.


However, other pages experienced significant improvement:


Anon-Page-B-Reach-Growth


The page above experienced an increase after the change (we found a few of these). This page exclusively posted photos over this time period and did not regularly ask for engagement. Let’s take a look at their photo posts:


Impressions Photo Improvement


Around December 8th, this page experienced an increased average in organic reach. It benefited from the change. After that point, this page did not have as many low-reaching posts, and had many more high-reaching posts (note: our system maxed them out at 100% impressions / fan).


What did these pages do differently?































Page A Page B
Posted mostly status updatesPosted mostly photos
Asked for engagement frequentlyRarely asked for engagement
Saw a significant decrease in organic reachSaw a significant increase in organic reach


Interestingly, Facebook did specifically reiterate that they would be focusing on “high quality content” that isn’t often using drastic calls to action to attract engagement. This may be the reason behind the difference in organic reach.


In an informal poll of Facebook admins, a vast majority of respondents self-reported drastic decreases. Sprinkled throughout the responses were some admins who were able to reduce the impact of the change (or even improve it). In our data, we found ~80% pages experienced a decrease over the time period.


7 tips to gain reach instead of losing it


The pages that were least impacted by the changes tended to focus on avoiding meme content, as well as avoiding frequent use of calls to action. Facebook is attempting to decrease these types of tactics in the news feed. Pages that have heavily used these tactics in the past may be more severely punished.


Facebook has said (and always maintained) that it is ideal to structure your content in the most logical way. Stories that include links should be posted as links. Many page admins like to include links within the descriptions of photos, however this is against Facebook’s general wishes. We always suggest to deliver your content in the best way for your audience to actually consume it.



  1. Focus, focus, focus on engagement.

  2. Study, analyze, and understand why your fans click the like button for your content.

  3. Avoid overusing strong calls to action.

  4. Avoid using memes.

  5. Analyze outbound links to determine which source is the most well received.

  6. Increase post frequency.

  7. Test different times of day for different types of content (e.g. news stories in the morning and product promotions in the evenings).


How was this data studied?


We examined ~100,000 posts over 11/4 -12/30 from approximately 1,000 pages. For any general metrics we averaged each page’s metrics and looked at the median of all the pages when examining aggregate data. Any “per-fan” data examined the metric divided by the number of fans for that page on the the day of posting.


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!


via Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1f8r5ca


http://ift.tt/1hsHd80

31 Link Building Tactics Discovered From Competitive Analysis

Posted by Cliquekaila



On the Moz blog there’s always been a large discussion around competitive analysis. From how to conduct competitive analysis using Google docs to in depth articles about competitive link analysis using Excel, or even just the fact that Moz has Open Site Explorer, one of the ultimate analysis tools for competitive backlink analysis. The fact of the matter is competitive analysis can be a very worthwhile exercise to help you determine the best strategy for your online efforts. This is especially true with link building.


Over the years, I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of backlinks while analyzing for opportunities (as well as looking for bad links to disavow or prune). Most recently, my analyses have inspired me to write this post, because common opportunities continue to reveal themselves, and they’re worth sharing. Have you discovered some great link building gems in addition to those listed below? Share them with us in the comments.


Contests


It’s no secret that giveaways, contests, and sweepstakes are great ways to attract links. Some of the recent contests I’ve observed driving links for authoritative sites include the “Draw My Favorite Teacher” contest by StorageMart, a competitor of a storage chain client of mine. Natural links from news organizations and authoritative blogs are often a result of a contest that is unique like this.


A hacking contest by Rackspace, a competitor of our global hosting provider client, also drew in quite a few links we observed after they partnered with this NFC Ring kickstarter project. The NFC Ring partner then helped promote the contest too for some added link juice. These are both great examples of contest-driven link earning.


Related articles



EDU link building strategies



Some of the most authoritative links my team and I have ever built are on university and college websites. When conducting competitive analysis be on the lookout for your competitor’s .edu TLD earned links. Expert tip: Do a find & replace for the characters “.edu” in Excel, and format it to fill any cell with a color that has “.edu”. See the screenshot below for more information.


Related articles





Housing and residence life “helpful links”


Recently I conducted some competitive analysis on three separate industries: storage facilities, national cable providers, and automotive insurance. In all three of these industries, I discovered a plethora of link opportunities on housing and residence life FAQ pages for students. Students who move into campus housing often have to find extra storage, thus the storage links. Additionally students moving to a new state or country for school may need to find cable providers/utilities or new insurance providers, thus the cable TV and auto insurance links. Some example opportunities are provided below. Be on the lookout for these types of link building opportunities.



  1. School of the Art Institute of Chicago Housing & Residence Life: FAQs

  2. Yale School of Medicine “Living in Connecticut” helpful links

  3. South Dakota School of Mines & Technology useful links section

  4. University of the Incarnate Word helpful links

  5. University of Florida College of Dentistry helpful links for students



Scholarship listings


The need to find help to fund education for students is in high demand. A reoccurring link building strategy I’ve seen used includes creating a scholarship for students and having the listing added to scholarship pages on .edu sites. Virginia.edu has an authoritative scholarship page along with KU.Edu and Davenport.edu. These schools don’t just post their own scholarships, they post other institutions’ scholarships as well as brands offering scholarships. Expert tip: Try the search command inurl:scholarship site:edu to find .edu domains with scholarship pages.



Related articles




Student resources and minority resources


When thinking about ways you can convince a University’s webmaster to place a link to you or your client’s site, specifically search for student resource pages. These pages are often similar to those found in campus life or residential sections of a University site. They are always treasure troves for link opportunities.


What are students looking forand in need of while in school? Awesome student resources exist on .edu sites like UKY.edu, as well as dedicated resources such as UniversityParent.com. See if a list exists that your site should be listed on.


Additionally, minority resources are prevalent, especially for Hispanic students. On MSState.edu this Hispanic business primer was developed and not only acquires a lot of links but also links out to great resources for students. Seek out these resources and ask to be added if you can develop a program, content piece or promotion relating to resources for minorities. Expert tip: Try using advanced search commands like this one to uncover these pages: inurl:helpful-links site:edu.


GOV link building strategies



Just like University domains, government pages are often extremely authoritative and very relevant. Helpful links pages, resource pages and more information is available on .gov TLDs you just have to find them. Common pages include those listed below. This is just scratching the surface of opportunities!


Foreign nationals


Helpful links for foreign nationals such as general information, banking and credit institutions, local news organizations, programs for foreign nationals and ESL scholarship opportunities. The National Renewal Energy Laboratory’s helpful links for foreign nationals was a site that was discovered during competitive link analysis.


Employment opportunities


Employment and career opportunities are often shared with visitors of .gov sites. The Iowa Human Rights department provides such resources to its readers on authoritative pages.


Non-profit partnerships


Non-profit partnerships also provide for great link building opportunities. This economic development program showed up in a competitive link analysis report listing private sector partners.


Related Articles



Offering a job


Job boards exist all over the internet. From news publishers to industry association job listing pages, if you’re hiring there are opportunities to get your site listed. Attending a career fair is also a great way to get a link. UIowa.edu has a great career site which was discovered during a competitive backlink analysis for a new school offering engineering programs.


Job boards are also on non-profit sites such as Python.org in your industry. Think about the types of sites that industry professionals frequent; I’m sure you’ll find a job board or career center with links to job listings. Just have to look.


Green eco-friendly causes



Anything eco-friendly, carbon footprint-lowering, green, or renewable presents an opportunity for generating links. Our team developed a resource page for green printing resources for a client InkTechnologies.com after looking through competitor resources and finding Go Green resource pages on an .edu and on non-profit sites. These pages existed and linked to third party sites so we figured we could ask to be listed as well after developing the content. We succeeded and got some great links; you can too!


Education programs that focus on renewable energy can uncover green links. While conducting research for a new engineering program one of our client’s offers we uncovered this Energy.gov link. Engineering related programs often study technology to help reduce our dependence on non-renewable energy sources. Other green educational resources and initiatives exist that might attract links such as: green internships, clean energy jobs, green competitions and related private and non-profit programs.


Pull backlinks to “green” educational programs, conduct advanced searching to uncover these sites and think about the opportunities at your organization or client’s company that have an environmentally friendly angle to acquire links.


Related articles



Sponsorships



Sponsorship has been a “bad” word in the world of link building. Using a sponsorship to try to increase your rankings with a dofollow link can be against Google’s Terms of Service. However, there are exceptions which make sponsorships not so bad after all. After conducting some competitive analysis, the following six sponsorship opportunities were uncovered. Expert tip: Watch out for sponsorships that put your link sitewide on every page or allow anchor text specific links. These are links that often signal nefarious tactics, and should be avoided at all costs.



  1. Sponsoring an event often garners publicity and brand visibility. For companies that decided to become an event sponsor of a recent Arts and Crafts Fair in Scottsdale, Arizona, their sponsorship also landed a link with their company’s logo on ScottsdaleAZ.gov.

  2. Sitewide sponsorships were a popular tactic just a short time ago. Be very selective about these types of opportunities. Did you know StatCounter.com accepts sponsorships? We discovered a competitor of a client uses the site for sponsorship.

  3. A Podcast exists for just about every topic under the sun. Consider sponsoring a Podcast or a Webinar, as you might just earn a link or two out of it. Take for example this Podcast sponsored by Go Daddy, InlandBank.com and others.

  4. Conference sponsorships have many benefits including getting you in front of a niche audience. Juicy links are a result as well such as those found on http://ift.tt/muB2JR and http://ift.tt/QPhjCM which were uncovered after a recent competitive analysis of Rackspace for a hosting provider client of ours.

  5. Non-profit sponsorships provide funding for a great cause while also achieving an authoritative link. A few noteworthy companies sponsor food banks such as this one http://ift.tt/1cNzwIU, another opportunity uncovered while scouring competitor Rackspace’s backlinks.

  6. Exhibitors or vendors at a Tradeshow or an Expo often receive listings and information on exhibitor pages. The Green Building Expo held in Scottsdale has a nice PR 3 page listing for exhibitors such as Wells Fargo, a competitor of a bank client for which we were researching strategies.


Related articles




Content earns links


Developing content can help you earn links? No way, what an unheard-of concept! We’ve all heard about content marketing being used to attract links, but what kind of content should you develop? Here are a few ideas discovered after competitive link analysis with clients in the web hosting, banking, education and engineering industries applicable across different industries.



Related articles



Old tactics done right



The majority of manually built links you likely uncover during a backlink analysis often utilize tactics from yester-year. Things like forum link building, comment spam, directories, and spun articles are evident. After reviewing a few recently, however, I discovered that even the bad tactics can be done right, and here are a few examples:



  • Forum links: When placed on authoritative relevant sites they can be valuable. Check out this Adobe Forum that packs a bit of punch from an authoritative standpoint for a competitor of a tech client we were reviewing.

  • Directories: When placed on relevant sites that don’t accept any site under the sun, have strict submission guidelines and are authoritative sites directories can still provide valuable. Sites such as BestoftheWeb.com and DMOZ.org are very authoritative, but niche directories exist catering to a specific topic.

  • Foreign link building: Although caution is required, there are still opportunities on foreign language sites that can represent link building opportunities. They must be relevant and authoritative, such as this one on Chinaz.com about web hosting providers.

  • Customer case studies: Although used in the past to be biased reports about your company, many customer case studies have provided worthwhile for competitors we’ve reviewed. Check out this case study we saw drew in a lot of links for Hostgator.

  • Guest blogging: Sure it’s overused today but if you have an opportunity to guest blog on a partner’s site or even a competitor do it! This guest post on Rackspace is a good example for a competitor we uncovered.

  • Links pages: Discovering links pages with a lot of on page authority and getting added is one link building tactic still valuable today. Consider this SAE.org links list with huge on page authority, a great opportunity discovered when looking through engineering school competitor’s backlinks. Just because there are a bunch of outbound links doesn’t automatically disqualify these link types as authoritative.

  • Local associations: Some brands went crazy with building a ton of links on local sites. One tactic that still works today is finding local associations to join. This NFPA.com link was discovered after reviewing competitors of a University client of ours for a juicy link.

  • Bookmarking: Wanted to receive hundreds of links for low cost in 2008? Bookmark links were a big hit, however today aren’t the best when done unnaturally. But did you know some sites exist today that allow individuals to create their own bookmarking pages? When you discover bookmarking pages on .gov or .edu sites they can be opportunities. Take for example this bookmarks page on the lbl.gov site we discovered during competitive analysis. This page is a bit irrelevant for the client we were looking for, but is a good example of bookmarking pages that exist today with some on page authority.


Related articles



These are a few of the great opportunities we’ve discovered through competitive link analysis. Hopefully you’ve found the opportunities worthwhile for your industry. Tell readers your own observations from competitive analysis in the comments below.


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!


via Moz Blog http://ift.tt/KDf6bu


http://ift.tt/KW9VTX