Massive Money Maker

This is a guest contribution by Nicholas Whitmore.

The title: What on earth does it mean?

Well, recently it seems like a lot of bloggers fancy themselves as marketers. You can’t read a post on a blog without seeing a load of other bloggers commenting at the bottom, with a link back to their own site. Of course other bloggers use black hat SEO tricks and other shady tactics in order to drive traffic to their blog. Each to their own you might say, but at the end of the day life can be much, much easier.

If you publish blog content that’s truly awesome, everyone else will market your blog for you.

If you seem to spend half your life trying to promote your blog with your efforts never coming to fruition, now’s the time to stop. There’s a reason why things aren’t working out – and you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s the actual content in your blog posts.

Sorry to have to break it to you, but your blog posts suck.

It’s time to go back to basics because if you’re guilty of trying to build links and force traffic to your blog, you’re trying too hard.

The art of blogging involves thinking up great topics and blog titles, performing research where required, then authoring great work.

Building links and driving traffic to your website does not fall under the blogging remit – that’s marketing, something different altogether.

Good things come to those who wait

Starting a successful blog is not something that you can do overnight. In fact, it can take months or even years before you start to see traction and those crazy traffic figures you’ve dreamt of. If you’ve got a short attention span or you’re incredibly impatient, the chances are that you won’t make it as a blogger.

Whilst some bloggers out there make a living from their sites, don’t go quitting your day job and blowing your life savings just yet – getting a blog to the point where it can be successfully and sustainably monetized takes a very, very long time.

Expedite success with more awesome blog posts 

The only way in which you can expedite the success of your blog is to publish more high quality content. Be careful not to inundate your visitors with too much content to digest though in your race to the top. Careful balances need to be struck between quality and quantity – a balance must also be struck between too many and too little blog posts.

Rarely will you see a sparsely populated blog that’s extremely popular. One of the core ingredients of a successful blog is frequent content – there’s no getting away from that fact. You don’t have to post 10 new blogs each week, but it would help in a lot of cases.

Hard work always pays off 

On my desk is a mug that my father used to drink out of. It says: “Hard work always pays off” – I find that little saying resonates around my head at least one million times each day. There are few things in life truer than this saying – and it can of course be applied to the world of blogging.

Be prepared to spend a good few months writing awesome posts that few people will read initially.

Keep plugging away – keep publishing great content and your blog will be recognized. The pay off comes when the recognition that your blog receives snowballs – links from other blogs start rolling in, and people recommend your posts on social media.

Recognition usually starts like a little trickle of water – gradually it will build up into a raging torrent. The more recognition your site receives, the more people will read it. As more people read your blog, it’ll receive further recognition. It’s an infinite loop of goodness for you as a blog owner!

In Summary 

When you write and publish awesome content on your blog, good things will come your way.

When you write and publish boring content then spend hours on end building links to it, trying to force people to your website, good things will never come.

Spend your time blogging – not marketing. The marketing side of things will be taken care of for you by your visitors if the blog posts that you publish are good enough to be recommended and shared across the internet.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with sharing posts you publish via social media with friends and followers – it’s the ideal way in which to generate that initial buzz and interest about your blog. When the marketing of your posts takes longer than it does to actually write them however, you’ve almost certainly lost your way as a blogger.

Click Here To Learn More!

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/DppuH-tBSiQ/

This is a guest contribution from Eric Cummings who writes about art and philosophy for On Violence.

I’ve been writing this post for three years. What can I say? I’m lazy.

Or I should say, I used to be lazy.

That’s not the case anymore. Four years ago, my brother and I started taking our writing career seriously. I now write. A lot. On my days off from work, I regularly put in over ten hour days, just writing, editing and re-writing. I’ve learned how to work, both smarter and harder. You can too.

(Finally, an admission: though I wrote down an outline for this post three years ago, I resuscitated this idea for today’s post a few weeks ago.)

Tip 1: Forget the “To Do” List. Use Next Actions. 

“To do” lists don’t work because most people include “do’s” like “write a novel”, “pay bills” or “find web hosting”. I know, because that’s what I used to do.

Then I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Instead of “to dos”, Allen proposes “next actions”. “Next actions” answer the question, “What do I need to do next?” Instead of “start a blog”, your next action is “research domain registries”, “brainstorm blog title ideas”, and “list blog post ideas”. This way you know what you need to do next.

For every blog post I write, I have a “NA” written at the top, stating the exact next action, like “research the topic” or “edit post” or “proofread”. I can’t do the entire concept justice in a blog post, but I’d recommend everyone read Getting Things Done. If you can’t do that, when you’re writing a “to do” list, ask yourself, what do I need to do next?

Tip 2: Figure Out Where You Lose Time

A number of years ago, my co-writer started listening to a podcast on business advice called Manager Tools. One episode changed my whole perspective on time, the appropriately titled “Time Management”. Most importantly, I learned how to do a “time audit”.

A time audit records everything you did on a given day. For one week, every ten or fifteen minutes, write down what you just did. At the end of the week, analyze it. Where do you waste time? What did you actually work on? What can you differently in the future?

What’s our most valuable resource? Time. You may want to write, you just don’t have the time. Then figure out where your time is going. Trust me, this analysis will blow your mind.

Tip 3: Figure out Your Golden Hours

A few years ago, Darren Rowse keyed me into his principle of “Golden Hours”, the two or three hours of the day where everyone is the most productive. Some people work better in the morning. Others write better at night.

My golden hours occur between 9:00 to 12:00. Knowing this, when I have a day off, I make sure I’m writing during my golden hours. I do other tasks (chores, bills, answering comments) later in the day.

Figure out your golden hours and organize your day around them.

Tip 4: Break Up Your Writing…With “Productive Breaks”.

Ever find yourself doing chores before writing? It’s a common delay mechanism. Instead of delaying, solve this problem by planning out your day before you start writing.

If I know at the start of a writing day that I have chores to do, I plan on doing the chores in half hour chunks between bursts of writing. So I will write a guest post for an hour, then do dishes. Then I’ll research blog posts, then sweep. Then I’ll edit posts. Then go shopping.

Breaking up your writing day has two benefits.

First, you can clear your mind and recharge your batteries. Second, it frees your brain, which is still thinking about what your were writing about, to come up with new ideas. You can’t write straight for hours on end. Some people probably can, but I can’t. So I break up my day with “productive breaks”.

Tip 5: Break Up Your Writing…By Writing About Different Things

My co-writer and I write a lot of different things. Blog posts, guest posts, essays, research papers, screenplays and more. We do this because we like writing about different things. But more importantly, it breaks up our days. I can get more writing in if I write in different mediums about different things. If I only wrote screenplays, I’d get bored. If I only wrote blog posts, I’d lose energy.

Vary up your writing and you’ll work harder.

Tip 6: Monotask 

Multi-tasking doesn’t exist. Sorry, but your mind can’t input multiple streams of information at the same time. You can’t write an email and talk on the phone at the same time. It’s impossible. And switching rapidly between tasks takes away your energy and focus.

So turn off your email, Twitter and chat programs. Don’t answer your phone. Stay off the Internet, unless you’re doing research on a current project.

Tip 7: Use Email in Bursts

As I just said, email can be a horrific time waster, especially if you leave it open all day.

Try this instead: Check your email in one hour blocks throughout the day; hopefully once in the morning, afternoon and at the end of the day. This applies to social media like Twitter, Facebook and chat programs as well. While that seems like an outrageously small amount of time, with practice you’ll learn to get all your social media taken care of in these quick bursts.

Tip 8: Strengthen Your Will Power Muscle 

New studies show that “will power” is a muscle that we can train like real muscles. I’ve learned this the hard way. When I first started writing five years ago, I could only work for about two hours at a time. Every year that time has increased by two hours.

Today, for instance, I’ve already been writing for about five hours, give or take some five minute breaks and a twenty minute walk. I’ll probably write for another four hours, before I totally crash. I can only do this because I’ve been developing the writing muscle for a long time.

Another thought on will power: it will deplete itself. I lose energy at night, especially after I eat dinner. Understand this, and figure out when/why you crash and stop working.

Do something post dinner that requires less attention, like commenting or tweeting, than something you do during your golden hours.

Tip 9: Follow a Blogging Schedule!

My co-writer and I write our posts early, and schedule them ahead of time. When you’re blogging, How Many Posts Should a Blogger Post? [Pros and Cons of Daily Posting]" href="http://www.problogger.net/archives/2013/05/14/how-many-posts-should-a-blogger-post-pros-and-cons-of-daily-posting/" target="_blank">force yourself to follow a schedule. Know that you’ll post two, three, or four times a week and stick to this schedule. It will make you a better writer and a better blogger.

There are no excuses for missing a week of posting. Write posts ahead of time, and create a folder of hold posts to use for emergencies. And write every week.

Click Here To Learn More!

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/ewkE1nA4NPs/

Today’s web search engines have sophisticated ways of measuring whether a web page is related to a given query, based on decades of research in Information Retrieval. Come join me as I explore the inner workings of a search engine’s relevance engine and explain what it means for SEOs.

Determining Relevance

When a user submits a query to a search engine, the first thing it must do is determine which pages in the index are related to the query and which are not. Throughout this post, I will refer this as the “relevance” problem. More formally, we can state it as follows:

Given a search query and a document, compute a relevance score that measures the similarity between the query and document.

The “document” in this context can also refer to things like the title tag, the meta description, incoming anchor text, or anything else that we think might help determine whether the query is related to the page. Practically, a search engine computes a number of relevance scores using different page elements and weights them all to arrive at one final score.

The relevance problem has been extremely well studied in the research community. The first papers go back several decades, and it is still an active area of research. In this post, I focus on the most influential approaches that have stood the test of time.

Relevance vs Ranking

Conceptually, we can separate relevance determination from ranking the relevant documents, even if they are implemented as a single step inside a search engine. In this mental framework, the relevance step first makes a binary (True/False) decision for each page, then the ranking step orders the documents to return to the user.

I’ll present some data later in this post that vividly illustrates this split and how it relates to different ranking signals.

Query and Document Models

Translating the query and document from raw strings into something we can do computation with is the first hurdle in computing a similarity score. To do so, we make use of “query models” and “document models.” The “models” here are just a fancy way of saying that the strings are represented in some other way that makes computation possible.

The above image illustrates this process for the query “philadelphia phillies” and the Wikipedia page about the Phillies. The final step in computing the similarity score runs the query and document representations through a scoring function.

Query Models

The following image illustrates some different types of query models:

The building blocks at the bottom include things like tokenization (splitting the string into words), word normalization (such as stemming where common word endings are removed), and spelling correction (if a query contains a misspelled word, the search engine corrects it and returns results for the corrected word).

Built on top of these building blocks are things like query classification and intent. If the search engine determines that a particular query is time sensitive it will return news results, or if it thinks the query intent is transactional it will display shopping results.

Finally, at the top of the pyramid are more abstract representations of the query such as entity extraction or latent topic representations (LDA). Indeed, Google knows that the “philadelphia phillies” are a major league baseball team and since it is baseball season returns last night’s score at the top of the search results (in addition to the knowledge graph on the right).

Document Models

Like query models, there are several different types of document models commonly used in search.

TF-IDF is one of the oldest and most well known approaches that represents each query and document as a vector and uses some variant of the cosine similarity as the scoring function. A language model encodes some information about the statistics of a language and includes knowledge such as the phrase “search engine optimization” is much more common then “search engine walking.” Language models are used heavily in machine translation and speech recognition, among other applications. They are also extremely useful in information retrieval. Yet another class of models uses the probability ranking principle, which directly models the probability of relevance given the query and document. Of these, Okapi BM25 has been shown to be particularly effective.

Correlation study

By now, you are probably wondering if search engines actually use any of these things, and if so, which ones are the most important. To explore this, we designed a correlation study similar to ones we have run in the past (see this for some background on the general approach). In this case, we collected the top 50 results from Google-US for about 14,000 keywords. This resulted in about 600,000 pages that we then crawled and used to compute a number of different similarity scores.

As you can see, the language model approach performed the best with a mean Spearman correlation of 0.10, consistent with results published in the research literature.

If we do some stemming of both the query and document first and recompute, the correlations increase slightly across the board:

This suggests that Google is indeed doing some type of word normalization or stemming in their relevance calculation.

Relevance vs Ranking revisited

Comparing these correlations vs Page Authority (an aggregate in-link metric in our Mozscape index) on the same data set, we see a substantial difference:

This begs the question: if these sophisticated similarity scores are so useful, why aren’t the correlations higher? The answer lies in the conceptual relevance vs ranking split I discussed earlier.

To convince myself, I constructed an experiment as illustrated below:

To run the experiment, I first took 450 random pages from our dataset stratified across the top 50 results (so that they include nine #1 ranked pages, nine #2 ranked pages, etc.). Then I added the 450 random pages to the top 50 pages in each search result to make one group of 500 pages for each keyword. Since 50 of these pages are in the search result, and 450 are not, 10% of them are relevant to the keyword and 90% are not (the assumption here is that if the page appears in a Google search then it is relevant). Then for each keyword, I collected the Page Authority and Language Model similarity score and sorted by each (the tables in the middle).

Finally, I computed the Precision at 50, which is the percentage of the top 50 results sorted by PA/Language Model score that are actually in the search result. This directly measures the extent to which PA or the Language Model can separate relevant from irrelevant pages. Since 10% of the 500 documents are in the search result, we can achieve a 10% precision by randomly sorting them. This 10% precision is our baseline (bottom gray bars in the image).

The results are striking. The PA precision is very close to the baseline, which says that is does no better then a random number at determining relevance even though it does do a good job at ranking the top 50 once they are known to be relevant. On the other hand, the Language Model precision is close to 100%. Put another way, the Language Model is nearly perfect in determining which of the 500 pages are in the search result, but does a poor job at actually ranking those relevant documents.

Takeaways

This type of query-document similarity scoring is well established in the research literature and underlies every modern information retrieval system. As such, it is fundamental to search and is immune to algorithm change.

Since search engines use sophisticated query and document models, there is no need to optimize separately for similar keywords. For example, any page targeting “movie reviews” will also target “movie review.”

Finally, you can use the conceptual split between relevance and ranking in your workflow. When creating or modifying existing content, first concentrate on making the page relevant to a broad set related keywords. Then concentrate on increasing the search position.

More Ranking Factors results coming soon

These are the first results we’ve released from the 2013 Ranking Factors project. As in years past, the project includes both an industry survey and large correlation study. I’ll be presenting the results at MozCon this year (so get your tickets if you haven’t already!), and we’ll be following it up with a full report sometime later this summer.

To dig deeper

Here are all the slides from my SMX Advanced talk:

I highly recommend the book Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning et al. It is available for free online reading from their site and provides a comprehensive description of everything discussed in this post (and much, much more). In particular, see Chapters 2, 6, 11 and 12.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to continuing the discussion in the comments below!

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/gf7OAmqyb5g/determining-relevance-how-similarity-is-scored

Last week, I reviewed “Who Owns The Future?” by Jaron Lanier. It’s a book about the impact of technology on the middle class.

I think the reality Janier describes in that book is self-evident – that the middle class is being gouged out by large data aggregators – but it’s hard, having read it and accepted his thesis, not to feel the future of the web might be a little bleak. Laniers solution of distributing value back into the chain via reverse linking is elegant, but is probably unlikely to happen, and even if it does, unlikely to happen in a time frame that is of benefit to people in business now.

So, let’s take a look at what can be done.

There are two options open to someone who has recognized the problem. Either figure out how to jump ahead of it, or stay still and get flattened by it.

Getting Ahead Of The SEO Pack

If your business model relies on the whims of a large data aggregator – and I hope you realize it really, really shouldn’t if at all humanly possible – then, you need to get a few steps ahead of it, or out of its path.

There’s a lot of good advice in Matt Cutt’s latest video:

It could be argued that video has a subtext of the taste of things to come, but even at face value, Cutts advice is sound. You should make something compelling, provide utility, and provide a good user experience. Make design a fundamental piece of your approach. In so doing, you’ll keep people coming back to your site. Too much focus on isolated SEO tactics, such as link building, may lead to a loss of focus on the bigger picture.

In the emerging environment, the big picture partly means “avoid getting crushed by a siren server”, although that’s my characterization, and unlikely to be Cutts’! Remember, creating quality, relevant content didn’t prevent people from being stomped by Panda and Penguin. All the link building you’re doing today won’t help you when a search engine makes a significant change to the way they count and value links.

And that day is coming.

Are You Flying A Helicopter?

Johnon articulately poses part of the problem:

Fast forward and we’re all spending our days flying these things (computers). But are we doing any heavy lifting? Are we getting the job done, saving the day, enabling the team? Or are we just “flying around” like one of those toy indoor helicopters, putzing around the room dodging lamps and co-workers’ monitors until we run out of battery power and drop to the floor? And we call it work.”…More than ever, we have ways to keep “busy” with SEO. The old stand-byes “keyword research” and “competitive analysis” and “SERP analysis” can keep us busy day after day. With TRILLIONS of links in place on the world wide web, we could link analyze for weeks if left alone to our cockpits. And I suppose every one of you SEOs out there could rationalize and justify the effort and expense (and many of you agency types do just that.. for a living). The helicopter is now cheap, fast, and mobile. The fuel is cheap as well, but it turns out there are two kinds of fuel for SEO helicopters. The kind the machine needs to fly (basic software and electricity), and the kind we need to actually do any work with it (seo data sets, seo tools, and accurate and effective information). The latter fuel is not cheap at all. And it’s been getting more and more expensive. Knowing how to fly one of these things is not worth much any more. Knowing how to get the work done is

A lot of SEO work falls into this category.

There is a lot of busy-ness. A lot of people do things that appear to make a difference. Some people spend entire days appearing to make a difference. Then they appear to make a difference again tomorrow.

But the question should always be asked “are they achieving anything in business terms?”

It doesn’t matter if we call it SEO, inbound marketing, social media marketing, or whatever the new name for it is next week, it is the business results that count. Is this activity growing a business and positioning it well for the future?

If it’s an activity that isn’t getting results, then it’s a waste of time. In fact, it’s worse than a waste of time. It presents an opportunity cost. Those people could have been doing something productive. They could have helped solve real problems. They could have been building something that endures. All the linking building, content creation, keyword research and tweets with the sole intention of manipulating a search engine to produce higher rankings isn’t going to mean much when the search engine shifts their algorithms significantly.

And that day is coming.

Pivot

To avoid getting crushed by a search engine, you could take one of two paths.

You could spread the risk. Reverse-engineer the shifting algorithms, with multiple sites, and hope to stay ahead of them that way. Become the gang of moles – actually, a “labour” of moles, in proppa Enlush – they can’t whack. Or, at least, a labour of moles they can’t whack all at the same time! This is a war of attrition approach and it is best suited to aggressive, pure-play search marketing where the domains are disposable.

However, if you are building a web presence that must endure, and aggressive tactics don’t suit your model, then SEO, or inbound, or whatever it is called next week, should only ever be one tactic within a much wider business strategy. To rely on SEO means being vulnerable to the whims of a search engine, a provider over which you have no control. When a marketing tactic gets diminished, or no longer works, it pays to have a model that allows you to shrug it off as an inconvenience, not a major disaster.

The key is to foster durable and valuable relationships, as opposed to providing information that can be commodified.

There are a number of ways to achieve this, but one good way is to offer something unique, as opposed to being one provider among many very similar providers. Beyond very basic SEO, the value proposition of SEO is to rank higher than similar competitors, and thereby gain more visibility. This value proposition is highly dependent on a supplier over which we have no control. Another way of looking at it is to reduce the competition to none by focusing on specialization.

Specialize, Not Generalize

Specialization involves working in a singular, narrowly defined niche. It is sustainable because it involves maintaining a superior, unique position relative to competitors.

Specialization is a great strategy for the web, because the web has made markets global. Doing something highly niche can be done at scale by extending the market globally, a strategy that can be difficult to achieve at a local market level. Previously, generalists could prosper by virtue of geographic limits. Department stores, for example. These days, those departments stores need to belong to massive chains, and enjoy significant economies of scale, in order to prosper.

Specialization is also defensive. The more specialized you are, they less likely the large data aggregators will be interested in screwing you. Niche markets are too small for them to be bother with. If your niche is defined too widely, like travel, or education, or photography, for example, you may face threats from large aggregators, but this can be countered, in part, by design, which we’ll look at over the coming week.

If you don’t have a high degree of specialization, and your business relies solely on beating similar business by doing more/better SEO, then you’re vulnerable to the upstream traffic provider – the search engine. By solving a niche problem in a unique way, you change the supply/demand equation. The number of competing suppliers becomes “one” or “a few”. If you build up sufficient demand for your unique service, then the search engines must show you, else they look deficient.

Of course, it’s difficult to find a unique niche. If it’s profitable, then you can be sure you’ll soon have competition. However, consider than many big companies started out as niche offerings. Dell, for example. They were unique because they sold cheap PCs, built from components, and were made to order. Dell started in a campus dormitory room.

What’s the alternative? Entering a crowded market of me-too offerings? A lot of SEO falls into this category and it can be a flawed approach in terms of strategy if the underlying business isn’t positioned correctly. When the search engines have shifted their algorithms in the past, many of these businesses have gone up in smoke as a direct result because the only thing differentiating them was their SERP position.

By taking a step back, focusing on relationships and specific, unique value propositions, business can avoid this problem.

Advantages Of Specialization

Specialization makes it easier to know and deeply understand a customers needs. The data you collect by doing so would be data a large data aggregator would have difficulty obtaining, as it is nuanced and specific. It’s less likely to be part of an easily identified big-data pattern, so the information is less likely to be commodified. This also helps foster a durable relationship.

Once you start finely segmenting markets, especially new and rising markets, you’ll gain unique insights and acquire unique data. You gain a high degree of focus. Check out “Business Lessons From Pumpkin Hackers”. You may be capable of doing a lot of different things, and many opportunities will come up that fall slightly outside your specialization, but there are considerable benefits in ignoring them and focusing on growing the one, significant opportunity.

Respin

Are you having trouble competing against other consultants? Consider respinning so you serve a specific niche. To specialize, an SEO might build a site all about dentistry and then offer leads and advertising to dentists, dental suppliers, dental schools, and so on. Such a site would build up a lot of unique and actionable data about the traffic in this niche. They might then use this platform as a springboard to offering SEO services to pre-qualified dentists in different regions, given dentistry is a location dependent activity, and therefore it is easy for the SEO to get around potential conflicts of interest. By specializing in this way, the SEO will likely understand their customer better than the generalist. By understanding the customer better, and gaining a track record with a specific type of customer, it gives the SEO an advantage when competing with other SEO firms for dentists SEO work. If you were a dentist wanting SEO services, who’s pitch stands out? The generalist SEO agency, or the SEO who specializes in web marketing for dentists?

Similarly, you could be a generalist web developer, or you could be the guy who specializes in payment gateways for mobile. Instead of being a web designer, how about being someone who specializes in themes for Oxwall? And so on. Think about ways you can re-spin a general thing you do into a specific thing for which there is demand, but little supply.

One way of getting a feel for areas to specialize in is to use Adwords as a research tool. For example, “oxwall themes” has almost no Adwords competition and around 1,300 searches per month. Let’s say 10% of that figure are willing to pay for themes. That’s 130 potential customers. Let’s say a specialist designer converts 10% of those, that’s 13 projects per month. Let’s say those numbers are only half right. That’s still 6-7 projects per month.

Having decided to specialize in a clearly defined, narrow market segment, and having good product or service knowledge and clear focus, you are much more likely to be able to spot the emerging pain points of your customers. Having this information will help you stand out from the crowd. Your pitches, your website copy, and your problem identification and solutions will make it harder for more generalist competitors to sound like they don’t know what they are talking about. This is the unique selling proposition (USP), of course. It’s based on the notion of quality. Reputation then spreads. It’s difficult for a siren server to insert itself between word of mouth gained from good reputation.

Differentiation is the aim of all businesses, no matter what the size. So, if one of your problems is being too reliant on search results, take a step back and determine if your offer is specialized enough. If you’re offering the same as your competitors, then you’re highly vulnerable to algorithm shifts. It’s hard to “own” generalist keyword terms, and a weak strategic position if your entire business success is reliant upon doing so.

Specialization lowers the cost of doing business. An obvious example can be seen in PPC/SEO. If you target a general term, it can be expensive to maintain position. In some cases, it’s simply impossible unless you’re already a major player. If you specialize, your marketing focus can be narrower, which means your marketing cost is lower. You also gain supply-side advantages, as you don’t need to source a wide range of goods, or hire as many people with different skillsets, as the generalist must do.

Once you’re delivering clear and unique value, you can justify higher prices. It’s difficult for buyers to make direct comparisons, because, if you have a high degree of specialization, there should be few available to them. If you are delivering that much more value, you deserve to be paid for it. The less direct competition you have, the less price sensitive your offering. If you offer the same price as other offerings, and your only advantage is SERP positioning, then that’s a vulnerable business positioning strategy.

If you properly execute a specialization strategy, you tend to become more lean and agile. You may be able to compete with larger competitors as you can react quicker than they can. Chances are, your processes are more streamlined as they are geared towards doing one specific thing. The small, specialized business is unlikely to have the chain of command and management structure that can slow decision making down in organizations that have a broader focus.

Specialized businesses tend to be more productive than their generalist counterparts as their detailed knowledge of a narrow range of processes and markets mean they can produce more with less. The more bases you cover, the more organisational aspects come into play, and the slower the process becomes.

In Summary

There are benefits in being a generalist, of course, however, if you’re a small operator and find yourself highly vulnerable to the whims of search engines, then it can pay to take a step back, tighten your focus, and try to dominate more specialist niches. The more general you go, the more competition you tend to encounter. The more competition you encounter in the SERPs, the harder you have to fight, and the more vulnerable you are to big data aggregators. The highly specialized are far more likely to fly under the radar, and are less vulnerable to big-brand bias in major verticals. The key to not being overly dependent on search engines is to develop enduring relationships, and specialization based on a strong, unique value proposition is one way of doing so.

Next article, we’ll look at differentiation by UX design and user experience.

Article source: http://www.seobook.com/specialization-strategy

Search any business online and chances are you’ll find a review about the company. Even if you don’t have a website, you can still get positive and negative reviews about your business from customers, clients, or patients.

The two most ubiquitous websites for reviews are Google and Yelp. Google allows anyone to write about his or her experience with any business. Before you can write a review for Google, you have to sign in with your Gmail account. If you don’t have a Gmail, then you must create one before submitting a review.

Every business owner or manager should monitor these reviews at least once a week as people can submit them spontaneously and without you knowing it. If you spot a negative review, immediately answer it. You do that through your business’s Gmail account that is associated with your Google+ account.

Here’s a negative review on Google for a dentist.

Negative review on Google for a dentist.

When you answer the review, do not make the mistake of getting defensive or making the reviewer look bad — everyone else seeing the reviews can read what you write. If you appear childish, defensive, and hateful, then you will hurt your reputation more. Instead of the owner or manager answering the reviews personally, it’s good practice to assign this task to a trusted and smart employee who won’t be as emotionally attached to the negativity of a bad review. Discuss with the employee what you want to say and let them answer the review in their own wording. The answer won’t come across as belittling or defensive. Also, warn your employee not to offer any discounts or money back in answering the review. It will be public, and future customers, patients, or clients will see that and some will take advantage of your kindness. Instead, answer the reviews with statements like “We’re sorry that you had a bad experience. Please contact us at 555-555-5555 so we can speak with you and make it right. We care about our customers and we would never purposely do what you’ve described.”

Next, encourage customers, patients, or clients to submit positive reviews online on a consistently. It’s harder to build up a good list of positive reviews because people are, in general, not motivated to do that unless they are influence by exceptional service from you.

On the other hand, negative reviews are easy for people to do. For some reason, the human psyche seems to lean to the negative. When us humans get mad about something we want the whole world to know about it. And since Google and Yelp offer that opportunity, upset people will leave their negative comments without thinking twice about it.

I work with dentists frequently.  I’m always surprised by the negative comments dentists get online. Dentist offices are busy and don’t have the time to attend to the reviews. They often have my company handle this for them.

The same applies when dealing with Yelp.com reviews. Here is a screen shot of a positive and negative Yelp dentist review.

Actual positive and negative dentist review, on Yelp.

Yelp.com is different from Google. People really like to post negative reviews there. From the hundreds of hours I’ve spent on Yelp helping clients, I can say businesses get an average of 2 to 3 bad reviews for every one good review. In some cases, it’s far worse than that and in others, it’s not much better. Again, dentists really seem to get the brunt of the negativity and should thus employ an online reputation strategy.

I’ve heard horror stories of business owners calling up Yelp and asking how to remove negative reviews and was told Yelp.com would not do it. I had a dentist call me once nearly in tears because bankruptcy seemed inevitable, due to the negative reviews posted on Yelp. At first glance, you may think, “Well, they deserved it if their service is really that bad.” But competitors can post bad reviews about each other and hurt business reputations. As childish and cutthroat as this is, it happens all the time.

Create a Reputation Strategy

So what is a business to do? How do you offset the negativity? Can you ethically create a good reputation that’s not phony?

The answer is, “Yes.”

Here’s what you do.

First, accept you cannot permanently get rid of bad reviews. If you take legal action against Google or Yelp, you better have deep pockets.

Yet, you can constantly gather good reviews and create a process to get good reviews coming in. This is far easier than it sounds. You simply need to create the process and assign an employee to do it. Once you start getting the good reviews, they will push down the bad reviews and make them harder to see and ultimately read. Plus, if you’re overwhelming the reader with good reviews, the bad reviews will lose their impact. In fact, done correctly the bad reviews will appear like the reviewer is a curmudgeon or that perhaps your office just had a bad day and it’s not normally a bad place to go to at all.

And that is the power of reputation marketing. Doing correctly can significantly increase business. Ignoring or mishandling it can be detrimental to your business.

Another thing you should do is submit reviews in key places. Create your own review and authority sites to host those reviews so your customers, patients, and clients can see them. Configure them online to where the reviews you’ve been collecting will permeate the Internet whenever people want to know if you’re worthy of them giving you their money or not.

Next, create a way to monitor whenever bad comments about you are made. When they’re made, you should be notified immediately so you can deal with it accordingly. Consider using services like Google Alerts for this.

Next, have patients or customers complete a survey that is designed to elicit a positive review. Then take that information and post it on your review sites. Remember, you can’t — and should not — post these reviews on Google and Yelp for the customers; only they can do that. But you can post on your own review sites and that is highly encouraged.

Article source: http://webmarketingtoday.com/articles/Use-Reputation-Marketing-to-Increase-Sales/

“Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to start with a conundrum. In fact, it’s a conundrum from a research project that is based on a fluency bias. Fluency bias being one of the many cognitive biases in the field of psychology.

Let me start by asking you a question. Do you believe the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks”? So a large number of participants in a research study were asked whether they believed this, and a second group, another group of participants in the same study were asked separately whether they believed the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals.” What do you think were the results? Take a minute to guess.

People believed this one massively more by a shocking margin. And you would think to yourself, “Well, I am not nearly so foolish a person as to think that my belief in a statement like this would be biased by rhyme, conceals/reveals,” and yet that is exactly what happened time and time again. This study can be reproduced with success. Far more people believe “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals,” rather than the alternate use of the word “unmasks.”

This is called, one of my favorite cognitive biases in the world, the “rhyme as reason” bias. Rhyme as reason. Let me give you another famous example that some of you have probably already jumped to. Do you remember Johnny Cochran in the famous O.J. Simpson trial, declaring to the jury, “If the gloves does not fit, you must acquit. If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

So human beings, especially in the marketing and technology world, are trained, we are trained to think that people are logical, that people consider the rational outcomes, the rational inputs, and they come to a rational decision based on those inputs. And yet a cognitive bias, like rhyme as reason, would suggest that’s not really the case at all. We are biased by all sorts of things.

Rhyme as reason is one of many fluency biases. The fluency bias or the fluency processing bias essentially suggests that things which are more easy for us to comprehend, which are more simple for us to digest, lots of good examples here. Attractive people on magazine covers are more likely to draw our eyes. Concepts that are simple for us to understand, phrases that we’ve heard many times, things that relate to things in our memory, all of these are simpler for us to understand and therefore more credible, more believable, and more likely, in the marketing world, to induce action.

Let’s take this over to web marketing for a second and think about things where this happens. Page speed load time. When something loads more quickly, not only are we more likely to stay on the page, we’re more likely to trust the brand more. We’re more likely to recommend it to others. We’re more likely to use it ourselves.

In fact, when Microsoft did a famous research study where they increased the amount of time before search results were returned by a mere 250 milliseconds, which is undetectable to the human eye, right? If you were shown a film strip and then there was a 250 millisecond cut, your eye could not detect it. Your brain would not know that you had been shown that image, and yet what they found was that abandonment rates went up. People searched less, and they searched less often, and they were less likely to return to the site.

This is fluency bias at work. The aesthetic attractiveness of a website’s or a web page’s layout is likely to drive us to take more action or to take less action, to recommend something, to tweet it, to share it, to link to it. No wonder, right?

The pronounceability of a brand name. One of my favorite, favorite examples is that a study looked at the pronounceability of stock market ticker symbols during their IPO, at a public market offering. And you would think to yourself, “Now, wait a minute. These are some of the smartest human beings in the world, who are working at hedge funds, who are working at large investment portfolios. There is no way that they are going to be taken in by the pronounceability of a stock ticker symbol.” Why does it even matter whether a stock ticker symbol is pronounceable or not? And yet pronounceability has a high correlation with more successful IPOs in their first two weeks after offering.

Insanity. Insanity. We are all subject to this. No matter how smart you believe yourself or you audience to be, fluency biases, processing fluency, and cognitive biases as a whole are undoubtedly having an effect on your audience.

The familiarity of user experience. Some of you have seen some of the screen shots from Moz Analytics and probably maybe a few of you have gotten access to the private beta, and over the next couple of months more people will. Inside that product you’ll notice that it looks very similar to another product. Right? There’s sort of a, “Oh, look at that. There’s the navigation on the left-hand side. There’s a little graph up here, and the time frame is over here, and then there’s a chart of data down here.” That reminds me a lot of Google Analytics, which many people who are watching this Whiteboard Friday and might be using Moz Analytics are almost certainly familiar with. And that is no error. That familiarity of user experience, that, “Oh, yes. I have been here before. Oh, yes. I am familiar with how to use a web analytics product or a search engine or an e-commerce site.”

There’s a reason that these follow into patterns and why these patterns are successful when they are repeated and deviation from those patterns can actually be dangerous. The legibility of font and text in a blog post, in a piece of content can influence whether it’s shared more or less.

The ease of discovery and shareability of something. If something is very easy to copy and paste inside my browser so that I can easily tweet it, or if I am sent a link by somebody in an email that just says, “Hey, if you would retweet this that would be great,” and it goes directly to their tweet, wow, this is very easy. It’s very easy for me to share it, and therefore I am more likely to do so. Processing fluency dictates it is thus.

I would urge you, whenever you’re thinking about your marketing campaigns, whether those be in the SEO world with things like your domain name, your title, your URL. Your URL, in a study by Bing, domain name and URL, the little part in the search results that’s green, actually had a significant biasing effect on where clicks went. Almost as significant, in fact, a little more significant than whether there was a rel=author profile picture, according to Google. These are separate studies, but the data should match up.

The readability of that content. Social, the sharing time. When was it shared? Was it shared at a time when I’m going to see it? Was it shared at a time when I’m likely to be on a device where I’m more likely to share? Maybe that’s mobile if it’s a retweet. Maybe that’s desktop if it’s something where I actually want someone to take action, or a laptop, or a tablet.

The length of the content. Length is very much a part of processing fluency because very long articles, depends on the subject matter, but we have a tendency not to read or to comprehend and process all of that information.

In advertising, your copy, your layout, your design, this is classic ad agency world stuff that people have been doing for decades. And in content, the style, the UX, the complexity of that content.

Again, another really good example, Moz’s own search ranking factors, which are produced every two years, and this summer we’re coming out with a new version. It will be first presented at MozCon and then appear on the web. But the complexity of the new UI, that we launched in 2011, made it such that engagement on those pages was far less because you had to click over to different tabs to actually see the numbers, as opposed to seeing it all on one page. It reduced the shareability, the number of links it got, as compared to when it was done in 2005, 2007, and 2009. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

If you were investing in web marketing channels, in content marketing and SEO, in social, and advertising of any kind, I would urge you to think about the fluency of the work that you’re producing and whether people can really consume it as effectively as you’re hoping they can. This can have a big impact on the effectiveness of the work that you do.

All right everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.”

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/4pW_lBHGeAg/processing-fluency-impacts-web-marketing-whiteboard-friday

Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down? 

When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to
clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve
user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking
power.

When done wrong, the results can be disastrous. 

In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There’s also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.

From Dr. Pete’s post - An SEO’s Guide to HTTP Status Codes

Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a “perfect” redirect

A
perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your
content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL
stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.

When
done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a
301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.

The
new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity,
but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to
non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant
content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link equity.

For
example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page
about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about
“tacos” does not.

A clue to this devaluation comes from the manner in which search engines deal with content that changes significantly over a period of time. 

The famous Google patent, Information retrieval based on historical data, explains how older links might be ignored if the text of a page changes significantly or the anchor text pointing to a URL changes in a big way (I added the bold):

…the domain may show up in search results for queries that are no longer on topic. This is an undesirable result.

One way to address this problem is to estimate the date that a domain changed its focus. This may be done by determining a date when the text of a document changes significantly or when the text of the anchor text changes significantly. All links and/or anchor text prior to that date may then be ignored or discounted.

If these same properties apply to 301 redirects, it goes a long way in explaining why non-relevant pages don’t get a boost from redirecting off-topic pages. 

301 redirecting everything to the home page

Savvy
SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages
to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step
further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s,
or soft 404s at best. 

This
means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may
simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity
at all.

While
it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page
redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of
pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those
redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.

Better alternative: When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.

If
the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better
page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410
status code.

Danger: 301 redirects and bad backlinks

Before
Penguin, SEOs widely believed that bad links couldn’t hurt you, and
redirecting entire domains with bad links wasn’t likely to have much of
an effect.

Then Google dropped the hammer on low-quality links.

If the Penguin update and developments of the past year have taught us anything, it’s this:

When you redirect a domain, its bad backlinks go with it.

Webmasters
often roll up several older domains into a single website, not
realizing that bad backlinks may harbor poison that sickens the entire
effort. If you’ve been penalized or suffered from low-quality backlinks,
it’s often easier and more effective to simply stop the redirect than to try and clean up individual links.

Individual URLs with bad links

The
same concept works at the individual URL level. If you redirect
a single URL with bad backlinks attached to it, those bad links will then point to your new URL.

In this case, it’s often better to simply drop the page with a 404 or 410, and let those links drop from the index.

Infinite loops and long chains

If
you perform an SEO audit on a site, you’ll hopefully discover any
potentially harmful redirect loops or crawling errors caused by
overly-complex redirect patterns.

While
it’s generally believed that Google will follow many, many redirects,
each step has the potential to diminish link equity, dilute anchor text
relevance, and lead to crawling and indexing errors.

One or two steps is generally the most you want out of any redirect chain.

New changes for 302s

SEOs typically hate 302s, but recent evidence suggests search engines may now be changing how they handle them — at least a little. 

Google knows that webmasters make mistakes, and recent
tests by Geoff Kenyon showed that 302 redirects have potential to pass link equity. The theory is that 302s (meant to be temporary) are so
often implemented incorrectly, that Google treats them as “soft” 301s.

Duane Forrester of Bing addressed this in a recent tweet.

So, not only do search engines limit us when we try to get too clever, but
they also help to keep us from shooting ourselves in the foot.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/AQyJZWBikgg/save-your-website-with-redirects