#'is it/will it ever be canon' is the least interesting metric by which to measure a ship/headcanon/etc to me

[marypsue]

not to be a horrible shipper all over your plotfic but what would the ships look like in your ageswap au?

The sample I posted does rather invite the question!

I should put out there, as a general rule, I'm not all that interested in Mike/Will and I don't have plans to write it anywhere. I don't really vibe with it, generally, and I believe I've mentioned previously (but maybe only in tags) that I really hate the way the Duffers conceived of and have been handling the possibility that Will might be gay. And many of the ways parts of the fandom have acted in response. I get that it's important to some people, and I don't want to rain on anybody's parade, but I've seen so much bad behaviour from the showrunners all the way down that it's pretty firmly put me off.

With that said, though. This fic was undertaken before I'd had much exposure to the fandom, and also, the roleswap plays...well, a role. I'm a sucker for a good triad relationship, especially the Monster Hunting Trio, and in this version of things, that's Mike and El and Will. So this is probably the only time you're ever going to see me writing reciprocated romantic feelings between Mike and Will. It's just that El is also there. And the entire context of their previous relationships with each other has changed. It feels different. I don't know. I'm operating on vibes, here.

Also because of the roleswap, this is one of those rare places where I'm not mashing Steve and Nancy and Jonathan's faces all together. Nancy and Jonathan are the Hopper and Joyce of this fic, and Steve is the Karen Wheeler. He'll be fine in his loveless marriage while the other two are off having fantastic post-saving-the-world sex. Maybe he'll have an ill-advised affair in the future. Who can say.

(Also Nancy and Barb had a brief on-again-off-again fling post-Nancy's-divorce, which has been over for some time as of the action taking place. Long enough for Barb to find a more stable relationship with the other local lesbian...)

I'm pretty sure that's it, as far as romance goes. Apart from the teen squad, it's pretty secondary to the plot in season 1, and I'm sticking with that. (Also, I need lots of time and space to fully mine the hilarity of Steve being Mike's literal actual father.)

[fictionkinfessions]

Canon species confession: fuckin IKRAN

The movies would never have the time or the cultural good will to be able to explore the goddamn Implications of ikran-rider bonds being intended and followed a Lifelong and Unique the way bonding with another Na'vi mate would, and that makes me so mad sometimes.

No, its not SEX, that is and has always been a deliberate bad-faith """interpretation""" of the neural queues and their function (by people who refuse to meet the fucking movies where they are at and insist on needing world building concepts Spoonfed to them instead of just extrapolating shit for themselves), what i Mean is ITS BIOLOGICAL TELEPATHY. We are more or less TALKING to the ikran when tsaheylu is made. My banshee was my friend, in absolutely every sense of the word. She shared her memories, her life story with me, and I shared mine with her. She had her own ideas on how to do things -- good ones. Usually much better than whatever I'd had in mind.

The line between "intelligent" and "non-intelligent" animals on Pandora was EXTREMELY blurred -- much like we are straight up finding out about our own animals here on earth right now. (Have you guys heard about the elephants? The whales? With Names? Distinct, Unique names for eachother? Interesting interesting interesting. it's almost as if the Avatar films actually DO have something important to say that's worth taking a shot at absorbing just like every other story thats ever been written Ever, golly gee whoever could've seen this coming!)

Using spoken+written language and tool use as the Only metric by which to measure how "sentient" things are is and has always only ever been an excuse to demean and disregard inconvenient truths about what it means to be alive on the same planet of other autonomous beings at all. It's just another way of dampening our own sympathies for things that don't look like us, to help us not feel so bad when we kill and farm and mistreat them.

It pissed me off so much how casual fans or fic writers will talk about ikran or pa'li or any other animals on Pandora -- Like they're all just mindless beasts, that tsaheylu "tames" them, that tsaheylu is Strictly a way to dominate and control other creatures -- except, of course, when its with another na'vi! THENNN its sweet and romantic and hot and totally 100% mutual, obviously. Just like marriage. teehee.

The next few movies are probably going to be clearing SOME things up, but I also have a feeling it's going to be a little painful watching myself champion that exact homo-sapient attitude in them, too. The human identity is so wrapped up in the idea that we need to micromanage and dictate every little of iota of the matter and interactions happening arounds us aaaalllll the fucking tiiiimmmmeeee and it only ever hurts us, but we keep going, because at least when we feed into it, we can feel like "we know who we are".

I say 'human', but of course -- even that's a gross over simplification. There's countless indigenous people across the continents who understood what bullshit that way of approaching life is, sometimes before they even reach the age of majority. Its the fucking white man's issue, injected into everything, because that was the whole point. It was a choice made, to colonize and spread and seed that voracious perspective into children so they'd grow up and do the same -- for fantastical "benefits" that have left the planet exactly where it is right now. The people who started all this got what they wanted, and most died happily, in the lap of luxury.

Prioritizing the self at every and all costs, and justifying it to ourselves with blithe, shallow perceptions of the other, just to try not to feel so guilty about it after the ash and dust settles, and the next generation is left to try to till that scorched soil.

Anyway. Ikran are cool. I miss Cupcake. -- Quaritch

[wolfofansbach]

This is a late observation because the fandom is pretty dead these days but one of the things I always found the weirdest about the Riverdale fandom was that people here seemed truly hesitant to ship stuff that wasn’t canon. 

Like after Barchie became canon I noticed a real spike in the number of Barchie fics on ao3 and a drop in Bughead fics. It wasn’t enough to equalize the two because Bughead was/is much bigger, but nevertheless. 

In every other fandom I’ve ever spent any time in, there’s always at least one big non-canon ship with legions of devotees and metric tonnes of fanworks, and usually it’s bigger than any of the canon ships. But for Riverdale there just...wasn’t one. 

Just about the only two ships were Bughead and Choni with Barchie (which eventually became canon) a distant third. The rest were tiny-to-nonexistent. Beronica is/was me and ten or twenty other brave souls. 

People would also use “crack ship” as a synonym for “non-canon ship.” Like, Jeronica is not a crack ship, kids, it’s just not canon. 

You can just ship stuff, you don’t actually need RAS’ permission. 

Especially interesting to me was that in the first couple of weeks after the premier, Beronica actually was the most popular ship as measured by works on ao3 (what could have been...). But as soon as it became clear that it wasn’t going to be canon it just shriveled in record time. 

In any other fandom I would have expected the two big ships to be Bughead and Beronica, but not so here! 

I should write a whole post-mortem on this fandom. 

[bleachbleachbleach]

All right B3 I gotta know...what concept of time do Shinigami use? How do they mark or measure the hours of the day? What kind of clocks or time-telling devices do they use? Analog or sundials?

“There are not just two times,” notes the physicist Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. “Times are legion: a different one for every point in space.” What we think of the present, he writes, “does not extend throughout the universe.” Rather, “it is like a bubble around us.” The “well-defined now,” as he calls it, “is an illusion.”

— “The Science of the Perfect Second,” by Tom Vanderbilt in Harper’s Magazine (April 2023).

Where time is concerned, I think we have enough canon evidence to say that the standard the Gotei has chosen is “whatever best coincides with the living world,” a 24-hour day with hours and minutes and seconds.

We see this mostly in the Soul Society arc, where Rukia’s execution is timed to the hour, and Hinamori has a whole alarm clock:

This isn’t to say there aren’t other forms of time in play as well (earlier Rukia tries to direct Chad toward the “hour of the tiger,” which no one else has ever mentioned as far as I know—maybe this is Kuchiki time, maybe this is Inuzuri time). I kind of feel like Soul Society may have embraced the multiplicity of different available measurement systems even harder than we have. Like, we have the age-old battle between Imperial and metric, and countless additional Indigenous, religious, etc. systems of measure. They have madness.

At the same time, I can think of some reasons this wouldn’t be true: Their world—at least, a world they have institutional memory of—is smaller than ours, in that there were fewer generations across which things might change, and fewer population loci (or rather, a singular locus, that being the Seireitei). There is also, of course, the near-infinite variations within Rukongai—but where shinigami are concerned, it’s the Seireitei and the Seireitei. Anyone shinigami happens to be familiar with X, Y, or Z system of Rukongai measurement is still going to know what the Seiretei uses; and what the Seireitei uses is probably 1) whatever the nobles continue to assert, combined with 2) whatever the 12th is begging people to use instead (Gotei-specific standard being the latter).

Which brings us back to the Gotei usage of mainstream Living World time.

The very interesting follow-up questions, of course, are:

Why?

To what end?

Practical Reasons

Despite the fact that this conception of time is even more removed from that which it is derived than it already is for us, there are practical reasons for its usage: Shinigami understand their purpose to be mediating the balance of souls across dimensions, which means their work directly concerns the Living World. For the sake of the dangai and keeping the number of shinigami that vanish in it to a minimum, standardizing time as much as possible seems important. It gives the 12th something to work with—some worldview that can unify the worlds a little bit and make all of this interdimensional travel and tracking possible! (See the links at the end of this post for further discussion!)

Also, without standardizing time across dimensions how are you supposed to make it to your Worm TV Zoom meeting on time? (Sidebar: I’ve previously hypothesized that the pomp and circumstance of the Worm TV was about network security but let’s be real, it’s probably also how you have a conversation in [nearly] real-time across dimensions. I would not be surprised if there was a wicked delay on denreishinki messages/data. See: The Great Gentei Kaijou Debacle of 2001.

Ideological Potentials

What follows are five ideas I think are interesting potential outgrowths of the discussion on Soul Society's use of mainstream Living World time:

1. Having chosen Living World time as the standard doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most relevant concept of time for vast swathes of non-dangai/shinigami life in Soul Society.

We get “shinigami aging makes no sense” discourse all the time, but like, there’s at least two ways of looking at that: Either shinigami aging doesn’t work with (this concept of) time, or it’s this concept of time does not work for them. "Time" not working/not applying isn’t unique to shinigami, and we have plenty of Living World examples of this: Indigenous time, crip time, Island time, &c.

Functionally relevant or not, though, I think Living time holds additional, deep-seated ideological meaning for shinigami, too.

2. The choice of Living World time as Soul Society’s standard plays an active role in making and defining the relationship between shinigami and the living.

At a basic level, the purview of shinigami is death, and “life” may be described as being in time, where “death” is being out of it. This is complicated by any number of things—namely, there being an afterlife and some version of time still operating there, lol, but also the notion that being in time the “correct” way makes you more alive (see: crip time), or the notion that life and death are dualistic opposites (religiously and culturally, not a universal truth). It's of course further complicated by the fact that even if it's not the most relevant measure of time in Soul Society, time does in fact (now) exist there. Soul Society is not out of time so much as it is in time in very strange ways that stretch the definition of what that's supposed to mean.

3. The Living World is a moving target, as far as understanding it goes.

It’s constantly changing, and even if a soul is a soul is a soul, I feel like there’s no way the relationship between shinigami and the Living World has enjoyed the same level of elemental stability. Even taking only the 20th century into account, the cultural significance of shinigami and other such folklore in Japan has had massive swings. Who’s to say the Meiji Restoration and “modernization” didn’t make shinigami work way harder? Who’s to say the re-emergence of said folklore post-WWII and through the mid-20th century didn’t similarly impact what it meant to be a shinigami, how hard it was to do your job, and how much job you had to do? (Is reishi even thinner when fewer humans believe it might exist? Is it thicker under torii gates, or in spaces of ritual?)

Going off of that:

4. If ways of knowing can impact ways of being with respect to the relationship between shinigami and the Living World, perhaps Soul Society itself feels those impacts even more strongly.

The nature of zanpakutou is all about manifesting the inner into the outer world, and given that Soul Society is reishi all the way down, maybe some version of that holds true for Soul Society as a whole: It has seasons and solar days and all of these things, in these particular ways, not just because it exists in the echo of the Living World but also because bringing this concept of time to Soul Society has effected concrete (inasmuch as anything reishi is “concrete”) change in Soul Society. Maybe, given enough time, shinigami could wake up one day and Soul Society WOULD have a molten core and a real moon.

Or maybe there are too many additional forces working against any kind of progressive trajectory (see: Soul Society anachronisms, see: the incredible stretchiness of space-time in Rukongai/traveling across Rukongai [yes I’m thinking about Renji in the Bount arc, I am never not thinking about Renji in the Bount Arc]).

The relationship between Soul Society and the Living World, in addition to being defined in terms of life and death, could also be defined in terms of the material and the spiritual. Perhaps time becomes a critical link point between the two. In the Living World, units of measurement broadly writ have gradually lost their material referents; instead of measuring every kilogram against a literal kilogram object, The Kilogram, kept in a French vault, they are now measured in terms of universal constants, or math. But time has never been material, and maybe that makes it ideologically special for Soul Society and the Living World—a point of relation, an opportunity.

5. Living World philosopher Henri Bergson suggests that the spirit is anchored in the past and the body in the present, and time is the union of the spirit and the body.

Basically, he theorizes that pure memory is within the purview of the spiritual, and in order to react with consciousness you need to perceive something and let memory impress itself on what it means to you--it requires relation with the past. Spiritual beings and the past aren't exactly the same thing in Soul Society, but the way time and memory work and the way image functions in Edo-looking Soul Society roll together in cool ways here.

And perhaps time, then, becomes a way of laying claim to the shinigami’s prime directive: To be shepherds of souls, stewards of the balance between realms. If time, and by extension, the relationship between shinigami and the living, can be defined with *increasing specificity*, then perhaps in some courts this might prove the prime directive, prove the legitimacy of the shinigami project--that is, their relationship to the Living World and what it is they think their job is.

Then time becomes both a means of relation and intimacy between these words and their denizens, and also a measure of control/claim that is as loving (six hearts beating as one) as it is violent (thousand-year blood wars).

Further Food for Thought:

-> “In Search of Lost Time,” by Tom Vanderbilt in Harper’s Magazine (2023), which inspired a lot of my thinking here and offers an absolutely beautiful rumination on time, systems of measurement and their dematerialization, and different elemental clocks. I’ve read this three separate times this year because I liked it that much!

-> “The Tyranny of Time,” by Joe Zadeh in Noēma (2021), which is also about the standarization of time and the ways our minds and bodies might be out of sync with this standard; and is also about the historical muddiness of time and timezones and time in scatters of English villages.

-> More on the "Hour of the Tiger" thing:

-> More about different conceptions/measurement systems of time, and its wimeyness in historical Japan and also Soul Society (see "info" tab for our response tags):

-> Thinking about time at an existential timescale (primordial ooze shinigami):

-> Followed up by more about Universal Time and the Dangai:

[lilaflyy]

ML fanfiction pet peeves

So, I’m a fanfiction writer and have read a lot of fanfiction, especially Miraculous Ladybug, in the past couple of years. While I did that, and especially recently, I’ve noticed a few things several writers do that don’t really fly well with me or which I just cringe at. So why not share it? :3

Please keep in mind that this is a general observation and I don’t mean to call anyone out here. Also, this is written in the order of how I remember the things, so not really a top 5 of any sort ;D

1. Lie-la: I get that we all hate Lila, but I often see her name written like this, especially in salt fics, instead of how her name actually is supposed to be written. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against a character calling her that in speech or in thoughts. When it comes to narration though, you should at the very least start with the correct spelling and then establish why the name spelling changes. Say, it’s like an inside joke thing or in this case, a stubborn, spiteful thing, especially if it’s Marinette’s POV. Regardless of those things, I would recommend sticking to the actual spelling because otherwise it quickly looks petty and that devalues your writing. We won’t hate Lila in salt fics any less when you use her real name, I promise! 

2. bluenette: So, to say it once so I hopefully won’t ever have to say it again: Marinette’s hair is canonically black, as described in the show in Adrien’s valentine’s poem. The blue sheen is a tribute to comic book heroes who have a blue shine in their hair, but the way to achieve that in 3D animation is to make the base blue too. Due to unfortunate lighting, it often lets her hair appear blue. Now, I don’t care if you draw Marinette with blue hair or with black hair, but when writing her, her hair should be described as black! And the word “bluenette” doesn’t exist anyway. Call her a “noirette” instead or look up synonyms for it. 

3. “You’re disappointed, aren’t you?”: I swear to god, I will do my best to punch you in the face if you write a reveal fic and let Marinette say this. In canon, she has never been portrayed as insecure about her own self. Let me remind you how she avoided being akumatised in Charmeleon by being confident in herself. And she also very much sees herself and Ladybug as one person, as seen when she was excited about Clara Nightingale writing a song about Ladybug-her! Don’t project shit into Marinette that is just not true!

4. They are French!: I dunno why, but apparently some people forget that the Paris ML plays in is located in France and not in the United States.

The currency used is Euro (€), not Dollar!

The measurements are in metrics (metres, centimetres, kilometres, etc.) not in imperials (inches, miles, etc.). Also, the temperature is measured in Celsius, not in Fahrenheit.

The legal age to drive is 18, not 16, so don’t you dare give them a car while they’re still in school! They’re also not allowed to drive for practice before that, they’ll need to go to a driving school and have a teacher.

Most people in Paris take the metro to get around fast, so that’s actually a superior means of transport than taking a car unless you want to go to the outskirts or out of town.

The age of consent is 15 in France.

The school system is not divided into primary school, middle school and high school like in the States! Research the French school system if you want to portray it accurately.

After graduations, people go to university, not college! College is actually the word used for a school form vaguely comparable to a middle school.

5. Racist or otherwise phobic comments by bullies: Especially Chloé and Lila are the ones who have bullied and/or are still bullying Marinette and other students canonically. While they do that, they have never slipped into right out racist or otherwise phobic (homophobic for example) comments. Using those highly devalues your writing because they are such cheap insults that usually don’t have as much of an impact as they should have. Bullies know their victims’ weak points, so target those very specific things. It will both let a fight look more interesting and give your writing more value.

There are certainly more things I could point out, but I just can’t think of any more at the top of my head right now. I might write a part two when I can think of 5 more and if you guys are interested in hearing my opinion.

Again: this is not meant as a personal attack on anyone’s writing, but it’s just a general observation I have made based on several hundred fanfictions of the fandom.

Feel free to tell me your own writing pet peeves, ML-related or generally! I’m curious! :3

[techyblogger]

SEO for Startups in 2021 and beyond https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/mh4ed1/seo_for_startups_in_2021_and_beyond/

We actually wrote a guide on this very topic I think could be very useful for any start ups looking to invest in SEO.

Technical SEO covers the technical health of your site, site architecture, indexation, site speed, mobile friendliness, structured data markup, robot files and sitemaps, canonical tag reviews, and internal link structure.

That’s a lot.

Additionally, because sites change and grow over time, technical SEO is also an ongoing process and an integral part of upkeep.

When we run a technical check on a client’s site, we check hundreds of individual factors.

Unless you’ve got a dedicated SEO team, that may not always be feasible. So, for the sake of space and practicality, let’s just quickly cover the very most essential and basic best practices — things you should implement when you launch a site and should keep up on as you build out a library of content:

- Indexation

- Site architecture

- Site speed

- Titles and H1 tags

- Content quality (duplicate and thin content)

Indexation. Indexation has two parts: (1) making sure content that should be indexed is indexed and (2) making sure content you don’t want indexed is not indexed. You can request indexation with Google Search Console, and you can block indexation with either a noindex tag or through the robots.txt file. Here’s Google’s documentation on the Index Status Report found in Search Console, which looks something like this:

Site architecture. Site architecture refers to the structure of your site, which is determined by both your internal linking scheme and the structure of your folders (usually determined by your categories if you’re using WordPress). A clear and logical structure that promotes relevance can help boost overall rankings.

A few basic rules of thumb include:

- Minimize page depth (number of clicks a page is from the homepage)

- Group relevant content together

- Link from content to other relevant content within the same category

If you really want to dig into site architecture, this is one of the most definitive articles ever written on it (although it’s a bit outdated). To visualize your own site architecture, we recommend Screaming Frog, which generates stuff like this:

Site speed. Google rolled out a site speed update this year. While it really only directly affected the slowest sites on the internet, it’s still a good practice to make your site as fast as possible. Why? Because fast sites typically yield good user engagement metrics, which do affect how you rank. There are lots of things you can do to speed up your site, but the basics are:

- Deliver your site through a content delivery network (CDN)

- Set up and enable caching

- Aggregate and minify CSS, HTML and Javascript

- Reduce image sizes

- Reduce plugin bloat

- Splurge on good hosting

To check and optimize your site speed, you use tools like GT Metrix or Pingdom. Google also has one of their own. Reports usually look like this:

Titles and H1s. Optimizing title tags and H1 tags are — and have always been — the most important on-page ranking factors. Luckily, they’re fairly straightforward. All you have to do is plop your main keyword in there somewhere, make sure the length is good (so it shows up correctly in Google), and you’re good to go; however, as sites grow, it becomes easier and easier to lose track of even basic tactical SEO like this. Screaming Frog gives you lots of good insight into this stuff as well:

Content quality. In this context “content quality” doesn’t mean how subjectively “good” a piece of content is; we’re mostly just trying to avoid too much duplicate or “thin” content. In general, every piece of indexed content on a site should be unique, substantial and meaningful. There are lots of ways to really dig into content quality, but one of the easiest ways to do it is to use a free tool called Siteliner. Plug in your site, and you’ll get a simple report like this one:

So those are the basics. And they’re really not rocket science. We recommend getting at least one full and comprehensive technical audit toward the beginning of your business’s life; it’ll save you a lot of time and headache in the long run.

Now, onto the other two more subjective, more nebulous, and more wily pillars of SEO…

​The Engine: Content Strategy & Keyword Research for Startups

An SEO-driven content strategy has two basic parts:

- Traffic-generating content

- Linkable assets

Traffic-generating content is designed to rank well in Google and (surprise) attract traffic; linkable assets are marketing tools that help build links, which are still a core part of Google’s algorithm and are necessary for a site to rank on their platform.

You generally need both. The one exception would be if you already have a site with very high authority (i.e. lots of links from other sites already pointing to it), which sometimes happens with startups that generate lots of press. But most of the time, especially for newer startups, a steady stream of links is required to maximize other SEO efforts (more on link building below).

Traffic-generating content should comprise the bulk of the content on a site and typically targets lower-competition keywords (keywords that are easier to compete for in Google).

The trick to creating high-yield traffic-generating content is to find topics that have the best combination of traffic potential and low competition (when talking about keyword competitiveness, we in the industry typically refer to it as “keyword difficulty”).

So, in other words, you want a good traffic potential : difficulty ratio.

Let’s unpack each of those separately.

Traffic potential is a measure of the upper limit of the traffic we might expect if we rank well for most of the available keywords for a given topic.

We use this to supplement — and sometimes in place of — search volume (how many times a given keyword is searched per month) because often, traffic is much higher than the search volume of a specific keyword since successful content usually ranks for many hundreds of keywords.

To see traffic potential, we have to use a third party tool, and currently, the one and only tool that adequately does the job is Ahrefs.

Ahrefs is so good for this particular task because it allows us to see a decent (albeit not perfect) estimate of traffic for a given set of search results. Let me show you what I mean:

Here’s the Ahrefs data for the keyword “furniture design software.”

In the SERPs (search engine results page) we can see all the pages’ rankings along with Ahrefs’ estimate of each page’s monthly organic traffic.

These are the numbers we’re interested in when looking at traffic potential.

The most successful pages generate over 1,000 visits per month (quick note: Ahrefs tends to underestimate traffic, so the real traffic could likely be higher). Other ranking pages seem to attract several hundred visitors per month.

For one piece of content, this is fairly good, especially if you sell furniture design software. It’s also just one keyword in one topic. By and large, this is a higher traffic potential than the average for most content.

If we wrote a blog post on this article and it ranked in the top 10 results in Google, we might expect to attract somewhere between 500 and 2,000 visits per month.

Let’s plug this into a quick hypothetical scenario: if you’re publishing weekly, and about 3/4ths of your content (perhaps 40 posts per year) is traffic-generating content optimized to rank for topics similar this one, you might expect to increase your monthly traffic by 20,000-100,000 visits over the course of a year.

Compare that to a keyword like this one: “best cart abandonment software.”

Here, the SERPs look quite a bit different. There are a few pages with decent traffic, but quite a few pages here attract less than 100 visits per month.

It’s not nothing, but it’s also not ideal.

A second hypothetical scenario: If we added 40 pages optimized for topics that had traffic profiles like this one, over the course of a year, we might hit a few home runs, but it’s more likely we’d bat the average and add somewhere between 50-100 visits per month, or 2,000 – 4,000 monthly visits.

That’s a lot less than the numbers we were just talking about with our first keyword. In fact, it’s about 10x less.

We didn’t change much here. We published 40 traffic-generating articles in each of our hypothetical scenarios. The only real difference was that in the first, we tried to pick a topic with a health traffic potential.

In my view, traffic potential is possibly the most important part of a good SEO-driven content strategy. Understanding this metric alone — even if you’re just using the best estimates of a third party tool — can easily 10x your content ROI.

It’s not the only part though.

A good content strategy also requires you to understand keyword difficulty.

Keyword difficulty is the measure of how easy it would be to rank for a given keyword.

If a keyword is too difficult, you could end up spending time and money on content that will never rank, and if it never ranks, both your traffic and your ROI will be zero.

Keyword difficulty is measured in lots of different ways (e.g. content quality, domain authority of the sites in the SERPs), but the best way to measure it is by measuring the number and power of the backlinks pointing to the pages that already rank for the keyword.

Almost all keyword research tools on the market include some way to measure keyword difficulty. Because I’m a bit of a nerdball who wants the best possible SEO tools, I did an extensive analysis on which tool had the most accurate keyword difficulty scores (measured against my own expertise, so take it with a grain of salt).

In my opinion, Ahrefs (yep, the same tool; notice a trend?) has the most consistently accurate keyword difficulty scores, so it’s what we usually use when we’re trying to find that Goldilocks traffic potential : keyword difficulty ratio.

Let’s return to one of the keywords we were looking at just a moment ago: “furniture design software.”

This is Ahrefs’ KD score:

Ahrefs gives this keyword a KD score of 3.

That’s very low.

Ahrefs has a logarithmic keyword difficulty scale, which means as the numbers get higher each point represents more and more real-world difficulty.

At the lower end of the scale, though, each KD point represents roughly one backlink needed to realistically compete with the pages that already rank.

However, I’ve found that we can realistically compete for keywords with KD scores less than 5 with no link building directly to those pages whatsoever.

So, unless we’re building out a blog on a website that already has lots of authority, we like to target keywords with KD scores below 10 (and below 5 if we can find them) almost exclusively, making exceptions for keywords that are necessary for some other non-SEO reason.

Compare this keyword to our second keyword: “cart abandonment software.”

Here, the KD is 29.

In my experience, the only way we’d rank for a keyword with this kind of KD score is if we paired it with a targeted, sustained outreach campaign that could eventually build 20-30 links to our page.

In other words, we haven’t got a prayer of ranking unless we devote loads of additional resources.

When building out a content strategy, we want to vigorously hunt for keywords that have:

- A traffic potential of at least a few hundred monthly visitors, and

- A keyword difficulty of less than 10

Of course, it’s not that easy. There’s one more component.

The last and (arguably) most crucial part of a good content strategy is understanding and properly targeting search intent.

We touched on this a bit earlier: SEO allows us to target people at specific points in the buying cycle.

We do this by understanding search intent.

In other words, we need to ask and be able to answer, “What did the searcher want when they typed in [keyboard]?” — and we need to understand where that intent falls in the buying cycle.

Unfortunately, understanding search intent is sometimes more of an art than a science, but (at risk of oversimplifying), here’s a quick breakdown.

Keywords that represent non-buying intent (i.e. things being searched for by people who will never buy, and are thus keywords we want to avoid) include modifiers like:

- “free…”

- “DIY…”

- “…torrent…”

- “streaming…”

- “cheap…”

- “…discount”

…And anything else the signifies “I don’t like spending money.”

Keywords that indicate people who are potentially at front end of the buying cycle — people who might buy if we can sufficiently help them — commonly include problem-solution-type modifiers like:

- “how to…”

- “…tips”

- “faster…”

- “get rid of…”

- “ways to…”

- “…strategies”

- “…solutions”

- “…service”

And finally, the juiciest keywords, buying-intent keywords — the ones that almost always make the most money — usually include modifiers that indicate a user is looking at products and making comparisons:

- “…reviews’

- “best…”

- “…vs…”

- “top…”

So, we obviously want to avoid non-buying-intent keywords. And buying-intent keywords almost always produce the highest direct ROI. However, that does not mean we should only target buying-intent keywords. If we neglect other types of keywords — those problem-solution keywords in the middle — we’re needlessly taking on massive opportunity cost since they’re often the easiest to find.

Instead, we need a mix; we just have to be extra sure we understand what people are looking for and that we produce content that meets their needs in a way likely to convert them into a user or customer down the line.

The goal of a great SEO-driven content strategy is to combine these things and find keywords that:

- Have high traffic potential,

- Are easy to rank for, and

- Appropriately match the most valuable kinds of search intent for our market

Good content strategy and keyword research is not easy, especially for startups who are often establishing new web presences. But the dividends can be huge.

We just need the last piece of the puzzle…

The Gasoline: Tactical Outreach for Startups

Outreach is perhaps the most difficult part of SEO because it has by far the most variables.

It’s analogous to (and possibly even the same as) a sales process: you’re reaching out to real human beings and pitching them. These sorts of processes are by nature less data-driven and more about sweat equity and relationship building.

There are hundreds of outreach tactics out there. Some of them work; some of them don’t. Over the years, we’ve filtered out the ineffective stuff and have zeroed in on tactics that work consistently (for the most part) across niches. A few of our tried-and-true favorites include:

- Guest posting

- Links and resources pages

- Skyscraper

- Infographic promotion

It’d take a novel to write about all of them (or even to cover an handful of them in detail).

So, I’m just going to cover one that we like to use here: it’s called mention link building.

The basic steps behind mention link building are:

- Build the best possible guide on one of the biggest topics in your industry — something people are talking about daily

- Track those conversations and pitch your guide to people who have actively blogged about that topic in the last couple days

It’s a super powerful tactic and can get you really good links. Even more importantly, because you’re reaching out to people who have published articles on this topic in the last couple of days, the links you earn can be timely, which is relatively rare in most types of outreach.

Here’s how we do it.

First, we need to find topics for which blog posts are published on a daily basis. To do this, we use a third party tool called Ahrefs. Ahrefs has lots of functionalities, and we use it for a lot of stuff. Here, we’ll be using their Content Explorer tool, which tracks content, social signals and links. It also allows us to sort by date, which is crucial to these kinds of outreach campaigns.

In Ahrefs, we’d navigate to the content explorer. In the dropdown box, we want to make sure we have “In title” selected, which will give us much more relevant results (it’ll only search for articles with search terms in the title).

Now, we need to search for a few topics. We want to go big. These are not articles we want to rank for; we’re using them expressly to supplement our outreach campaigns. So generally, we can just start with the biggest topics in our industry, and more often than not, if you’ve got a startup, you know exactly what those are.

As a demo, let’s imagine we’re a fintech company selling billing and coding software to hospitals.

If we just type “billing and coding” into Ahrefs, we’ll get some results…

… over 1,000 results, in fact. Looks good right? Almost, but if we narrow this down to blog posts and articles published in the last 24 hours, we get bupkis.

The topic isn’t big enough.

We need something bigger. Even if it’s not explicitly related to our products, we need something huge that people are writing about everyday.

Let’s see what comes up if we type in “medicare.”

That’s a ton of posts, but are people writing about it on a daily basis? Will there be people to pitch everyday? Let’s see what’s been published in the last 24 hours.

Bingo.

Yes, this number (90 articles) is a lot smaller than the previous number, but if even half of those people turn out to be good prospects (and if this is the average conversational output for this topic), we could feasibly send out 40-50 good, timely emails every day.

Of course, we’d need to build a killer piece of content — something big or fresh or interesting or, ideally, all three — we’d have a solid number of people to pitch it to everyday.

What’s that content look like?

The frustratingly simple answer is: to earn links, content has to be really good. Of course, that’s vague, but it’s vague by nature. Content can be as “good” as your resources and imagination allow.

In general, though, “good” = (1) highly useful, (2) extremely timely, (3) totally original, or (4) exhaustive/comprehensive.

A few examples.

Check out this page built by Nerdwallet.

It doesn’t have many words (in fact, it has under 1,000 words). However, it has a a custom, well-designed retirement calculator. It’s both totally original and extremely useful.

How many links did it earn? Try 472.

Here’s another. It’s an article on creatine, of all things, published by Examine.com (don’t read it, or you’ll be MIA for several hours).

Just in case you missed that line at the bottom, it says “Our evidence-based analysis features 735 unique references to scientific papers.”

And it’s true. Here’s the very bottom of their citations.

This article is also (and this is a nice way of putting it) fairly long. It clocks in at over 46,000 words, and it was written, researched and edited by people who have master’s degrees and Ph.D.s in scientific fields.

In other words, it’s probably as exhaustive and comprehensive as a piece of content could possibly be.

How many links did it earn? As of the time of writing: 585.

Obviously, it’s not feasible for most of us to put together content like Nerdwallet or Examine.com. The good news is we don’t have to. This content is on the extreme end of “good.”

A typical article written for a solid, ongoing mention-driven outreach campaign might be 2,000 – 3,000 words. It would need to be exceptionally written, of course, and it would likely need some other special X factor: a fresh angle, an infographic, original data, compiled data, the advice of an expert… just… something.

After writing and publishing our amazing content, whatever it is, we can start tapping into the ongoing conversation we already know exists.

Returning to our hypothetical fintech startup, after we’ve written our piece on Medicare, we’d simply log into Ahrefs every day, look at articles published in the last 24 hour hours (these):

We’d go down the list, and if we saw an article that could benefit from including a link to our asset, we’d give them a shout.

The email might look like this:

Nothing fancy.

Short, sweet, simple, and communicates a very explicit proposition: we’ve got amazing content that your article could benefit from.

If anyone is interested I'd be happy to share the full article.

Best of luck!

submitted by /u/Thesocialsavage6661 [link] [comments] March 31, 2021 at 05:20PM

[aion-rsa]

How Old is Mario? The Many Mysteries and Myths of the Character’s Age

https://ift.tt/2N503x3

As the years go on, one of the few consistents in gaming remains Mario and the quality of most of the major Super Mario Bros. games. While it sometimes feels like Mario has always been with us and will remain a video game mainstay for years to come, the character’s remarkable longevity does nothing to answer that question that has plagued us for over 35 years: “How old is Mario?”

It’s easy to answer that question if you’re talking about the Super Mario franchise or even the birth of the character from a creation standpoint, but when you’re trying to figure out how old Mario is in the Super Mario universe and the grand Nintendo chronology…well, that’s where things get tricky.

I can’t guarantee that looking into this subject will offer an answer that you’ll be satisfied with, but if you’re just interested in diving deeper into this particular rabbit hole, here’s a slightly more exhaustive attempt to answer a question that has proven to be much more complicated than you’d ever guess it would be.

Shigeru Miyamoto Says Mario Is 24-25 Years Old…Wait, What?

Let’s start with what is one of the only “direct” pieces of information we have on the subject of Mario’s age.

In a 2005 interview first published on Nintendo Japan’s website, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto stated that Nintendo didn’t really “put any restrictions on Mario as a character” aside from the fact that “he’s about 24-25 years old.”

Like the rest of the world, you’re probably raising an eyebrow at that suggestion. We’ll dive into the various reasons your doubt is justified here in a bit, but let’s start with the fact that Mario certainly doesn’t look like he’s 24-25.

So far as that goes, there are a few possible explanations. The first, and most likely, is that this is honestly one of those things that Nintendo doesn’t really care about and hasn’t put too much thought into. As such, the consistent design of the character is probably more important to them than this quote Miyamoto gave years ago. Much like the popularity of the character, they probably see Mario as something close to immortal.

If you’d like to go a little deeper than that, you could argue that Mario has aged since Miyamoto made that statement. After all, Miyamoto would have made that statement around the time of Super Mario‘s 20th anniversary, so that number would have made a little more sense when viewed strictly from that perspective.

As others have pointed out, this could also be a matter of Miyamoto suggesting that Mario has the physical capabilities of a person that age (no doubt due to his consistent jumping exercise routines). While I’d lean more towards the “Mario is immortal” argument, there’s something to be said for the idea that Miyamoto was measuring Mario’s age via his physical abilities.

Shigeru Miyamoto Has Called Mario a “Weird Old Dude”

While Miyamoto has only offered the 24-25 age range as a direct response to questions about Mario’s age, he has previously made statements that somewhat contradict that information.

For instance, in a 1996 interview for a Japanese strategy guide, Miyamoto was asked about Mario’s “unrealistic” movements. Here’s what he had to say on the subject:

“With 3D, little ‘lies’ like that can go unnoticed. So we lied a lot! I mean, Mario is this weird old dude who can jump 3 times his height… so who’s counting? (laughs)”

Ok, “old” can be a subjective term, but it’s certainly a strange word to use to describe someone who is in their mid-twenties. If pressed to guess, I’d say that Miyamoto had it in his head that Mario was older at one point but later decided to keep the character in his physical prime. That or he was, you know, joking.

Read more

Games

Super Mario 3D World Never Promised a Revolution, But Still Stands Apart 8 Years Later

By Aaron Potter

Games

15 Super Mario Games That Never Happened

By Matthew Byrd

When is Mario’s Birthday?

Ah, here’s another great question about Mario’s age that’s genuinely quite confusing. Actually, most people point to three possibilities in regards to Mario’s birthday.

The first popular theory is that Mario’s birthday is on March 10, aka “Mar10 Day.” However, the concept of Mario Day appears to have been created by fans who wanted to celebrate Mario and couldn’t pass up the chance to use such a clever date to do so. Nintendo acknowledges the day, but it doesn’t seem to be “canon.”

Some fans also suggest that Mario’s birthday could be September 13: the day that Super Mario Bros. was released in Japan. However, Nintendo typically just treats that day as the anniversary of that game and the Super Mario franchise. Besides, Mario previously appeared in both Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong. Actually, if you want to use those releases as a metric, you could say that Mario was “born” in 1981 when Donkey Kong was developed and released (even if the character in that game wasn’t originally named Mario). Again, though, That’s really just a matter of Mario “the creation’s” birth date vs. the character’s birth date.

Interestingly, strong evidence suggests the “official” answer to this question (or at least the month and day) may be October 11. At least that’s the day that Nintendo listed Mario’s birthday as in an old issue of Nintendo Power:

Happy birthday Mario! A calendar included with the second issue of Nintendo Power states that Mario’s birthday is October 11 (and reaffirmed in the following issue). Image 1 Via: https://t.co/dqXMvrGLrd Image 2 Via: https://t.co/rxBgXjZz7g pic.twitter.com/fWnUNPLyis

— Fantasy World 9 (@World9Fantasy) October 11, 2018

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Nintendo Games Are Inconsistent About Mario’s Age

Anyone who has tried to keep up with The Legend of Zelda‘s timeline probably won’t be too surprised to learn that Nintendo has been somewhat…inconsistent with Mario’s age over the years.

For instance, in Super Smash Bros. Melee, it’s suggested that Mario is actually 26. It’s not that big of an age difference from the 24-25 range Miyamoto suggested, but given that it’s apparently one of the few things about Mario the company has defined, it’s certainly interesting that there would be any variation in his age.

Other games make passing references to Mario’s possible age that absolutely contradict that 24-25 estimate. For instance, Paper Mario: Color Splash makes an off-hand reference to a 30 year battle between Mario and Bowser. Again, that number makes sense if the game’s developers are just commenting on the anniversary of the franchise, but that idea doesn’t really gel with Mario’s suggested age.

Don’t even get us started on Baby Mario. While that character’s first appearance in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island suggests that Baby Mario was, in fact, Mario as a baby, we’ve seen numerous games since then that show Baby Mario and Mario working side by side. There’s a loose explanation for this in some games, but this is really just one of those things that Nintendo has thrown their hands up at over the years.

Mario’s Actors Are Typically Between 40-60

If you were hoping that the age of some of the people who have played/voiced Mario over the years might shine a little light on this subject, I’ve got some bad news for you. Here’s a look at a few of the notable actors that have portrayed Mario over the years and their rough age at the time they took on the role.

“Capt.” Lou Albano (The Super Mario Bros. Show) – 56

Bob Hoskins (Super Mario Bros. Movie) – 51

Peter Cullen (Saturday Supercade) – 42

Charles Martinet (at the time of Super Mario 64‘s release) – 41

There have been a few other Mario voice actors over the years that usually fall into that rough 40-60 age range, but the point is that Nintendo typically casts older people to portray the character. We’ll see if that streak changes in the Super Mario Bros. animated movie that is currently scheduled to be released in 2022.

Is Mario Older Than Luigi?

The good news is that Lugi has fairly consistently been described as Mario’s younger brother over the years. However, Nintendo has been inconsistent (try to be surprised) in regards to exactly how much older Mario is.

In a 1990 comic called Family Album ‘The Early Years,” we see baby Mario as an only child for quite some time before Luigi is mentioned. This implies that Mario is several years older.

However, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island suggests that the two are actually twins who are roughly the same age. Again, that game raises a lot of questions about Mario’s age, but Nintendo has seemingly stuck with the “twins” explanation since then. Luigi has referred to Mario as an older brother in several games, and titles like Super Paper Mario use the “twins” description when referencing the siblings.

As best as anyone can guess based on the available information, Luigi is likely just minutes (or hours) younger than Mario rather than years. That would mean that Luigi is also in his mid-twenties but still younger than Mario.

How Old Was Mario Segale (The Man Who Inspired Mario’s Name)?

In case you didn’t know, the name “Mario” was inspired by a man named Mario Segale who owned a warehouse that Nintendo rented in the ’80s. The story goes that Nintendo decided to rename “Jumpman” in Donkey Kong to “Mario” in the American version of the game following an incident in which Segale yelled at former Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa over overdue rent.

In case you’re wondering, Segale would have been about 49 at the time of Super Mario Bros.‘ release in Japan. While that age range is pretty consistent with the actors that Nintendo cast for early portrayals of Mario, this could actually be a dead end as there is no official indication that Mario’s physical attributes were strictly based on Segale.

So How Old is Mario, Really?

Well, we’re not going to argue with Miyamoto’s age range suggestion, but if we’re trying to make sense of that age based on everything that we do know, I’d conclude that Mario is as physically healthy as a 24-25-year-old, is minutes to hours older than Luigi, was born in October, and not only doesn’t seem to age but actually may have gotten younger over time in the minds of Nintendo’s artists and designers.

The post How Old is Mario? The Many Mysteries and Myths of the Character’s Age appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[coldtomyflash]

I know the jokes about Mick's intelligence have been a bit much but do you believe there's anything to them? I mean Stein and Ray (along with characters like Felicity, Barry, Cicso, Caitlin, etc.) are the geniuses of the group. Len, Sara, and Jax (along with Oliver, Diggle, Iris, etc) seem to be of normal or average intelligence. Maybe even above average or superior intelligence for some of them. By comparison would you say Mick is below average intelligence? They seem to play it that way.

Ah, poking a sore spot anon.

First, I should mention up front that no one on these shows is actually of ‘average’ intelligence, if you’re going by IQ as your metric (and even if you’re not, let’s simplify and talk about “intelligence” as intellect in that sense, even if it’s an ableist/classist oversimplification).

The global population average for IQ is always ~100, because they re-score IQ so that the average always comes out to be 100. What 100 represents has shifted in the past century, but the truly average person within a population is going to have that as their IQ. 

The standard deviation for IQ is 15. That means someone with an IQ of 115 is “smarter” than about 84% of the population. They’re in the top 15% or so (conversely, an IQ of 85 is the lower 15% of the population).

“Gifted” is around 130 (the score required to be part of Mensa), and “Genius” is typically thought of as ~140 or higher. When TV shows pull out people with IQs of 160-180, that is... really really rare. Only 1 in a 1000 people even has an IQ of 145 or higher. But it happens.

So that’s the setup here. I’ve ranted before about the distribution of IQ/”intellect” in this verse, but to summarize that post:  Stein, Ray, Cisco, Eobard, Hartley, Harry, Caitlin, Felicity, Jesse are all presented in the genius level with their abilities (I’d say these people range from 136-170?). 

People who are going to range somewhere in the gifted to genius level include Leonard, Barry, Jax, Rip, Nate (likely realistically 125-135). Wally is tough: he’s not necessarily presented as having a gifted IQ but his school projects suggest a lot of ingenuity. He and Iris (and Joe) are above average but maybe not in the ‘gifted’ range that some of the other characters are, but if any of them is, it’s Wally. (All of them are probably 115-120??? Idk it’s hard to guess).

Note that “explicitly/obviously a genius” and “capable of pulling off crazy feats that only a genius in a sci-fi world without real-world limitations could ever do” really applies here. The science and hacking that Caitlin, Felicity, and Cisco pull off on the regular? Not normal. At least Ray was shown as taking years to develop the ATOM suit, and not a single day to whip up a device to combat Grodd’s mind control powers, or hours to come up with a chemical compound that’ll stop Everyman from shifting.

The mean IQ of team Flash is probably like 135 if you averaged all of them, maybe higher because Cisco’s an outlier for sure, or lower if you count HR. The mean IQ of team Arrow isn’t as ridiculous because, somewhat thankfully, there are fewer scientists and inventions going on on that show. I don’t know enough of the current team makeup to guess but I’d honestly put Oliver at ~115? Same with Digg, for the record.

The mean IQ of team Legends is probably like 138 thanks to Stein and Ray pulling up the average, with Nate and Jax and Rip (and formerly Len) keeping it high, and Sara, Amaya, and Mick (and Kendra and Carter) all trailing at more ‘normal’ levels of intellect.

But in my opinion, almost all these people have noticeably above average intelligence (in part because education =/= intelligence). To pull off the heists he did and learn to use his gun and modify it and think on the fly? Len is very smart. And Jax? He learned to repair a time machine himself. Rip is often considered to be this super brilliant Time Master / Captain by other Time Masters in S1 and has clearly pulled off some incredibly clever feats. Nate has a PhD and is apparently the only person ever who has put together that there was a team of time travellers across history and even somehow learned what they call themselves (like what even???) and I’d guess he’s around 120-125 idk. 

Then there’s Sara, Amaya, Kendra, Carter, who represent a more genuine ‘normal’ range, depending on who it is and what test they’re taking... 

(Why do I think everyone on these shows is at least above average? Because they’re working in highly skilled fields that rely on a lot of quick thinking and cognitive resources to plan and navigate their way through, not to mention some need for scientific aptitude from most of them, with complex problems to solve and puzzles to balance).

So really, where does that leave Mick?

Well, he’s not a super genius, that’s for sure. He’s not a “genius” at all, and he’s definitely not well-educated.

But I would argue, anon, that he’s actually still above-average and probably has at least the IQ of of the others considered “normal” on the team and maybe a higher one than some of them. I would also argue that he has brain damage of some sort that has impaired his ability to speak and recall words (aphasia) and that depression and alcoholism are impairing his cognitive resources in season 2. You can see this thread for discussions of his aphasia, and check out this one for examples of him using complex language and critical thinking skills before that, as an argument on the brain damage side and how intellectual he is / can be. 

Also, I think Mick got in the habit of ‘playing dumb’ as part of a defense mechanism as well as a routine he and Len used to play off each other, and the team didn’t/doesn’t realize how wrong they are about his intellect level because of it (and because they think education = intellect). Finally, you might be interested in this post about Mick’s interpersonal intellect which often flies under the radar, or this post about his other skills that the Legends team fails to notice and value.

Basically... I think Mick has an above average IQ in general (which for the record is somewhat abnormal for a criminal; there’s arguments for why this is and how it relates to how we stigmatize certain forms of crime and intersectionality issues, but “criminals” tend to have slightly lower than average IQs). His language skills may not be great and he’s not educated, but he is smart and skilled. Brain damage, alcoholism, depression, pyromania, and impulse control have all (arguably) been issues for him, but there’s zero reason in canon to discount his actual intellect aside from him a) playing dumb and pretending not to understand basic words like ‘thick’, and b) comparing him to geniuses.

But what it all boils down to is that there is zero reason to call him an idiot or dumb (not that those words are really great to call someone anyway, especially if you actually mean it as a stab at their intellect). 

tl;dr upshot: 

The writers “playing it that way” is really them showing us the team and others calling him less smart but showing Mick as being smart (because he is). Although there are a lot of geniuses and above-average intellect people, Mick is on par with most others on the show. Eventually the writers decided they needed to make him seem less smart to justify that reputation, so they made him start to forget words and phrases, which just ended up more ableist in the end and makes it seem like mental illness or brain damage is really the underlying problem.

Final caveat: 

It is important for me to note that this whole discussion is about a single type of “intelligence” called g which is what IQ tests purport to measure, but in reality there are at least 6 but probably as many as 9 distinct types of intelligence, each of which are valid and important and worthy of exploration and discussion. This whole discussion is an oversimplification for what it means to be ‘smart’ in any sense and is limited to some classist forms of ‘intellect’.

[werank]

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.

I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?

I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”

Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.

We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.

I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.

And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.

SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.

The Job of an SEO

Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.

Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.

It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.

For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.

Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but having them won’t give you a competitive edge.

Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.

Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority

Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.

1. Content is in your control.

When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.

Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.

Who links to you is an X factor not in your control. What is in your control? Content. Click To Tweet

2. Content has trackable metrics.

What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.

Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:

The number of thin pages that you make better.

The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.

The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.

What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.

3. Bigger sites make more money.

When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.

How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.

Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.

How to Set Content Apart as 10x

At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”

That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.

The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.

So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”

Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.

Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:

What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?

How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.

What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?

What are the sources of the information and are they credible?

What’s the quality of the writing?

Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, you’ll know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.

My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic

Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.

Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.

If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:

Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through all of their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring to light that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”

There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.

Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.

Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.

You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.

What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.

We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.

Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.

Voice of Customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.

In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.

There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.

I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.

And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.

SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.

If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.

If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.

Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey

[Read More …] Source: SEO News

The post Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 appeared first on WeRank Digital Marketing Agency.

[badbackgroundscience]

Okay, who totally miscalibrated the Enterprise’s sensors?

Episode of the Week: The Corbomite Maneuver

Planet of the Week: n/a Villain of the Week: a tiny man with a puppet fetish Redshirt death count: 0

TL;DR: The Enterprise gets chased by a glowing cube of death and Kirk attempts to bluff a puppet. An incompetent navigator becomes an ambassador despite having no experience (Does that sound timely to anyone else?). Leonard McCoy is not a moon shuttle conductor.

Our episode opens with the Enterprise boldly charting where no one has charted before. Soon, it runs into a mysterious...“device” (Spock’s word, not mine). It doesn’t look particularly intimidating, but it does go out of its way to block our ship in any direction it tries to travel. No, Sulu doesn’t ever try to go backwards, but I guess he can’t think of everything.

Kirk wanders up to the bridge from sickbay without his shirt on (Well, I guess it’s on), and we learn this glowing, rotating cube is solid, but made of a completely unknown composition.

This is further confirmed when Sulu provides its size and mass: 107 meters on each side, and “a little under 11,000 metric tons”.* That makes its density, if we round to 2 significant figures, 9.0 kilograms per cubic meter (kg/m3).

The density of water, for comparison, is 1000 kg/m3; the density of air (it varies by temperature and pressure) is about 1.2 kg/m3.

In other words, this “solid” is barely denser than most gases (Tungsten hexafluoride, for example, is a whopping 12.9 kg/m3. It’s toxic and forms hydrofluoric acid when it contacts water. I do not recommend breathing tungsten hexafluoride. Sulfur hexafluoride, on the other hand, can be used to freak out reality show judges).

Some of you might think the cube could be made of an aerogel, which sometimes goes by the nickname “frozen smoke” because they’re all usually at least 90% air, and the original material used (silica) produces a translucent blue color. The least dense aerogel, according to Guinness, has a density of 0.16 kg/m3 (not pictured below, but pictured here).

I would argue it’s technically not entirely solid, because, as the name suggests, aerogels are basically gel with the liquid part replaced by a gas (making it a solid full of a bunch of ‘holes’), but I’m sure there are people who would disagree with me. I’m okay with that.

But anyway, a definition: 

“An aerogel is an open-celled, mesoporous**, solid foam that is composed of a network of interconnected nanostructures and that exhibits a porosity (non-solid volume) of no less than 50%.” 

(The “open-celled” part means that the air isn’t trapped inside solid pockets, but the structure of an aerogel’s solid bits does make it difficult for air to move through it. That’s partly what makes it a great thermal insulator:)

We can infer that, from something Spock says later in the episode,*** the cube is metallic. Aerogels can be made out of a lot of substances, including metals, which is great if you need them to do different things (like conduct electricity, or not conduct electricity). 

Many might feel like what you’d expect - that green foam you put in pots for flower arrangements. And many of them are pretty fragile (They are mostly air, after all). Traditional silica aerogels can support an evenly distributed weight a couple thousand times their own, but special aerogels (called, perhaps unsurprisingly, “x-aerogels”) get a lot stronger.

You can read more about aerogels, including how you actually make them, here.

When the Enterprise tries pulling away from the “buoy”/”flypaper” (again, Spock’s words), it starts emitting radiation. Our first officer reports said radiation comes “from the short end of the spectrum”, which I like to think means ‘gamma rays’ - the shortest of all wavelength types on the electromagnetic spectrum. Also, it’s dangerous, and gamma rays are nothing if not dangerous to people who aren’t behind, like, a meter of packed dirt or many many centimeters of lead.

No one (unfortunately(?)) turns into a giant green rage monster, but Kirk gets desperate enough to finally order his crew to fire phasers**** and destroy it. 

After an unspecified amount of time - enough for a couple of practice drills and for Kirk to get mad at a salad - they come across a much larger object. Instead of a cube, it’s a sphere with a bunch of bumps all over it.

Here’s both the original and the CGI!update versions:

Spock says the sphere’s mass goes off his scale (which is rather odd...I mean, hopefully they’re be able to measure the masses of stars with a bloody spaceship, let alone something not massive enough to engage in nuclear fusion), and "must be a mile in diameter”.*****

Mr. Bailey, the navigator who gets relieved of duty later in the episode for failing to remain calm under pressure, reports the Enterprise is 5000 meters away, yet the object fills their viewscreen. If you immediately wondered if the math works out on that, well, you’re me.

We can measure how big it would look if the viewscreen were really a window. We’re looking for the object’s angular diameter, which comes out to be roughly 18 degrees of arc. That’s pretty close to how big a basketball looks when you hold it out at arm’s length.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions from that analogy.

Sulu says this is what it looks like at “magnification 1-8-point-5″:

That would, of course, mean they’d actually be zooming in on the object, instead of out. So really he meant -18.5 (aka 1/18.5 the original size, or 18.5 times smaller. Was that a typo in the script, or George remembered the line wrong? No one will probably ever know...

Kirk has Uhura hail the object. They receive a message that they’re going to destroy the Enterprise in 10 minutes because they trespassed into their territory and destroyed a warning buoy. Kirk tries to run away, but the baddie Balok ain’t havin’ none of that.

Kirk eventually realizes (thanks to a random comment from Dr. McCoy) the two vessels aren’t playing a game of chess, but of poker. He then delivers the following bluff, providing us the title of the episode -- The Corbomite Maneuver:

“Since the early years of space exploration, Earth vessels have had incorporated into them a substance known as corbomite. It is a material and a device which prevents attack on us. If any destructive energy touches our vessel, a reverse reaction of equal strength is created, destroying the attacker! It may interest you to know that since the initial use of corbomite more than two of our centuries ago, no attacking vessel has survived the attempt. Death has little meaning to us. If it has none to you then attack us now. We grow annoyed at your foolishness.”

Balok decides not to fire on the Enterprise, and instead gets inside the equivalent of a shuttlecraft (only 2000 metric tons, according to Spock) to come tractor the Enterprise to an M-class planet in Balok’s territory.`* Kirk plays along for a bit, then has Sulu try and break away. They do, with damage to their engines, and apparently damage to Balok’s ship as well.

Rather than let Balok die from a lack of life support, Kirk, McCoy, and Bailey transport over to help (Note he did not bring an engineer, which I might have thought of doing...). Turns out what they thought Balok was was a puppet.

Instead, Balok is a bald child with funky eyebrows, and very (very) obviously dubbed over by a grown but weird-sounding man.

Balok offers the three men a drink called tranya (actually grapefruit juice for filming), and confesses his distress signal was a test. He also reveals he’s the lone occupant of the entire mile-long ship, and very lonely. He asks for one of Kirk’s crewmen to stay on board and hang out for an extended period of time. Bailey volunteers...

...and we never see him again (in canon).

*insert scary music*

* A metric ton, for the uninitiated Americans, is 1000 kg, or 2200 pounds.

** “Mesoporous” means it contains pores ranging from 2-50 nm in diameter

*** He’s reporting on the ship that sent it out. The line: “Exceptionally strong contact. Not visual yet. Distant spectrograph. Metallic, similar to cube. Much greater energy reading.”

**** Despite being completely solid, it’s somehow capable of warp travel...I cannot explain why, nor can the humans or half-vulcans living several centuries beyond me.

***** A mile-wide sphere with the mass of the Sun (which is by no means the most massive star in the galaxy, and hopefully easily measurable by the Enterprise’s sensors) would have an average density 750 times greater than that of the most dense non-black hole matter in the known universe, i.e. a neutron star. The Enterprise and its crew would be experiencing about 540 billion g’s of acceleration from their stated distance of 5000 meters away.

That’s heavy, doc.

`* He doesn’t actually say “M-class” - that hasn’t been established in the canon, yet. He just says it’ll be one that can sustain their lives.

Enjoy the blog and have a dollar to spare? I have a Patreon, now.

TOS s1e10 - Written by Jerry Sohl, Directed by Joseph Sargent

Image credits:

aerogel 1 NASA/JPL-Caltech 

aerogel 2 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 

[miettawilliemk1]

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.

I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?

I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”

Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.

We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.

I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.

And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.

SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.

The Job of an SEO

Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.

Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.

It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.

For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.

Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.

Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.

Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority

Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.

1. Content is in your control.

When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.

Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.

2. Content has trackable metrics.

What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.

Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:

The number of thin pages that you make better.

The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.

The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.

What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.

3. Bigger sites make more money.

When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.

How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.

Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.

How to Set Content Apart as 10x

At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”

That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.

The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.

So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”

Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.

Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:

What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?

How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.

What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?

What are the sources of the information and are they credible?

What’s the quality of the writing?

Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.

My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic

Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.

Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.

If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:

Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”

There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.

Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.

Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.

You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.

What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.

We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.

Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.

Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.

In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.

There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.

I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.

And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.

SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.

If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.

If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.

Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey

http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq

[lindasharonbn1]

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.

I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?

I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”

Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.

We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.

I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.

And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.

SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.

The Job of an SEO

Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.

Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.

It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.

For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.

Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.

Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.

Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority

Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.

1. Content is in your control.

When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.

Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.

2. Content has trackable metrics.

What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.

Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:

The number of thin pages that you make better.

The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.

The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.

What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.

3. Bigger sites make more money.

When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.

How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.

Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.

How to Set Content Apart as 10x

At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”

That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.

The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.

So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”

Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.

Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:

What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?

How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.

What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?

What are the sources of the information and are they credible?

What’s the quality of the writing?

Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.

My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic

Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.

Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.

If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:

Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”

There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.

Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.

Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.

You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.

What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.

We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.

Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.

Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.

In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.

There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.

I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.

And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.

SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.

If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.

If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.

Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey

http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq

[janiceclaudetteo]

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.

I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?

I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”

Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.

We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.

I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.

And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.

SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.

The Job of an SEO

Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.

Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.

It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.

For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.

Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.

Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.

Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority

Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.

1. Content is in your control.

When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.

Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.

2. Content has trackable metrics.

What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.

Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:

The number of thin pages that you make better.

The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.

The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.

What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.

3. Bigger sites make more money.

When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.

How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.

Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.

How to Set Content Apart as 10x

At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”

That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.

The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.

So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”

Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.

Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:

What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?

How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.

What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?

What are the sources of the information and are they credible?

What’s the quality of the writing?

Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.

My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic

Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.

Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.

If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:

Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”

There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.

Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.

Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.

You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.

What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.

We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.

Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.

Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.

In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.

There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.

I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.

And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.

SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.

If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.

If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.

Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey

http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq

[rodrigueztha]

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.

I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?

I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”

Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.

We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.

I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.

And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.

SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.

The Job of an SEO

Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.

Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.

It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.

For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.

Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.

Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.

Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority

Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.

1. Content is in your control.

When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.

Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.

2. Content has trackable metrics.

What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.

Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:

The number of thin pages that you make better.

The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.

The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.

What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.

3. Bigger sites make more money.

When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.

How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.

Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.

How to Set Content Apart as 10x

At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”

That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.

The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.

So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”

Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.

Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:

What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?

How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.

What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?

What are the sources of the information and are they credible?

What’s the quality of the writing?

Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.

My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic

Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.

Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.

If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:

Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”

There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.

Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.

Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.

You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.

What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.

We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.

Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.

Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.

In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.

There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.

I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.

And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.

SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.

If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.

If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.

Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey

http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq

[elenaturnerge]

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.

I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?

I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”

Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.

We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.

I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.

And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.

SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.

The Job of an SEO

Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.

Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.

It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.

For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.

Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.

Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.

Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority

Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.

1. Content is in your control.

When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.

Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.

2. Content has trackable metrics.

What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.

Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:

The number of thin pages that you make better.

The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.

The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.

What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.

3. Bigger sites make more money.

When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.

How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.

Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.

How to Set Content Apart as 10x

At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”

That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.

The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.

So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”

Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.

Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:

What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?

How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.

What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?

What are the sources of the information and are they credible?

What’s the quality of the writing?

Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.

My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic

Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.

Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.

If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:

Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”

There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.

Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.

Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.

You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.

What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.

We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.

Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.

Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.

In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.

There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.

I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.

And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.

SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.

If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.

If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.

Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey

http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq

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Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018

Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.

I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?

I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”

Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.

We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.

I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.

And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.

SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.

The Job of an SEO

Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.

Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.

It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.

For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.

Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.

Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.

Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority

Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.

1. Content is in your control.

When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.

Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.

2. Content has trackable metrics.

What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.

Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:

The number of thin pages that you make better.

The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.

The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.

What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.

3. Bigger sites make more money.

When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.

How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.

Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.

How to Set Content Apart as 10x

At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”

That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.

The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.

So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”

Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.

Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:

What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?

How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.

What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?

What are the sources of the information and are they credible?

What’s the quality of the writing?

Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.

My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic

Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.

Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.

If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:

Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”

There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.

Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.

Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.

You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.

What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.

We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.

Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.

Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.

In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.

There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.

I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.

And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.

SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.

If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.

If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.

Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey

http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq