#but trust me the tags are important to giving context and broader reach to this post *cry*

[l1ttles3am0th]

Fellas, I have a little problem with something I want to implement into my AU, (being TSAMS characters,) but doing so would cause major conflict with a key, central, and crucial element of the AU. Below are the details and a TLDR. Don’t mind the tags looking absolutely wrong together, as I need a lot of answers in order to build a basis and need maximal reach to do so in proper relation to the topics at hand.

So, I’m thinking of implementing a few of the Sun and Moon Show characters into my FNaF AU as a side project (the story behind their existence in context to my AU being that they were originally supposed to be part of a Daycare expansion before the whole place burned to the ground and their plans had to be sold to make up for the loss, resulting in them ultimately being built and given life by other people.) Thing is, in TSAMS, Sun and Moon are brothers, whilst in the Mothiverse (which was established long before I thought of implementing TSAMS characters), Sunny and Moon are lovers without any form of blood or familial relations outside of their marriage. I see a lot of potential in the implementation of these characters, but at the same time, I’m getting myself into a massive balancing act with this one. I’ll either have to be extremely careful, put a bajillion disclaimers on all of my work, or shelve the idea altogether. I really love this idea and I see so much potential for it, but given the conflict it’s going to cause with the AU’s main ship, it’s gonna be extremely difficult to handle without feedback.

Is there anything you would suggest in order to go about this? How would YOU approach this problem if you were in my shoes? I’d love to hear your suggestions. Also, for reference, Sun x Moon (aka Nightlight or Solstice) is an extreme comfort and coping mechanism of mine, and given that its been engrained into the very fabric of my AU since the literal beginning of SB’s implementation into it, it’s gonna be damn-near impossible to retcon it out. Thank you for listening.

TLDR: I want to implement TSAMS characters (Earth, Solar, Lunar, Eclipse, BloodMoon, etc..) into an AU with Sun x Moon as the main ship, but that’s gonna cause a fuckton of problems, and I need feedback on how to do this effectively and tastefully, if at all.

[donald-clemons]

How to Optimize and Use Online Marketing Campaigns for Success in 2020 – CommerceNow ‘20 Part 1

This past June, 2Checkout was the proud host of our fourth CommerceNOW 2020 online event, bringing together some of the greatest minds in eCommerce, digital marketing, conversion rate optimization, customer retention, global payments, and more, to share their knowledge and acumen.

Over the two-day event, 14 renowned speakers shared cutting-edge trends and actionable insights on how to grow an online business (even during a pandemic), with an audience of 3,000+ professionals. This is the first of a series of blog posts where we’ll share the key takeaways from the CommerceNOW ’20 sessions. Don’t forget you can also register to watch all of the recorded webcasts here.

  Three of our experts addressed the importance of Optimizations and Online Marketing Campaigns to Succeed In 2020. Among their key takeaways:

Continue to use search for a useful view of consumer behavior and intent, and take appropriate action, despite this current crisis;

Conquer your organic search challenges with sharpened and refocused SEO skills;

Make campaigns easy to understand, interesting, and fun.

  In a presentation by Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft, “The Digital Advertiser’s Guide to COVID-19,” Purna explored the elevated relevance and use of search in the context of the pandemic.

    With brick-and-mortar retail shopping on hold and people stuck at home, online search is top-of-mind for customers, and what they are searching for is distinctive, too. Some searches, naturally, are down, like for travel and lodging, while financial services and retail (especially for things like home goods and appliances, since we’ve all become very home-focused) have gone up dramatically.

In short, however, paid search is like “a steady ship during stormy waters,” Purna asserted. It’s been impacted the least by COVID, she pointed out, and has simultaneously benefitted the most.

Purna advised businesses to optimize their advertising and marketing strategies by focusing on three areas:

  Immediate strategy—quick actions they could take today, like modifying their message and imagery to show they connect with what consumers are facing and how their lives have changed.

Restoration strategy—what will the world look like after the pandemic? Start building strategic remarketing lists and adjust their KPI’s to be more flexible with their benchmarks.

New opportunities—what ways can they capitalize on changes brought on by the pandemic? Begin to target their advertising with the re-rise of desktop shopping in mind; lower their budget but keep their advertising up and running; expand to a broader audience to reach new users who have become customers because of the pandemic.

  For each of these areas, Purna supplied a checklist of items to examine, with a deep-dive into specific directives for each: Ads, Keywords, Audience, Bidding, and Budget.

Purna also advised companies to take a “health check,” looking at the following:

  Audience dashboard: High-level and granular views of audience performance and bid adjustments based on KPI’s;

Comprehensive gap analysis: New keyword opportunities to stay ahead of the competition;

Negative keyword conflicts: Identify opportunities to resolve conflicts;

Share of voice dashboard: Identify how to optimize your budget, bid, and ads for your audience campaigns.

  Purna concluded her presentation with valuable resources and helpful links about advertising and marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as charitable ways to give back during this challenging time.

  Aleyda Solis, SEO Consultant and Founder of Orainti, addressed the topic of SEO difficulties in eCommerce and ways to turn them into successes, in her presentation “How to Win SEO for eCommerce in 2020—Main Challenges and How to Overcome Them.”

    Organic search is the main traffic driver for eCommerce and shopping sites, Aleyda pointed out, but sites have characteristics that make it challenging to optimize them as effective as businesses would like, such as:

High number of products

Highly dynamic inventory

Complex taxonomy

In turn, she said, these challenges can cause common SEO issues, like the following:

Crawl budget issues

Content indexing, duplication, and cannibalism issues

Internal linking challenges

The good news? Aleyda says these issues actually can be a great opportunity to sharpen your  SEO skills, in two ways:

Optimize your product pages with limited control and highly dynamic inventory

Internal linking and indexing of facets with non-standardized attributes.

Aleyda does a deep-dive into numerous ways to accomplish these two tasks, with examples and visuals, to make it more likely that consumers will find your product and purchase it.

  Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing, SEMRush, presented “Ways to Improve Customer Retention: Gamification Cases by SEMRush,” sharing three campaigns her company has recently conducted and the components that contributed to their success.

    The three simple tenets Olga cites when talking about the success of SEMRush’ marketing and advertising: Make your campaigns easy to understand, make them interesting, and make them fun. “Gamification is the perfect way to deliver these three things,” she asserted.

In one example of a campaign using gamification, Olga described how a new eBook on SEO techniques was used as an incentive to upgrade from a basic subscription to what they call their GURU subscription. After launching the campaign, they realized their GURU clients were also interested in receiving the eBook, so they were welcomed to join.

  Make it interesting: The campaign goal was to increase their clients’ awareness of the range of SEO tools SEMRush offered, especially those they were not yet using.

Make it easy: They initially sent an email blast with a straightforward, non-time-consuming sign-up for five tools. The eBook was the “prize” for doing so.

Make it fun: If the user signed up for all five tools, they received a follow-up email with an animated “vault” to open, with the eBook as the “treasure” inside.

  The results? An almost 50% open rate for the campaign newsletter, 750 participating, and with almost half of those who opened the newsletter—900—signing on for new project setups.

Olga described another successful SEMRush campaign: animated Easter eggs, hidden across their interface, which when clicked on would reveal information on a product tool … as well as another Easter egg to click on. Every customer who clicked on an egg would receive a personal response via Twitter, making it a very personal, fun “game” with lots of social engagement.

Their Easter egg hunt led to 9,300 users participating over the two weeks, +1,500 actions in SEMRush by users, and over 8 million impressions for tweets with #semrushegghunt. Four of the five tools featured as Easter eggs got significant new visitor boosts.

Olga also addressed their tactics for social media campaigns, and emphasized that “it’s all about empathy, care, and customer support.” She cited the following steps for successful social media campaigns:

  Make it personal: Use the person’s first name whenever possible, when communicating, to make the contact more powerful. “It will resonate more than anything else,” Olga said.

Respond to unhappy customers: Retain users by responding to social media complaints where your company is tagged. You have a better chance of retaining the naysayers, even if they are unhappy, if you engage in open discussion with them.

Respond as quickly as possible: Even if you have to give them a more complete answer the next day, make contact immediately—they will appreciate it and you will build trust.

Fix their complaint: If you can, address and find a solution to the problem they are having. They are likely to become your biggest advocate.

Don’t apologize for the company: Instead, use the following formula: “I see you,” “I care about you,” I am sorry you feel that way,” and “Please hear me out.”

Olga’s key takeaways:

Attracting and keeping clients are equally important.

Don’t invent a new platform; use your website interface, email and social media.

Talk to your audience, especially when they are upset with you.

Make your campaign easy, interesting, and fun.

  To learn more about the trends, insights, tips, and tricks that some of the greatest minds in eCommerce, digital marketing, CRO, and customer experience shared at CommerceNOW 2020, you can sign up here to access all the sessions.

The post How to Optimize and Use Online Marketing Campaigns for Success in 2020 – CommerceNow ‘20 Part 1 appeared first on The 2Checkout Blog| Articles on eCommerce, Payments, CRO and more.

How to Optimize and Use Online Marketing Campaigns for Success in 2020 – CommerceNow ‘20 Part 1 published first on https://yousweetluxury.weebly.com/

[endenogatai]

UK Uber drivers are taking its algorithm to court

A group of UK Uber drivers has launched a legal challenge against the company’s subsidiary in the Netherlands. The complaints relate to access to personal data and algorithmic accountability.

Uber drivers and Uber Eats couriers are being invited to join the challenge which targets Uber’s use of profiling and data-fuelled algorithms to manage gig workers in Europe. Platform workers involved in the case are also seeking to exercise a broader suite of data access rights baked into EU data protection law.

It looks like a fascinating test of how far existing legal protections wrap around automated decisions at a time when regional lawmakers are busy drawing up a risk-based framework for regulating applications of artificial intelligence.

Many uses of AI technology look set to remain subject only to protections baked into the existing General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). So determining how far existing protections extend in the context of modern data-driven platforms is important.

The European Commission is also working on rebooting liability rules for platforms, with a proposal for a Digital Services Act due by the year’s end. As part of that work it’s actively consulting on related issues such as data portability and platform worker rights — so the case looks very timely.

Via the lawsuit, which has been filed in Amsterdam’s district court today, the group of Uber drivers from London, Birmingham, Nottingham and Glasgow will argue the tech giant is failing to comply with the GDPR and will ask the court to order immediate compliance — urging it be fined €10,000 for each day it fails to comply.

They will also ask the court to order Uber to comply with a request to enable them to port personal data held in the platform to a data trust they want to establish, administered by a union.

For its part Uber UK said it works hard to comply with data access requests, further claiming it provides explanations when it’s unable to provide data.

Data rights to crack open an AI blackbox?

The GDPR gives EU citizens data access rights over personal information held on them, including a right to obtain a copy of data they have provided so that it can be reused elsewhere.

The regulation also provides some additional access rights for individuals who are subject to wholly automated decision making processes where there is a substantial legal or similar impact — which looks relevant here because Uber’s algorithms essentially determine the earning potential of a driver or courier based on how the platforms assigns (or withholds) jobs from the available pool.

As we wrote two years ago, Article 22 of the GDPR offers a potential route to put a check on the power of AI blackboxes to determine the trajectory of humankind — because it requires that data controllers provide some information about the logic of the processing to affected individuals. Although it’s unclear how much detail they have to give, hence the suit looks set to test the boundaries of Article 22, as well as making reference to more general transparency and data access rights baked into the regulation.

James Farrar, an Uber driver who is supporting the action — and who was also one of the lead claimants in a landmark UK tribunal action over Uber driver employment rights (which is, in related news, due to reach the UK Supreme Court tomorrow, as Uber has continued appealing the 2016 ruling) — confirmed the latest challenge is “full spectrum” in the GDPR rights regard.

The drivers made subject access requests to Uber last year, asking the company for detailed data about how its algorithm profiles and performance manages them. “Multiple drivers have been provided access to little or no data despite making a comprehensive request and providing clear detail on the data requested,” they write in a press release today.

Farrar confirmed that Uber provided him with some data last year, after what he called “multiple and continuous requests”, but he flagged multiple gaps in the information — such as GPS data only being provided for a month out of two years’ of work; no information on the trip rating assigned to him by passengers; and no information on his profile nor the tags assigned to it.

“I know Uber maintain a profile on me but they have never revealed it,” he told TechCrunch, adding that the same is true of performance tags.

“Under GDPR Uber must explain the logic of processing, it never really has explained management algorithms and how they work to drivers. Uber has never explained to me how they process the electronic performance tags attached to my profile for instance.

“Many drivers have been deactivated with bogus claims of ‘fraudulent use’ being detected by Uber systems. This is another area of transparency required by law but which Uber does not uphold.”

The legal challenge is being supported by the App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) which says it will argue Uber drivers are subject to performance monitoring at work.

It also says it will present evidence of how Uber has attached performance related electronic tags to driver profiles with categories including: Late arrival/missed ETAs; Cancelled on rider; Attitude; Inappropriate behaviour.

“This runs contrary to Uber’s insistence in many employment misclassification legal challenges across multiple jurisdictions worldwide that drivers are self-employed and not subject to management control,” the drivers further note in their press release.

Commenting in a statement, their attorney, Anton Ekker of Ekker Advocatuur, added: “With Uber BV based in the Netherlands as operator of the Uber platform, the Dutch courts now have an important role to play in ensuring Uber’s compliance with the GDPR. This is a landmark case in the gig economy with workers asserting their digital rights for the purposes of advancing their worker rights.”

The legal action is being further supported by the International Alliance of App-based Transport (IAATW) workers in what the ADCU dubs an “unprecedented international collaboration”.

Reached for comment on the challenge, Uber emailed us the following statement:

Our privacy team works hard to provide any requested personal data that individuals are entitled to. We will give explanations when we cannot provide certain data, such as when it doesn’t exist or disclosing it would infringe on the rights of another person under GDPR. Under the law, individuals have the right to escalate their concerns by contacting Uber’s Data Protection Officer or their national data protection authority for additional review.

The company also told us it responded to the drivers’ subject access requests last year, saying it had not received any further correspondence since.

It added that it’s waiting to see the substance of the claims in court.

The unions backing the case are pushing for Uber to hand over driver data to a trust they want to administer.

Farrar’s not-for-profit, Worker Info Exchange (WIE), wants to establish a data trust for drivers for the purposes of collective bargaining.

“Our union wants to establish a data trust but we are blocked in doing so long as Uber do not disclose in a consistent way and not obstruct the process. API would be best,” he said on that, adding: “But the big issue here is that 99.99% of drivers are fobbed off with little or no proper access to data or explanation of algorithm.”

In a note about WIE on the drivers’ attorney’s website the law firm says other Uber drivers can participate by providing their permission for the not-for-profit to put in a data request on their behalf, writing:

Worker Info Exchange aims to tilt the balance away from big platforms in favour of the people who make these companies so successful every day – the workers.

Uber drivers can participate by giving Worker Info Exchange their mandate to send a GDPR-request on their behalf.

The drivers have also launched a Crowdjustice campaign to help raise £30,000 to fund the case.

Discussing the legal challenge and its implications for Uber, Newcastle University law professor Lilian Edwards suggested the tech giant will have to show it has “suitable safeguards” in place around its algorithm, assuming the challenge focuses on Article 22.

Wow. This could be historic: the first art 22 case to really crack the veil of algorithmic black box secrecy and givevpowed back to dstified platform workers. Go @jamesfarrar who drove this ( sic) from the start!! #uber #a22 https://t.co/DEoX1bdCGY

— Lilian Edwards (@lilianedwards) July 20, 2020

“Article 22 normally gives you the right to demand that a decision made in a solely automated way — such as the Uber algorithm — should either not be made or made by a human. In this case Uber might claim however, with some success, that the algorithm was necessary for the Uber context with the driver,” she told us.

“However that doesn’t clear their path. They still have to provide ‘suitable safeguards’ — the biggest of which is the much-discussed right to an explanation of how the algorithm works. But noone knows how that might operate.

“Would a general statement of roughly how the algorithm operates suffice? What a worker would want instead is to know specifically how it made decisions based on his data — and maybe how it discriminated against him or disfavoured him. Uber may argue that’s simply impossible for them to do. They might also say it reveals too much about their internal trade secrets. But it’s still terrific to finally have a post GDPR case exploring these issues.”

In its guidance on Article 22 requirements on its website, the UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, specifies that data controllers “must provide meaningful information about the logic involved in the decision-making process, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences for the individual”.

It also notes Article 22 requires that individuals who are subject to automated decisions must be able to obtain human review of the outcome if they ask. The law also allows them to challenge algorithmic decisions. While data controllers using automation in this way must take steps to prevent bias and discrimination.

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[claraoswald81]

The History of SEO 2019

There are large news for anyone currently inside the niche website and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION business. The sensible strategy for SEO would certainly still appear to be in order to reduce Googlebot crawl expectations plus consolidate ranking equity & possible in high-quality canonical pages plus you do that by reducing duplicate or near-duplicate content. This can take a LONG period for a site to recuperate from using black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tactics and fixing the issues will never necessarily bring organic visitors back as it was prior to a penalty. The particular best SEO Guide is right here to dispel those myths, plus give you all you require to know about SEO in order to show up on the internet and some other search engines, and ultimately make use of SEO to grow your company. > > Upon Page Optimization: On-page SEO is definitely the act of optimizing single pages with a specific finish goal to rank higher plus acquire more important movement within web crawlers. There are numerous 10 Things You Should Know About SEO 2019 websites providing pertinent information regarding SEO and online marketing, and you will learn from them. But it's perplexing why some businesses don't consider harder with analysis, revisions, plus new content with their SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION online marketing strategy. An effective SEO strategy may be made up of a mixture of elements that ensure your web-site is trusted by both people as well as the research engines. By taking their own marketing needs online and employing confer with an experienced SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency, a business has the capacity to achieve thousands, or even millions associated with people that they would have got not been able to usually.

There is usually no magic wand in your own hands to regulate or manage your competitors' strategies or administration, Google analytics update, or client's behavior communicate business but a person can manage your SEO. In this particular new environment, the digital internet marketer who views SEO in the broader context will surely come away ahead of the competition within 2018 and beyond. Good SEO publications explain in detail how greatest to use keywords and exactly how to structure your entire web site to attract the attention associated with search engine spiders and associated with human visitors, and a posting such as this cannot perform the topic justice. While businesses start on an SEO advertising strategy, they should realize that a good entire marketing campaign can drop flat on its face in the event that a business is unable in order to reach the masses, that is definitely, their target audience. If your own pages were designed to obtain the most out of Search engines, with commonly known and right now outdated SEO techniques chances are usually Google has identified this plus is throttling your rankings within some way. A lot of business people find keeping upward with the "moving target" associated with SEO distracts them from day-to-day priorities more than they actually imagined, so it's good in order to appear closely at what can make sense for every business. The software process for the SocialSEO Electronic Marketing and SEO Scholarship is usually done 100% electronically and demands the next list of materials. SEO or the particular Search Engine Optimization is certainly an method of increasing visitors generation for an internet company. Cisco approximated that by 2019, video can make up 80% of almost all consumer internet traffic. In line along with the previous point, SEOs can consider various landing pages along with proper keywords, meta tags plus the overall website structure through the SEO point of watch. Including relevant key phrases in the title, URL, plus headers of the page plus making sure that a internet site is crawlable are actions that will site owners can take in order to improve the SEO of their particular site. To fulfill intent and position well in the long work, build your SEO marketing technique around topics, not keywords In the event that you do that, you will find a person can naturally optimize for essential keywords, anyway. Artificial cleverness (AI) and voice searches are usually two technologies that are currently affecting SEO but will most likely have an even bigger influence in 2019 and the yrs to come. They are usually also great for video SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and get great organic position online and Google. Remember keywords are usually the KEY in SEO composing guidelines. It deeply analyze your web site and reveals each opportunity intended for your SEO improvement by concentrating on key factors like interpersonal media, technologies, local SEO, website visitors, usability, search ranking efforts plus mobile SEO. A SEO expert or agency can audit your own site and appear at exactly how it is performing against your own most important keywords.

The number one particular reason for using video upon your site to improve SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is to increase the quantity of time users remain upon your site. Search engine optimization has been but still is fascinating in order to me. The SEO placement intended for any size business begins along with proper web site optimization, a good excellent link building strategy plus a well planned online marketing and advertising plan. One section of focus for better marketing and SEO performance within 2018 is the confluence associated with content, influence, and social. This can be helpful for SEO, because it helps avoid search engine crawlers from becoming confused by syntax or affirmation errors, and leads to even more accurate indexing. Stop thinking in terms associated with SEO vs. content marketing” plus start exploring how well they Blog9T will perform together. (Give it a try tone of voice search using OK Google through your cell phone and inquire "What Is BlowFish SEO" ) In the event that all remains as it will be, Google will read out loud just about all about my company in the short to the point method, These cards are formatted in order to fit the screen of your own cell with no scrolling upward or down. Although SEO is really the time-consuming process but believes me personally, if you work well along with dedication and trendy techniques, the particular combined results of on-page plus off-page SEO holds you upon the top with rank #1 for a specific search outcome. Fairly lately, I've seen a resurgence associated with on-page SEO factors making the difference searching engine rankings. Here's the truly great news: You don't have in order to have to be a SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION wizard to make sure your own website is well positioned regarding organic search engine traffic. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the acronym for lookup engine optimisation. The particular search engines have refined their own algorithms along with this advancement, numerous tactics that worked within 2004 can hurt your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION today. Therefore, we also produce content on conducting keyword analysis, optimizing images for search motors, creating an SEO strategy (which you're reading right now), plus other subtopics within SEO. In 2018 there will be an actually bigger focus on machine understanding and SEO from data. ” Of course, the amplification part of things will continue in order to incorporate increasingly with genuine public relationships exercises rather than shallow-relationship hyperlink building, which will become progressively easy to detect by research engines like google. Seo (SEO) is often regarding making small modifications to components of your website. In my SEO post writing guidelines I suggest a person take your main keyword plus 3 or 4 other associated keywords and write at 3-4%. Some SEO specialists claim that will building links for SEO reasons is pointless; others believe typically the role of backlinks for any web site has continually risen through typically the years. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a huge part associated with any marketing strategy. This fresh paradigm of users relying upon voice search for many associated with their search needs will become a game changer for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. The traditional method to SEO has been devoted to creating excellent content that will is easily searchable via lookup engine bots. To realize SEO, you'll also need in order to know how Google search functions. 2019 will certainly still use many of these kinds of newly implemented tactics, but lookup engine optimization experts are likewise suggesting there will be a great deal more. Currently more than half associated with searches account for mobile products, and the number will definitely proceed up in 2019. Within the remaining 2018 quarter, a person need to invest in mobile-first content that will rank a person higher in mobile search within 2019. The vast majority of your SEO learning need to come from online resources, yet there are a few textbooks that will help you conceptually understand the history of research, search engines, and how SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION has changed through the yrs. There are numerous methods that webmasters use within order to entice potential clients to their site—one of the particular most important and effective associated with those being Seo (SEO). SEO is important for a lot of companies because if individuals find you with a web lookup and find what they're searching for, you can receive plenty of new web visitors that will can help you earn even more money. Good SEO follows guidelines that Search engines determines are best practices in order to have your articles ranked upon top. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION services do thorough keyword analysis to get a specific website, and after that optimize the information on the particular basis of these keywords plus theme of website. Performing SEO upon your own websites is the great method to practice plus hone your SEO ability. We optimize your web site both of internal and exterior factors thats Google's engine rely on and reliable for top rating search result, Gurantee your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking No succeed can refundable. Looking deeper: An SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION cost often means one associated with two things: the investment inside your organic search strategy, or exactly how much you pay for compensated search engine marketing (SEM) providers like Google AdWords. We all are dealing with new methods designed to target old design SEO tactics and that concentrate around the truism that WEBSITE ‘REPUTATION' plus Plenty of WEBPAGES plus SEO equals Plenty associated with Keywords equals LOTS of Search engines traffic. BrightonSEO is a one-day search marketing and advertising conference and series of teaching courses held, unsurprisingly, in Brighton. From narrowing straight down target markets to changing the particular way content is written, AI and voice search will have got a continuous effect on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION moving forward. One aspect of SEO will be link building, which we can discuss slightly below, which frequently leads to thin content. Applications for the particular 2018-2019 cycle of the SEO Progress programme are now closed in addition to will re-open again in Early spring 2019. SEO could be difficult because search engines are constantly reevaluating and changing how they will prioritize search engine results. Moreover, it will help SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION by gaining backlinks, likes, feedback or shares. SEO & Content Marketing Software for eCommerce Business, Agencies and Enterprises. Calib Backe, SEO Manager for Walnut Holistics, writes that mobile plus voice are going to carry on their domination of importance since we rely on desktop much less and less. If much associated with your competitors has hired SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION firms to 10-20 keywords within a moderately competitive industry, after that you will have to spend a small more. The Google Research Console may be the most essential SEO tool on the globe. No BS. When you're done with the fatigued cliches told over and more than again at SEO Conferences, and then you're prepared to experience UnGagged - an UnConventional SEO plus Digital Marketing conference that offers real-world results. SEO is a good acronym for the phrase "search engine optimization. " Search motor optimization is focused on doing specific issues to your website to operate a vehicle even more traffic to it so that will you can increase online product sales - and traffic. By 2019, the method we search might not modify completely, but these new technology will definitely change the way we all build links, engage users, plus generate leads through content advertising. Site Champion® increases site visitors by helping shoppers find your own products in search engines by means of increased keyword rankings using SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION automation. While link quantity is nevertheless important, content creators and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION professionals are realizing that hyperlink quality is now more essential than link quantity, and because such, creating shareable content will be the initial step to earning valuable hyperlinks and improving your off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. If you understand you might have VERY lower-quality doorway pages on the site, a person should remove them or re-think your SEO strategy if a person want to rank high within Google for the long expression. One of the problems search engines like yahoo and Bing have often attempted to overcome is knowing which external links exist exclusively for SEO purposes and which usually links represent a true sign that the source content will be of value to the visitors. 2018 has currently seen some particularly significant SEO paradigm shifts from Mobile First” in order to the ever-advancing Rankbrain machine-learning formula. Content marketing will be a bigger approach which along with SEO forms a part associated with your digital marketing strategy. What You Should Know: This future of search engine optimisation is Semantic SEO. Links plus technical SEO are the biggest pieces of the pie, yet multimedia efforts such as video clip, photos, and podcasts will end up being the game changer and differentiator in many competitive markets. Occasional, and We do more occasional and not really frequent, usage of keywords plus keyword phrases in these hyperlinks may also help very somewhat in your SEO processes. Excelling at SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION means serving your visitors—not simply search engines. Here arrives the idea of SEO or even search engine optimization. The particular fact remains that SEO providers assure clients that even in the event that the site will not position among the top search motors like google, the money will certainly not be a waste credited to the refund. SEO specialists started in order to abuse PageRank in order in order to boost the rankings. 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Google announced that will they released several minor enhancements over the period of the particular time of about a 7 days and after analysis, experts inside the SEO industry concluded that will the updates were the outcome of keyword permutations and web site using doorway pages. SEO, or Search Motor Optimization, means setting up your own website and content to show up through online search results. People that want to take their company to some new height plus generally and mostly believe within the way of SEO marketing and advertising. If you work in lookup marketing, you'll know that SMX is one of the greatest search engine marketing conferences associated with the year, covering topics which includes SEO and PPC. SEO is conducted each on-site and off-site via various resources that are the existence of your web identity associated with different social media platform plus prominent display of your cyberspace link on other well-reputed internet sites. 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A Week Inside WeLive, the Utopian Apartment Complex That Wants to Disrupt City Living

Katelyn Perry

WeWork is branching out into housing, but can it actually change the way we live?

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re just slightly more alone than everyone else? Like when you’re scrolling through Instagram, and you get that sinking sensation that you’re missing out on some kind of deep human fulfillment? It’s not a specific pang of FOMO; it’s a broader suspicion that your social life would be somehow richer, more populated with actual humans, with fewer nights eating takeout and watching Netflix—if only something changed.

Well, that’s the feeling the “co-living” start-up WeLive believes it has devised the cure for. Or at least that was my takeaway the first time I found myself watching GIFs of happy millennials hugging one another and laughing on its website. WeLive is functionally an apartment building, but with all the amenities listed on the standard Silicon Valley rider. It runs on a very modern set of principles in the urban housing market: The units come fully furnished; there’s a laundry room and a yoga studio. But more, there are the things you might ordinarily need to leave your apartment for—an espresso bar and trendy eateries and happy hours. Most critically, WeLive comes stocked with neighbors who intend to become your real-life human friends. This one building, your home, has everything you could ever need, is the idea, including a built-in community.

From afar, WeLive seemed to be one part social experiment, one part endless summer. It was a market-savvy effort to solve the digital-age loneliness that registers as a low-level yet omnipresent white noise in the lives of young urbanites.

The company has positioned itself as a “physical social network”—an IRL antidote to the dislocation caused by doing so much socializing online instead of in person. WeLive wanted to tackle what sociologist Marc Dunkelman, author of The Vanishing Neighbor, calls the “crisis of urban anonymity.” Dunkelman thinks that people living in cities have lost their sense of community. That people shouldn’t accept as a fact of life that they share a roof with total strangers and never, over the course of months or years, learn more than a name and some basic information—if that even.

WeLive’s pitch dovetailed effectively with this theoretical problem among millennials. That’s why its core idea—What if you really knew your neighbors?—held so much appeal to me. WeLive’s co-founder, Miguel McKelvey, thinks WeLive could provide the physical context for community building that we’ve been lacking. “Religion is no longer a connection point for most people,” he told me. “Our communities were built on coming together in physical locations once a week or twice a week. These institutions have dissipated.” WeLive, consequently, was seeking to fill that void.

Last spring, I couldn’t stop thinking about WeLive. I recognized the appeal in my own life, knowing as I did that the further I climbed into adulthood, the fewer of my friends I saw in person. Half-hearted social-media use had become the default way to keep up with people as professional demands and significant others crowded out the abundant and untethered time of our early 20s. I wasn’t wallowing in aching solitude, but I couldn’t help feeling more alienated the deeper we dug into our phones, watching one another live our best lives on highly edited Instagram feeds.

Something about that idea and the solution that WeLive provided—the social engineering of its bold experiment—seemed radical and appealing, or at least cynically (and smartly, from a business standpoint) tapped into the insecurities of so many people my age. Sure, the incessant networking—while doing laundry or riding the elevator—and the dominance of a social scene fueled by free alcohol might instill some ennui of its own after a while. But I was willing to accept neighbors like these as the cost of living in a true millennial utopia.

So last spring I did what anyone as intrigued and terrified by the idea of “co-living” might do: I packed a bag, rented a room, and moved in.

You can show up to your apartment, as the WeLive people like to emphasize, "with just a suitcase." It comes pre-stocked with books and tchotchkes.

WeWork/Lauren Kallen

Amenity-wise, the place was pretty sweet. The Studio+ at the 110 Wall Street location that I booked for ten days—which usually costs $3,520 a month, a rate higher than StreetEasy’s median rent for studios in the financial district (insane as that is)—was set up with everything I could think of. It had Wi-Fi, pots and pans, bedsheets, towels, toiletries, and even books on the shelves (Joe Gould’s Teeth—a book about a homeless man—struck me as a weird choice). The Studio+ was a bit of a narrow corridor, yes, but personal space in the building was sacrificed in favor of shared luxury spaces: high-quality kitchens where guests are encouraged to cook, a cozy wood-paneled bar, a terrace with two hot tubs, a workout studio, a laundry room with an arcade and Ping-Pong table, a cocktail bar in the basement, and a lobby with distressed couches and a barista making complimentary cortados. Monthly cleanings were included. Cable packages were taken care of. Downstairs was an Honesty Market stocked with essentials if you ran out of TP in the middle of the night or got a hankering for Ben & Jerry’s. I thought it was remarkable how much trust they gave “members,” until I noticed a security camera above the payment iPad, watching closely.

Then there were the people. Early on, I couldn’t quite tell if they were being genuinely friendly or if they felt compelled to enthusiastically playact the role of “neighbor from the future.” On my first night, I wandered down to the laundry room—the de facto equivalent of the common room at Hogwarts—and played Big Buck Hunter on a vintage arcade terminal. There I met and chatted with an attractive young Parsons School of Design student and a chiseled banker from the UK who were both actually doing laundry. I poured myself a beer from the keg while they went on about how great WeLive was and how much I would like it. If there was a strain of earnestness to the whole exchange—a sense that I’d agreed to sleep in a tower where everyone was drinking the citrus-infused Kool-Aid and wearing matching T-shirts with the “Live Better Together” slogan tagged on the front—it didn’t bother me. At least not at first.

The vibe was carefully curated. WeLive is, after all, an offshoot of co-working behemoth WeWork, reportedly the third-biggest start-up in the U.S., with a $20 billion valuation. In just eight years it opened more than 200 locations in 20 countries. WeWork is known for building a “culture” of its own, in part by plying employees who stay late with free drinks and frequent parties. “They want it to be your life,” one former WeWork employee told me. “Everyone there is under 30, hot, and down to party.”

WeLive is perfect for a German consultant on a three-month project–but it’s expensive. WeWork Corp.

It’s clear WeLive has imported some of that vibe to reach a similar target demographic. “People obviously compare it to a college dorm,” a member and WeWork employee named Jordan Niemeyer said. I’d been living at WeLive for a few days at this point—drinking as many free cortados and beers as I could—when I met Jordan at a party on the terrace. “But show me a college dorm like this,” he said. “I wanna go there.”

As if on cue, someone handed Jordan an open bottle of champagne. He was a thirty-something former hedge-funder who’d lived at WeLive’s Wall Street location since it opened for beta testing in 2016, and he quickly became, in my eyes, the WeLive spirit animal. Before I’d even taken a free yoga class I could tell that the place was a haven for people who, as they get into their late 20s and early 30s, didn’t want to give up the kinetic, optimism-fueled party culture of being young in a city. Alongside that crowd, though, were some young families, some students still in college, even a few retirees eager to be closer to the action. The breakdown skewed male and white, but not in a super discouraging way. Lots of skin tones and nationalities were represented.

But the funny part about living inside a techno-utopia is that most of the time you’re actually just doing regular stuff. Sleeping. Scrambling to get out the door in the morning. Maybe throwing together a meal at night (but more often ordering takeout) and, yes, watching Netflix. The one thing that makes it completely different from every other apartment building I’ve seen: WeLive has its own internal app on which members can post announcements or complaints on something called the Buzz page. (“Anyone have a screwdriver and hammer that my roommates can borrow?”) It’s part roommate text thread, part coffee-shop corkboard, but the effect is that even when you leave the building, you have a digital connection tethering you to it. The app, like the meme posters adorning the walls (“Home Is Where the WiFi Is”) and all the WeLive messaging in general, enforced the tone of the place—a superficial sense of humor dressed up in playful graphic art that belied a deeper earnestness and the technocratic kernel at the heart of the business. I’d seen this kind of start-up-y subterfuge parodied on HBO’s Silicon Valley, but I’d never lived inside of it.

Watch Now:

Inside Kumail Nanjiani’s Very Real Mansion

After I’d settled into a routine at my new apartment, I decided it was time to actually leave the building and head uptown to the headquarters to meet one of the founders. Miguel McKelvey looks like a bear that got really into CrossFit, tall and bearded, with a warm, disarming disposition underneath all the tech jargon. I went in still under the impression that WeLive was a trial balloon, sent up to check the weather on this new housing trend called co-living. It had competition in that field. A mess of other start-ups are jostling to corner that market—like Ollie’s all-inclusive tower in Manhattan, Common’s intentional living in various Brooklyn brownstones, and Nook’s human-storage facility in Oakland. But WeLive was convinced, because of existing relationships with building owners around the world, that it had the upper hand.

The typical resident, McKelvey says, is an “entrepreneur looking for a noncommittal way to try out whatever new project he or she is working on and not have to sign a lease.” WeLive, McKelvey feels, is perfect for the itinerant tech worker of this new borderless economy. But co-living was only part of the story for him. As we started discussing WeWork’s longer-term ambitions—expansion into more cities (it already has D.C.; Seattle is next) but also into other industries like education and fitness—I realized that I’d underestimated the extent of what the company was pursuing. WeLive was just one piece in a much larger play.

“When the idea of ‘We’ came in,” McKelvey told me, “it started as a ‘WeBlank: WeWork, WeLive, WeSleep, WeEat.’ That was the premise at the very start. Our aspiration is to be a holistic support system or lifestyle solution for people who are interested in being open and connected.”

A “holistic support system”—frighteningly Digital Age as that sounds—is the total infrastructure of a human life. Here’s a helpful thought experiment for conceptualizing the grand scheme: What if a single company sanded off all the hard edges in life? What if you never had to search for an apartment on Craigslist again? What if you never had to wait for the cable guy, either? Or find a health-care plan on the open exchange? What if it was all just…there? You join the global network, and anywhere you go there are hardwood floors, good coffee, fast Wi-Fi, and, most important, like-minded friendly people interested in engaging and working alongside you. The things people used to have to piece together themselves (apartment, office, insurance, gym membership) would now be packaged and delivered by one provider. A few months after McKelvey and I talked, WeWork opened a fitness and wellness space called Rise by We. Later it announced plans to open elementary schools for young entrepreneurs. It was all happening.

Soon you’ll be able to “feel like you’re staying within your community, within the network, wherever you are,” McKelvey said. “It never feels like it’s holding you back. It’s just always there. It always works.”

The WeThing, then, was a globe-spanning network of cocoons, all sharing the positive vibes of productivity, a frictionless existence where you never have to deal with practical inconveniences or shortages of friends or the feeling of loneliness. And where everyone wears the same T-shirt.

"Sometimes it just feels good to succumb to the niceties and convenience. Even if, in the back of your mind, you know you’re ceding something valuable."

The majority of start-ups these days make a business out of solving one very specific problem. WeWork belongs to the much smaller and potentially more lucrative class of businesses trying to solve literally every problem they can, the way that Amazon will sell you a new 4K television and, if you subscribe to Prime, brand-new content to watch on it.

“When we imagine a future for both WeWork and WeLive and the other things that we’re doing, it really is about unlocking people,” McKelvey told me. In tech-speak, that means it’s setting out on a conquest of Napoleonic scale for a monopoly over the entire breadth of its customers’ primary needs. In theory, I’m repulsed by the idea of being “unlocked” in any fashion, and yet I’m clearly a total sucker for it, too—as proven by the fact that I couldn’t resist moving in, that I gleefully partook of the free coffee and beer, and that when they screened a Star Wars marathon in the lobby, I thought about skipping work. The most successful businesses know what we want and how to give it to us. And sometimes it just feels good to succumb to the niceties and convenience. Even if, in the back of your mind, you know you’re ceding something valuable.

Intellectually, I like the idea of living a life with minimal possessions, moving constantly between cities, confident that I’ll have a welcoming network wherever I go (as long as I don’t stray too far). It’s refreshingly un-American—not focusing all your energy toward owning your own castle. And it plays into a new aspirational aesthetic that values materialism less and focuses instead on experiences, travel, wellness, and professional fulfillment. Of course that’s appealing. Who wants to wait for the cable guy? Or wait out a lease when you’re ready to move?

Happy hours hosted in the Whiskey Bar are a good way to get to know your neighbors. Katelyn Perry

But like the perma-freelance future we’re all racing toward, WeLive gives me this sinking feeling that what I’m giving up in security and commitment, I’m not necessarily getting back in freedom. Take it to its logical conclusion: At some point, the youthful gig-economy worker of tomorrow is going to have babies, and she’s going to need to put them in a WeDayCare while she pursues her latest consulting job. Pretty soon our offspring will be learning, living, working, and dying all inside one monolithic company: the many-tentacled WeOctopus. And that gives me the creeps.

Once I was keyed into this bigger game, I saw everything WeLive did through a different lens. It’s a social experiment on a scale we haven’t really seen before, except maybe in the Israeli kibbutz, in which WeLive’s other co-founder, Adam Neumann, was raised. The crucial distinction, though, and the reason the WeThing isn’t a real “utopia” per se, is that it asks nothing of its members by way of shared responsibility or decision-making. It’s purely transactional. You just pay in, show up, enjoy the perks, and go about your merry way. In the end, that capitalist DNA might be the thing that gives it the legs to last longer than, say, the hippie communes of the ’60s.

Then again, it’s also possible that real utopian shit might grow in the artificial setup. I was doing laundry one night and lost track of time playing Big Buck Hunter. When I turned around, a dude my age was folding my laundry for me because, he claimed, he needed to use the dryer and he didn’t want anyone to abscond with my clothing. That kind of sappy altruism was, at first blush, borderline offensive to the standoffish, self-reliant ethos I’d picked up while living in New York City. But after we started talking, I could tell it came naturally to this guy, who, despite living in New York, had clearly not yet adopted its notoriously callous ways. “People think WeLive is a bunch of entitled millennials who want someone to clean their room,” he said. “But it’s not.”

Living at WeLive was relatively conflict-free. The biggest scandal to date on the internal app’s Buzz page was about the smell of marijuana, a whiff of which I’d caught seeping through the vent in my bathroom. The community manager, who plays a tricky hybrid role of landlord, dormitory R.A., and neighbor, reminded everyone that smoking in units was grounds for eviction. Members chimed in to add their weed-related complaints. Others got defensive. One guy responded: “This is New York.” Another said simply: “Grow up or get out.”

There’s an implicit promise that all WeLive members exist on the same chill frequency. Katelyn Perry

Tiffs like that don’t really detract from the experience, members told me. They certainly don’t stop WeLive from gearing up for expansion—albeit at a slower pace than it had initially hoped. The company just announced that the third WeLive will open, in Seattle in 2020, with 36 floors of living and working space. WeWork hired an executive from Starwood to run the WeLive business, and there are rumors that it has its sights set on London next. The broader WeWork company just got a $4.4 billion investment from the nearly $100 billion Vision Fund run by Japan’s SoftBank.

As for whether WeLive can help with the increasing loneliness of my generation, it’s still too early to tell. We seem to socialize better online than in person, and we’re definitely worse, at least statistically, at the stuff young people used to do—like have sex and not live with their parents. Silicon Valley’s inclination is to try to solve those problems by reaching in and re-engineering our social lives. But even if it can get you to a kegger, WeLive can’t actually make your friends for you. The same way Tinder can only get you into the same room as a potential mate—you still have to do the talking.

Ironically, the most organic social incident I witnessed while in residence at WeLive was something that happens at every building in the city—a fire alarm. One warm night in late April, everyone had to evacuate the building. We all milled around outside the lobby, suspended between the reassuring idea that it wasn’t a real fire and the sneaking possibility that it might be. A young mother of two stood away from the fire trucks, watching her kids run around. She explained with a conspiratorial look in her eye that she hoped that the alarm was caused by someone smoking pot. That way they would finally have a culprit for the persistent smell. She was worried about her kids, and she thought this might bring about stricter enforcement.

It’s an example of one of the many basic things WeLive will need to solve as it expands around the world: families with young children and twentysomethings who wish they were still in college, attempting to live side by side, as one. Which is, of course, a problem familiar to any apartment building in any neighborhood in America, ever.

"And what, really, is the end goal of all that streamlining, anyway? What do you do with all the time you’re not “wasting” anymore? Work on your app? E-mail till you fall asleep?"

A bigger problem might be that there’s something dehumanizing at the core of what WeLive encourages—at the center of this whole society-wide movement toward maximum performance. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not as taken with optimization as the Soylent-guzzling, fitness-tracking set. For instance, I’d like to pick out my own wall art and books. And I don’t mind running out to the store, because I enjoy going outside. And what, really, is the end goal of all that streamlining, anyway? What do you do with all the time you’re not “wasting” anymore? Work on your app? E-mail till you fall asleep?

After I moved out, WeLive kept evolving and I burrowed back into my own, non-utopian life. Six months later, I was unexpectedly back on the New York City housing market after a sudden breakup. I find it telling that it didn’t once cross my mind to return to WeLive. It’s not WeLive’s fault, necessarily. The apartments there are nice enough, if a bit pricey. The beer is good and the coffee is strong. It’s probably exactly what a lot of folks are looking for. But I’m reminded of the old Groucho Marx line, the one about never joining a club that would have you as a member. WeLive is great—as long as you don’t mind becoming the kind of person who hangs out at a WeLive.

Benjy Hansen-Bundy is a GQ assistant editor.

This story originally appeared in the March 2018 issue with the title "Can the WeLive Experiment Actually Change the Way We Live?"

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Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[seo19107]

Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[seoprovider2110]

Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[seo75074]

Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[vidmrkting75038]

Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[personalinjurylawyer93555]

Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[seo53703]

Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[mortlend40507]

Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[realestate63141]

Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[constructionsworkr3053]

Content-First SEO

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

http://ift.tt/2xr39lI

[seo90210]

Content-First SEO

I’ve been finding myself saying, “You don’t rank for keywords, you rank for content,” a lot lately.

Imagine this. You’re trying to turn a quaint town on the shore (East or West—pick your coast of choice) into a vacation destination. You’ve developed a brand for the location that you’re promoting in all the right travel magazines and websites. You have well-positioned billboards. AAA knows how to help people get there. You make sure the town name is on all the road signs within 100 miles.

People start traveling. But when they arrive, they find a few chain stores, a dingy restaurant and a couple of Super 8 Hotels. No fantastic food or charming overnight options. No pedestrian paths or bike trails through the area. No tours to the nearby nature attractions. Everyone is disappointed, and soon word spreads that the town is not worth visiting. No matter what improvements happen in the future, word of mouth has already taken root. People know this isn’t a place worth visiting. No matter what you do down the line, tourism is low.

You got people there. What went wrong?

In this case it’s obvious. You didn’t get them to a rewarding destination.

The magazine clips and road signs have to support what’s in the town. The attractions will determine if your town succeeds as a vacation destination, not the markers that get people there. And you don’t succeed by first getting people there and then creating something of value.

Why do we lose sight of this seemingly obvious parable in marketing?

I would argue that it’s because there are so many clever ways to approach the “signage” in online marketing. The practice of generating visibility can become consuming. Creating the substance to which that signage leads is simpler, but harder to do well. It’s less easy to chart than those clever tactics until you already have a problem—until visitors are leaving en masse.

The content comes first, then the SEO.

Content Is About Substance

In this example, the qualities of the destination are the content: the food, the entertainment, the lodgings. These provide the substance of a “vacation destination.”

SEO is simply what you set up to help people find the town. Your SEO was awesome. Your content sucked. This gives short-term payoff—you get a first wave of people to the destination—and long-term failure—no one likes it and you acquire a negative reputation.

Not only does this kill repeat visits (to your town), but soon enough the magazines, the travel websites, even good old AAA start to question whether to send any more traffic your way.

Let’s transfer the idea from the metaphorical town to your real website.

An important distinction:

Content is not just a blog post or a product description. It’s not just the restaurant menu in our little town, but the roads a visitor travels to get there.

Content is any information used to convey meaning. It is any information that gives the visitor what they were after when they first arrived.

Information can take the form of words (like that definition of “content” I just gave), pictures, formats (the italicized text told you a word was important), or implicit associations created by structure and layout.

“Words are content” is easy to understand. “Implicit associations” as content is harder to understand. Here’s an example.

A search begins: “big cat yawning in the sun.”

Aw, look at that big cat sunning herself and yawning.

Here’s another picture of a cat yawning.

Aw, look at that big tiger yawning in the sun…

But in the second example, “a big cat yawning in the sun” isn’t quite what you see, is it?

They’re both cats, they’re both striped, they’re both showing fangs, they both have sun on their heads. Both photos are close-ups of the cats’ faces and upper portion of their bodies.

The data is the same, but visitors were probably looking for one or the other of these images, not both. Good content satisfies a visitor desire. You have to choose the image based on the substance you think your viewer wants, not based on what you think you can get to rank.

You have to provide content that gives something substantial to your audience, not whatever you think will show up in search results. (Don’t know what they want? Learn how to develop a useful persona.)

SEO Is About Content

In marketing’s current obsession with data, we don’t care as much about meaning-making as we do about bigger numbers or line graphs that go up to the right. We want to make tangible, measurable changes to our sites that will get us those charts. We want easy answers.

“How do we rank for this keyword?” Put it in your metadata.

“How do we get this page to rank?” Add some links and a good H1.

I’m oversimplifying, but my point is that these changes don’t get you far if the content on your site isn’t worthwhile.

Search engines serve humans, not the other way around. When we start to serve search engines first, we’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil might think this is a good thing (and Google employs him—draw your own conclusions), but I don’t. Do you want to work for a machine or make it work for you?

I have the good fortune to work with a smart group of people who understand this. They know content and search engine optimization are fused, that tactics for SEO *must* involve content quality. (Click to tweet.) Sometimes, I also have the good fortune to work with clients who know or will learn this.

If SEO is about content, and content is about substance, SEO is about substance.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about where tactical SEO fits into Content-First SEO. I sat down with one of those smart people I work with, Zac Heinrichs, to talk about how different SEO tactics can be reframed with the goal of creating substance.

SEO Tactic: Keyword Research

Zac Heinrichs: “One of the biggest stereotypes of SEO that’s persisted over the last decade or so is that it’s all about keywords… over time, that’s slowly changed for the better. With different Google updates, search engine understanding of a page or site has become more semantic. It’s not necessarily about the keywords on the page or the header anymore, but about answering specific questions and presenting valuable ideas rather than keywords to get the right answer in front of the people who are looking for it.”

To paraphrase, what matters is not keywords, but user intent. Read: meaning.

Key questions we should take from this when using keyword research:

What do people want to do?

How do we help them do that with our content?

What are the questions people ask and how do we answer them?

SEO Tactic: Target High-Volume Terms

I get frustrated with marketers who say they just want more search volume or want to target high-search volume terms. More specific ideas may have lower search volume, but focusing on what is most relevant vs. what is most common can help businesses satisfy user intent. Right, Zac?

Zac: “Yes, and that’s the perfect way to build broader authority as well. If you can provide relevant and accurate answers for lots of questions about one topic with pieces of highly targeted content, creating a hub page to organize it on the site helps you build authority and relevance around that higher-search volume term or topic. It’s mutually beneficial.”

Key questions we should take from this when considering what terms to target:

What subtopics under this broad term is our business ideally suited to address?

What highly relevant subtopics could we address, but haven’t?

Have we provided meaning on our site by organizing these subtopics into central hubs?

SEO Tactic: Link Building

External link building is not a tactic. It is a result, an earned benefit of having valuable content. If you set the right expectations and deliver something awesome, getting external links follows naturally.

Zac: “At Portent, we try to rely on making great content and not going fishing for links.” If you have something useful to certain audiences, networking with sites who have those readers makes sense. If you don’t, it doesn’t. Create content that’s worth the link.

Internal link building is often overlooked, but is easier to control. It helps set expectations and create associations. Remember the boring town? The network around it (the brand promotion in magazines, the billboards, the road signs) prepared visitors to find not just a town, but a destination with multiple ways to engage and enjoy. You can set expectations (do the SEO), but if you don’t deliver it will backfire. Make sure you have something substantive on which to base those expectations.

Zac: “Internal links help to provide correlation between pages. Contextual anchor text provides greater indication of what’s on the next page, enhancing trust from people and from a search engine—an expected result happens.”

Again, think of the town. You made a promise by disseminating the messages within your control. You set expectations through context. Now deliver on what you promised.

Key questions we should take from this when considering how & when to build links:

Is the content we’ve created good enough that we want to link to it from all over our site?

Have we promoted our best content by linking to it all over our site to increase its organic visibility for those who might link to it themselves?

Have we created complementary content that provides depth and a great experience when visitors come to check out this individual page?

SEO Tactic: Writing Good Metadata

Metadata is the stuff that shows up in SERPs telling people what they’ll find on the page if they click through: title tags and meta descriptions.

Metadata is a prime ad spot in the most coveted travel magazine. Here, you get to tell visitors who are only one click away why your content is significant. And yet, perhaps simply because search engines will automatically pull something from your page to fill in this text, it gets neglected far too often. Don’t treat it as an afterthought.

You have roughly 160 visible characters to compel a reader to click through to your page. Make a promise the page fulfills. Get specific to pique interest. The best content doesn’t appeal to absolutely everyone, and the best metadata won’t either: It will appeal to the people looking for what you have.

By the way, details matter. Simple spelling errors or awkward phrasing do, in fact, make a huge difference. If you’re not convinced, someone did the experiment to prove it.

Zac: “Moz’s Head of SEO did a presentation at MozCon this year about metadata. Because Moz is an SEO monster, she wanted to see what it would take to actually lose some of the featured snippets they had earned. It turned out to be as simple as adding a typo in the meta description.” [Here’s a summary of the talk, “How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads”.]

This is my shameless plug for copy editors and proofreaders everywhere. Readers judge words based on their accuracy and presentation. No matter how right the words are, if they’re misspelled or capitalized atypically readers will notice and ignore your site. Having an SEO write your metadata content is not enough. You need an editor or content expert to review it.

A New Approach: Content-First SEO

Much like content-first design, a concept that’s been around for a few years, content-first SEO will recognize that meaningful communication is the key to your online presence. Everything you put online needs to be a conversation between you and your audiences (a conversation they want to have). The SEO tactics you use need to further that conversation by making it more relevant, authoritative, and visible.

Want people to find your town? Start by making it an extraordinary place to go.

Want better SEO? Start with your content. Build out from there. Your content is what ranks.

from FEED 9 MARKETING http://ift.tt/2xr39lI