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So you may wonder what’s happened with my old case studies, my old clients. Are they still ranking? Does the work I do continue to work after I stop building links? I don’t remove links that I’ve built. I don’t remove listings from local listings sites I’ve added you to. Here is one of the … Read more from Houts Graphics http://bit.ly/1QCQysQ from Blogger http://bit.ly/21hmdbf ” - http://ift.tt/1pKpIJj via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1VUSoOn
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Some of you folks that are reading this know that I spend my daystoiling for a big bank. So I can totally understand if you thought that this article was about hedge funds or some related financial instrument. Or perhaps youre used to reading posts that focus primarily on my current profession (marketing)so you thought that hedging your bets was an analogy ofsome sort that referred to spreading your marketing dollars and expertise on more than one channel. Side Note: That last assertion is a good idea in my experience. If youre already good at search engine optimization try to master paid search marketing. Know your way around email marketing? Learn how to activate display campaigns. Really strong with digital channels in general? Figure out how traditional advertising channels like TV and outdoor work. Dont care about marketing? Thats ok too. Though Id argue that even if youre not a marketer, you may want to consider understanding fundamental marketing concepts if for no other reason than to gain a better understanding of how the human psyche works. Anyhow, back to my original point. The reason that I titled this post Hedging Your Bets is because I got to thinking about the nature of a love affair. I realize that in some sense, we all must decide whether or not to hedge against the degree of love and passion were willing to manifest for our significant other. Some of us are quite risk averse, so we choose a mate based mainly on financial stability, emotional safety, and a high degree of consistency. Were not looking for a volatile love [anymore]. Some us are a bit more ambitious. We want someone thats compatible. Someone that makes us laugh and smile. A true companion. A love like cool water. More of a long play, as opposed to a violent, fiery, torrid affair. Then you have the true gamblers. The ones who wont settle for anything less than true love. Real passion. I have a lot of respect for those folks for a variety of reasons: 1) Firstly, Ive been there. And its awesome. 2) Secondly, I know how painful it can be if this beautiful construct unravels (or is unrequited). 3) Thirdly, this special type of person runs the risk of never finding what theyre looking for. 4) Fourth, and perhaps worst of all, you run the risk of feeling what its liketo think to yourself My Baby Laid Out All Night: Ive got a young kiddo in tow these days, and I often think about what Ill tell him about falling in love and assorted ailments. Hopefully, hell see the love his mother and I have and continue to share, and that will help him find his way. Ultimately, I suspect that love has different seasons. It changes over time, and sometimes, if youre lucky, its reborn time and time again like the cherry blossoms in Prospect Park. I also think that its worth considering that other facets of life also fit the hedge your bets analogy. For example, marketers that always play it safe and stick with mainstream best practices typically dont go far. Yet at the same time, marketing mavericks that always shoot from the hip and use their mouths (and keyboards) to make bets their skills and connections cant cash run the risk of endingup in the unemployment line. So hedge your bets wisely my friends. ”- http://ift.tt/1NnD0GT via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1r3HOHA "Its impossible to take any tech industry blog post (e.g. marketing programming growth hacking..."4/21/2016
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Its impossible to take any tech industry blog post (e.g. marketing, programming, growth hacking, etc.) seriously while listening to Lightnin Hopkins sing Going Down Slow. [embedded content] And I believe that, in general, this is the right attitude to take as it relates to this internet business of ours. All too often, I run into industry colleagues who get swept in a frenzy of algorithm chasing, (not provided) lamenting, and character count obsession. Theres really no reason for that. In fact, I think that taking oneself and their craft too seriously can be a detriment to their long-term professional prospects. And perhaps their personal ones as well. I ran into one of my closest industry colleagues a true friend on the subway yesterday. And we got to talking. About a lot of things. Absinthe, the good old days, and what it takes to be true leader. The yeller and screamer type is out both in the NFL and in Corplandia. Nobody has time for the pissing and moaning type either. The worrier is out too (and wont live long). But the over zealous micro-manager is by far the worst offender. Mind you, we all have a little of all four in us. Our job is to wring them out of our existence one laid back moment at a time. I was outside walking my dog earlier tonight, and I swear that I saw a mini Tsunami rolling into the Western coast of the Hudson River. Charlie barked. I got to thinking about the fleeting, frail nature of life. Theres no time for getting hung up on the nitpicking, not-going-to-move-the-needle-anyway details. So just take it easy. Your data is directional? No worries. Taking a long time to convince the Powers That Be that original content makes measurable money? No biggie. Google did something that upset the apple cart youre little world balances on?So what. Just focus on making friends and providing value when/where you can. Youre not going to win every battle. The internet is a very new place, so some people from the pre-internet generation are never going to fully grasp it. And guess what? Those people are often the real movers and shakers in an organization. So until those generations fully adapt or more likely fade into the retirement sunset, its probably not a good idea to annoy the crap out of them by constantly insisting that your channel(s) is the most important thing in the world and that it and you should always be the first consideration. P.S. Whats his name statistician (you know, the famous one that predicted the election) suggests that you ante up and teach yourself proper statistics. Hes right on. Thats the future (and present) in virtually every professional field and domain. ”- http://ift.tt/1XLYopX via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1XLYbDh "Dear Kettle: This is the pot. I am calling you black. Here is why. Earlier this year I wrote on..."4/21/2016
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Dear Kettle: This is the pot. I am calling you black. Here is why. Earlier this year I wrote on Marketing Pilgrim that you should always update your older outbound links. I do this on my Websites because it maintains a good user experience. I dont do this for search engine optimization. I do it for you (well, mostly for my own sanity). I do go back and read my older articles from time to time for many reasons. I usually find a typo that needs fixing and often I find broken links that need to be replaced. I am very stingy with my links. I wont link to most SEO Websites, for example, but there are many other Websites I wont link to, either. I have been more generous with my links to science fiction and fantasy Websites. Some of you have tried to trick me into linking to PageRank Traps on your client sites by writing science fiction articles. Haha, very dumb idea. Dont you think I check what I am linking to before I place the link? Real science fiction fan sites go offline like stars winking out at dawn because most of them are built on free hosting sites and those services tend to vanish quickly. I find myself updating links for fan sites all the time. Its probably not necessarybut this is one of my personal passions. I want my Website visitors to be able to find something appropriate if I link out. Fortunately my sites are well-crawled by the Internet Archive and I can usually find one or more copies of offline sites there, so I update my links to point to Archive.Org if the fan sites have been permanently lost. But I should not have to do this for news Websites. After all, they tend to stay online. Government Website link destinations should also be stable. And yet in both categories I find that linking to any content on these kinds of Websites is highly risky. More than that, it usually creates a very bad user experience. The problem with government Websites is that they kill old content as if its poison when someone in some administrative office somewhere decides the content is no longer relevant to citizens or, worse, contradictory to current laws, regulations, and information. What they SHOULD be doing is updating that old content with notices at top and bottom that it has been archived for historical purposes and links to more current information. I have yet to figure out what the schizophrenic news industry is doing because they all hire SEO experts, gurus, and gumshoes who give them really stupid advice. On any given day a news organization is likely to do one of the following dumb things with its old content: Remove it completelyRedirect it to a site searchUpdate it with irrelevant informationMove it to some archive section that is organized completely differentlyRetitle it (and republish it) These companies would not be doing this dumb stuff if someone using an SEO or Content Marketing job title didnt think it was a clever way to build traffic. Meanwhile, out on the Web, old links die faster than mosquitos killed by a malathion truck when news Websites improve their optimization. You would think that an industry that has become so unnecessarily obsessed with using bad search engine optimization advice would want to keep its link profiles as intact as possible. Many of my old articles link out to news Websites. I once naively believed they would be stable sources of information. You know, there are days when I would almost rather link to a Wikipedia article. They are more stable than some news Websites. Changing your URLs is only going to hurt your search engine optimization. There is no net gain from doing something like that. You dont need to change your URLs anyway; you need to change your navigation structure. Those are two wholly different separate things. What set me off on this little tirade down memory lane was that I republished an old article that had been taken offline years ago. As I normally do with these little projects I scanned through the articles links and updated them. When I got to the one news link in the article I had to dig up an Archive.Org copy because the news site (E! Online) had completely removed its old content. This is what comes of linear thinking. You look at your analytics and see that 10-year-old content is not being visited. Therefore it must be hurting crawl budget (its not thats just more nonsense the SEO industry has cooked up). Crawl budget doesnt work that way. Thanks to the SEO expert who advised E! Online to get rid of all old content (or move it to where the sun dont shine) the site has LOST link value. Its one thing for the links to decay away naturally; its another thing completely to just walk away from those links when you are learning to obsess over links, link value, and crawl budget. Worse, many people like me, when we see those old destinations are gone, just kill our links or replace them with something more appropriate. So even if you cleverly redirect your old URLs you run the risk of losing inbound links because a lot of people dont like redirected destinations, especially if the redirects dont simply point you to a new URL for the exact same content. And you keep asking why Google cares about how redirects are managed. THIS IS WHY. So why am I the pot calling the kettle black? Because I am the guy who tells people that the fastest Panda fix is to delete everything, publish new content on new URls, and dont implement redirects. That flies in the face of everything I just wrote above. So Im the pot and you are the kettle. My advice is pretty safe because most people wont do it even though it means they can start building their traffic again immediately. Waiting for the Panda to come back and love your site is, in my opinion, the least optimal solution. But SEO has to support the business decision and if the business decision is to keep the old site going, then keep it going. You can always add subdomains to your site and grow your traffic that way. I want my old links to remain useful. I do restore old content from time to time. When I do that I would rather NOT have to figure out where to point the links to. Content restoration is a very important process of building and maintaining a useful Website. I hesitate to speak of its impact on search engine optimization because I know that as soon as the light bulbs start going on well see a flurry of badly written, poorly thought-out SEO articles explaining how to use Content Restoration for SEO. Worse, it will become the next link building or content marketing tactic (not that there is much difference between the two). Search engine optimization works best when you create useful content and provide useful links. After more than a decade of explaining that to people I would like to believe the memo is starting to circulate. Content age has nothing to do with search engine optimization. It doesnt matter how old the content is. What matters is what you do with the old content. I often search for old content. Its bad enough that Google keeps burying old content. You dont have to help Google screw up the Web by telling your clients and employers to bury old content. Its okay to move it to a subdomain archive as long as you make the archive useful. Its never okay to just kill old content because you think it has lost its value. The value that matters is the value that *I THE WEB* place on the old content. Nothing else. Today I republished an old article and updated the links. Because I was diligent E! Online lost a valuable link. That is what your linear SEO strategies, following the paint-by-numbers I read it on Moz approach, accomplish for your clients and employers. You lose good links. Learn from this lesson. ”- http://ift.tt/1SxKZ6J via Tumblr http://ift.tt/22Q9bRd
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Many people already argue that links, as ranking signals, are getting less valuable. Googles search algorithm is still based on the link graph. Most of their actions (such as Penguin update, and the successive batches of manual unnatural linking penalties) to win against web spamming may perhaps just prove the real importance of links to the search technology. Seeing that links are still one of the best signals they can use in determining the relevance, authority, popularity and the credibility of a web page or an entity. Well, that just means that getting the right types of links is still very much important in this age of SEO (and even on the entire digital marketing space). Because links dont just help a site get better visibility on search results it also helps information, products or services get discovered through referral. Small vs. Big, Fast vs. Slow Having so many search ranking factors to consider may make it seem even (in some ways) to win in search. Though, most of the time, one of the main deciding factors of who gets to win is the resources allotted by those who really want to have a bigger search and market share. But one thing that I really like about investing in SEO is that even the small ones still have the right to compete and would still have a fighting chance for as long as theyre proving that they really deserve to rank and be seen (through the quality of their content, product/service and the mentions they get naturally from other people/websites). And thats why building a strong brand presence on the web has become an important aspect of SEO and link building makes that part much easier for search engines to understand. Glen Dimaandal wrote a great piece on enterprise link building a few weeks ago (he also did a guest post here recently on enterprise-level content strategy). On that post, he detailed several tactics that many well-recognized companies have already invested on to effectively promote their brands over the web, such as: Press release distributionThought-leadership campaignsTool creationGetting interview opportunitiesLeveraging corporate partnershipsSite acquisitions Although in this post, I just thought of sharing some other link building ideas that not just enterprise-level companies can explore, but may also be viable for smaller businesses too. Associates Program Building a strong community within your brand is definitely a powerful way to make a website a link-earning machine. A great example for this approach is the one that youll obviously see from Moz. It has been mutually beneficial for both ends, given that their associates are helping their community grow (and their link profile for sure) and at the same time, their associates get to build their personal brand and demonstrate their expertise to Mozs continuously growing audience. This approach can also be very much applicable to other industries just like BiggerPockets, who have several regular content contributors on their main blog (that helps them earn natural links on a massive scale with less effort). On launching an associates program: Make a list of people who you think can help grow your brand by having them regularly write content for your site. You can start with those who are really active in promoting their personal brands.Make sure you can provide the right incentives to your target associates and brand advocates (it could be through commissions, more brand exposure, direct business leads, free access to your products/services, etc).Exclusive Directories Creating your own recommended lists of other companies in your space (indirect competitors) that provide products/services that your target market also seeks for (but you currently dont provide) can also be a good linkable asset and an effective platform you can use to build relationships with other industry influencers. Tracking A-List News Sites Sources The biggest publishers on the web heavily rely on other sources for them to be able to generate credible content while keeping up with their normal publishing frequency. Thats why contacting the editors and journalists from these well-known news sites would sometimes be a long-shot, knowing that theyve got plenty of things on their plate. So why not get published on places where they are getting their news stories instead, right? Most of these publications have content partners, and youll just have to put enough time and effort to dig to see the sites where they are getting their news stories regularly. Like for instance, Yahoos Small Business Advisor is partners with sites like Business2Community, AllBusiness.com, Entrepreneur and a lot more. And other big content sites like Forbes, FastCompany and Inc.com also publish content from their content partners on their domain. Even tech news sites mostly get fresh stories from other sites they trust, read, and regularly visit (well thats obvious, since thats what most bloggers do). Theres a bunch of ways to track news sites regular content/news sources you can do it manually (observe the top 20 content or so and see if you can find a pattern on who are they mostly linking out to as for their stories references). Or you can also use ScreamingFrog SEO Spider to scrape the external links from a particular category of the news site to see who the domains they mostly use as references. Building a Learning Center Investing to create a massive amount of useful content in your website doesnt just help you build and earn more links. It also helps with the other more important aspects of business like brand strengthening, scaling customer support (as these content can also serve as FAQs), as well as in converting readers to loyalists and visitors to customers. Many successful brands have already utilized this approach, especially those whore in the web-based service/products field and Id surely fire one sample thats very close to my brand: Affiloramas Free Lessons. These content assets normally do well when it comes to link building/earning, given that they mostly answer frequently searched queries or asked questions. And it also makes a lot of sense to promote these pages, especially in situations where you get to simplify your answers to community members asking (or on discussions from other websites) by just pointing them to these informational pages. Friends of Friends Marketing Relationships are very vital in any form of marketing Im sure that youve already heard that a lot. I remember when I was just starting that I really invested a lot of time and effort on building relationships with other bloggers in this space (Ive even written a comprehensive blog post about the entire process 3 years ago). Because its true, in any industry, that the right relationships will take you places. Connect, engage and influence those who you can help and can help you as well. Find those who are very active in promoting their own brand, and those who write for various places. Its important to aim to have something of high value to their target audience (and/or even them) which could be your ideas, product or expertise. Because the more they learn from you (the more youll be able to influence them) and the more theyll speak highly of you and recommend you through their writings. Write the type of content that your target prospects read, share and mostly link out to (follow them social networks to know what they usually learn from then produce the same quality of content!). Content Licensing Content Licensing is another marketing process that can be very beneficial to both participating entities (the original owner of the content and the publisher that will be republishing the content). The original source of the content can get links and more exposure from the republished version of the content on a different website while the licensee gets a free content that can help them build their own readership and links to the republished content as well. Another form of content licensing that you can explore is allowing your content to be republished and translated into different languages which can also help your brand reach a wider audience (for instance having a few of my posts here be republished in SpanishatInboundespanol.com). Several ways to implement this method: For licensors (content owners): you can start by reaching out to other bigger publishers in your space and ask if theyll be interested to republish your content (especially on foreign websites that arent targeted to English-speaking countries offer your content to be translated).For licensees (republishers probably sites with bigger traffic): Find high quality content creators and offer content partnerships, wherein you can ask if theyll be interested to republish one of their content on your site under their authorship (to give more exposure for them).Or you can also use content licensing platforms like NewsCred and Written.com. If in case youre interested to try this out, you might also find this document useful: content license agreement sample. Also, dont forget to always link to the original source of the content and use the rel=canonical tag if necessary. Micro Niche Sites This is surely one of the oldest tricks in the book. Though using it for an enterprise-level campaign would certainly need a different approach for it (as the other supporting sites will serve more purpose than just building links that your competitors wont be able to acquire). Building branded niche sites (or acquiring smaller sites that specifically target different segments of your market) can be very useful if your marketing campaign is in for the long-haul. For instance, I started SageMode last month a small blog thats more targeted to SMBs, entrepreneurs and startups since thats also a segment that our company also wants to target as clients for our online marketing services. This new entity can help expand the business in so many ways, as it naturally builds its own identity and relationships in the long run. These things can all result to better link building opportunities, effective lead generation, and more business insights/technology. Though focusing on this strategy will require a lot of resources, but there are still ways that you can do to lessen the volume of work needed to jumpstart this type of campaign. For example, on my first 2 blog posts for this new blog, I just did a group interview and a curated post (and I think it just took me a total of an hour to finish both). Another approach for content development that you can do to ensure that your niche sites are continuously getting new content is to make it user-generated (like allowing guest bloggers, building a niche directory website, having a gamified or voting feature like Inbound.org, etc). But of course, it takes a lot of resources (budget, time and effort) to build an empire. If you liked this post, you can subscribe to my feed and follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre. Related Posts ”- http://ift.tt/1XJLZ5Z via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2432yxk
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Many people already argue that links, as ranking signals, are getting less valuable. Googles search algorithm is still based on the link graph. Most of their actions (such as Penguin update, and the successive batches of manual unnatural linking penalties) to win against web spamming may perhaps just prove the real importance of links to the search technology. Seeing that links are still one of the best signals they can use in determining the relevance, authority, popularity and the credibility of a web page or an entity. Well, that just means that getting the right types of links is still very much important in this age of SEO (and even on the entire digital marketing space). Because links dont just help a site get better visibility on search results it also helps information, products or services get discovered through referral. Small vs. Big, Fast vs. Slow Having so many search ranking factors to consider may make it seem even (in some ways) to win in search. Though, most of the time, one of the main deciding factors of who gets to win is the resources allotted by those who really want to have a bigger search and market share. But one thing that I really like about investing in SEO is that even the small ones still have the right to compete and would still have a fighting chance for as long as theyre proving that they really deserve to rank and be seen (through the quality of their content, product/service and the mentions they get naturally from other people/websites). And thats why building a strong brand presence on the web has become an important aspect of SEO and link building makes that part much easier for search engines to understand. Glen Dimaandal wrote a great piece on enterprise link building a few weeks ago (he also did a guest post here recently on enterprise-level content strategy). On that post, he detailed several tactics that many well-recognized companies have already invested on to effectively promote their brands over the web, such as: Press release distributionThought-leadership campaignsTool creationGetting interview opportunitiesLeveraging corporate partnershipsSite acquisitions Although in this post, I just thought of sharing some other link building ideas that not just enterprise-level companies can explore, but may also be viable for smaller businesses too. Associates Program Building a strong community within your brand is definitely a powerful way to make a website a link-earning machine. A great example for this approach is the one that youll obviously see from Moz. It has been mutually beneficial for both ends, given that their associates are helping their community grow (and their link profile for sure) and at the same time, their associates get to build their personal brand and demonstrate their expertise to Mozs continuously growing audience. This approach can also be very much applicable to other industries just like BiggerPockets, who have several regular content contributors on their main blog (that helps them earn natural links on a massive scale with less effort). On launching an associates program: Make a list of people who you think can help grow your brand by having them regularly write content for your site. You can start with those who are really active in promoting their personal brands.Make sure you can provide the right incentives to your target associates and brand advocates (it could be through commissions, more brand exposure, direct business leads, free access to your products/services, etc).Exclusive Directories Creating your own recommended lists of other companies in your space (indirect competitors) that provide products/services that your target market also seeks for (but you currently dont provide) can also be a good linkable asset and an effective platform you can use to build relationships with other industry influencers. Tracking A-List News Sites Sources The biggest publishers on the web heavily rely on other sources for them to be able to generate credible content while keeping up with their normal publishing frequency. Thats why contacting the editors and journalists from these well-known news sites would sometimes be a long-shot, knowing that theyve got plenty of things on their plate. So why not get published on places where they are getting their news stories instead, right? Most of these publications have content partners, and youll just have to put enough time and effort to dig to see the sites where they are getting their news stories regularly. Like for instance, Yahoos Small Business Advisor is partners with sites like Business2Community, AllBusiness.com, Entrepreneur and a lot more. And other big content sites like Forbes, FastCompany and Inc.com also publish content from their content partners on their domain. Even tech news sites mostly get fresh stories from other sites they trust, read, and regularly visit (well thats obvious, since thats what most bloggers do). Theres a bunch of ways to track news sites regular content/news sources you can do it manually (observe the top 20 content or so and see if you can find a pattern on who are they mostly linking out to as for their stories references). Or you can also use ScreamingFrog SEO Spider to scrape the external links from a particular category of the news site to see who the domains they mostly use as references. Building a Learning Center Investing to create a massive amount of useful content in your website doesnt just help you build and earn more links. It also helps with the other more important aspects of business like brand strengthening, scaling customer support (as these content can also serve as FAQs), as well as in converting readers to loyalists and visitors to customers. Many successful brands have already utilized this approach, especially those whore in the web-based service/products field and Id surely fire one sample thats very close to my brand: Affiloramas Free Lessons. These content assets normally do well when it comes to link building/earning, given that they mostly answer frequently searched queries or asked questions. And it also makes a lot of sense to promote these pages, especially in situations where you get to simplify your answers to community members asking (or on discussions from other websites) by just pointing them to these informational pages. Friends of Friends Marketing Relationships are very vital in any form of marketing Im sure that youve already heard that a lot. I remember when I was just starting that I really invested a lot of time and effort on building relationships with other bloggers in this space (Ive even written a comprehensive blog post about the entire process 3 years ago). Because its true, in any industry, that the right relationships will take you places. Connect, engage and influence those who you can help and can help you as well. Find those who are very active in promoting their own brand, and those who write for various places. Its important to aim to have something of high value to their target audience (and/or even them) which could be your ideas, product or expertise. Because the more they learn from you (the more youll be able to influence them) and the more theyll speak highly of you and recommend you through their writings. Write the type of content that your target prospects read, share and mostly link out to (follow them social networks to know what they usually learn from then produce the same quality of content!). Content Licensing Content Licensing is another marketing process that can be very beneficial to both participating entities (the original owner of the content and the publisher that will be republishing the content). The original source of the content can get links and more exposure from the republished version of the content on a different website while the licensee gets a free content that can help them build their own readership and links to the republished content as well. Another form of content licensing that you can explore is allowing your content to be republished and translated into different languages which can also help your brand reach a wider audience (for instance having a few of my posts here be republished in SpanishatInboundespanol.com). Several ways to implement this method: For licensors (content owners): you can start by reaching out to other bigger publishers in your space and ask if theyll be interested to republish your content (especially on foreign websites that arent targeted to English-speaking countries offer your content to be translated).For licensees (republishers probably sites with bigger traffic): Find high quality content creators and offer content partnerships, wherein you can ask if theyll be interested to republish one of their content on your site under their authorship (to give more exposure for them).Or you can also use content licensing platforms like NewsCred and Written.com. If in case youre interested to try this out, you might also find this document useful: content license agreement sample. Also, dont forget to always link to the original source of the content and use the rel=canonical tag if necessary. Micro Niche Sites This is surely one of the oldest tricks in the book. Though using it for an enterprise-level campaign would certainly need a different approach for it (as the other supporting sites will serve more purpose than just building links that your competitors wont be able to acquire). Building branded niche sites (or acquiring smaller sites that specifically target different segments of your market) can be very useful if your marketing campaign is in for the long-haul. For instance, I started SageMode last month a small blog thats more targeted to SMBs, entrepreneurs and startups since thats also a segment that our company also wants to target as clients for our online marketing services. This new entity can help expand the business in so many ways, as it naturally builds its own identity and relationships in the long run. These things can all result to better link building opportunities, effective lead generation, and more business insights/technology. Though focusing on this strategy will require a lot of resources, but there are still ways that you can do to lessen the volume of work needed to jumpstart this type of campaign. For example, on my first 2 blog posts for this new blog, I just did a group interview and a curated post (and I think it just took me a total of an hour to finish both). Another approach for content development that you can do to ensure that your niche sites are continuously getting new content is to make it user-generated (like allowing guest bloggers, building a niche directory website, having a gamified or voting feature like Inbound.org, etc). But of course, it takes a lot of resources (budget, time and effort) to build an empire. If you liked this post, you can subscribe to my feed and follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre. Related Posts ”- http://ift.tt/1Ssr2ef via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1pfWqCi "Tweet With the release of schema.org v2.0 (the too large to fully describe in a single post..."4/19/2016
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Tweet With the release of schema.org v2.0 (the too large to fully describe in a single post edition) came a new property I think deserves to be in the spotlight as it resolves some long outstanding issues. mainEntityOfPage Indicates a page (or other CreativeWork) for which this thing is the main entity being described. Now I recommend you read the propertys full description on http://bit.ly/1Qlx4ZD as it goes on to describe its intended use and where it stands in relation to properties like http://bit.ly/1MGTbiv, http://schema/org/sameAs and http://bit.ly/1Qlx380. Properties to which mainEntityOfPage is very closely related and which are part of schema.orgs fundamental building blocks. Unfortunately though the reason why one should use this property is only is described by: Many (but not all) pages have a fairly clear primary topic, some entity or thing that the page describes. For example a restaurant’s home page might be primarily about that Restaurant, or an event listing page might represent a single event. The mainEntity and mainEntityOfPage properties allow you to explicitly express the relationship between the page and the primary entity. Which is illustrated via the following markup example further down the page (also available in RDFa and JSON-LD): Cath’s Cafe Open: Daily from 11:00am till 8pm Phone: 555-0100-3344 View our menu. But which I think is an odd example as it doesnt illustrate the propertys true value by mentioning how it can help webmasters deal with some very nasty and hard to resolve situations. Before going ahead and explaining this to you though, let me point out some schema.org basics first. Schema.org 101 Lets say youre a producer of goods (ACME Corporation) and youre selling your products on your website. One day you decided to lay down some http://bit.ly/1Qlx4ZG markup on your product listing pages, and because of this each of the products listed on those pages probably contains some markup along these lines:
"Leigh Miller Yankee Stadium francis_leigh Some rights reserved A couple of months ago I wrote..."4/19/2016
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Leigh Miller Yankee Stadium, francis_leigh, Some rights reserved A couple of months ago, I wrote about a Google patent that involved rewriting queries, titled Investigating Google RankBrain and Query Term Substitutions. Theres likely a lot more to how Googles RankBrain approach works, but I came across a patent that seems to be related to the patent I wrote about in that post, and thought it was worth sharing and starting a discussion about. The patent I wrote about in that post was Using concepts as contexts for query term substitutions. The title for this new patent was very similar to that http://bit.ly/1W6QSXM one (Synonym identification based on categorical contexts), and the more recent patent was granted on December 1st of this year. The new patent starts off describing a scenario that is a good example of how it works. The inventors tell us: For example, learning that restaurants is a good synonym for food in the query [food in San Francisco] is relatively straightforward, because the volume of query traffic including the query term San Francisco is very large. For much smaller cities, such as Grey Bull, Wyo., the query stream may have never seen any supporting evidence for this synonym substitution. That both cities are entities that fit into the same category, that of Cities means that they could potentially be good synonyms for each other. Thats what the inventors of this patent tell us specifically, using the San SEO Expert Francisco and Grey Bull example: For example, if San Francisco and Grey Bull are both cities, and restaurants is a good synonym for food in queries about San Francisco, the synonym relationship may apply to queries related to Grey Bull as well. Thus, the category city may be considered a useful category when identifying synonyms for query expansion in circumstances such as this. So, we are told that the process involved in this patent is to identify categories from a knowledge base involving a number of entities where other entities within that same category could potentially be synonyms for each other in similar contexts. The process from the patent involves identifying those entities from a query stream, and identifying the category as one that they call a coherent category. The patent tells us that a coherent category is one in which a certain threshold of terms tend to co-occur in a query stream involving those entities. The patent tells us, for instance that a category that might include entities that are cities, villages, and towns might see a lot of co-occurring terms involving hotels and roads. If the number of co-occurring terms appearing in that query stream meet a certain threshold, it would be considered a coherent category, and the entities from the same categories could possibly then be used as synonyms for each other. The patent in question is: Synonym identification based on categorical contexts Invented by: Zachary A.Garrett, Takahiro Nakajima, Tasuku Oonishi Assignee: Google US Patent 9,201,945 Granted December 1, 2015 Filed: March 8, 2013 Abstract Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for training recognition canonical representations corresponding to named-entity phrases in a second natural language based on translating a set of allowable expressions with canonical representations from a first natural language, which may be generated by expanding a context-free grammar for the allowable expressions for the first natural language. Take Aways When I wrote about the query term substitution patent I refer to at the start of this post, I included a number of examples of queries that were re-written based upon some substitutions of query terms that might seem reasonable to a search engine looking at words that tended to show up, or co-occur, in a query stream involving those search terms. For instance, someone searching for [New York Yankees stadium] was likely searching for results that involved baseball since queries that included New York Yankees and stadium also often included the term baseball. That patent didnt use the term co-occur nor did it explain how a knowledge base might be used to substitute entities that might be in the same categories like this one does, but the idea that a shared context like entity categories can be used to trigger entity substitutions in a query is interesting. Its worth spending time with both patents and reading through each of them multiple times and thinking about how they are being used. Total Shares 187 ” - How Google Might Make Better Synonym Substitutions Using Knowledge Base Categories http://bit.ly/1Wd8cdM via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1Sj6jav
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[Estimated read time: 6 minutes] I initially started writing a post about how BuzzFeed tailors its content to different social networks. What image sizes do they use? What type of content works on one network but not another? What tactics do they employ? But as it turns out, there isnt anything that revolutionary in the way BuzzFeed approaches their content on these social networks. There are a few interesting things they do, such as: Using silent, square videos on Facebook that work well on any device and dont require sound to be understood more info from Tom Critchlow here: Intermodal Media Matcha Green Tea Swiss Roll Posted by Tasty on Thursday, January 21, 2016 Posting almost exclusively list-based articles on Twitter: Aggregating Reddit-type content from elsewhere onto their Instagram feed without much connection to BuzzFeed: Having different individuals run their Snapchat account in a story format that you would expect from your own friends. For instance, someone might document her time at a concert or trying a new type of food or visiting Central Park. Occasionally appending ?sub_confirmation=1 when linking to their YouTube channel to generate a subscription popup: https://www.youtube.com/user/BuzzFeedVideo?sub_confirmation=1; But, I dont think these tactics are the most interesting part of BuzzFeeds approach to social media. A different approach to social strategy BuzzFeed made a fundamental change to its social strategy in early 2015. This is what BuzzFeeds publisher/data guru Dao Nguyen had to say about it: Our CEO, Jonah Peretti, started talking about BuzzFeeds distributed strategy to internal teams in January 2015. Instead of focusing primarily on our website and apps, and using social networks as a way to send traffic to them, we were going to aggressively publish our content directly to platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat. Id recommend checking out the entire article as well; its awesome. BuzzFeeds Instagram feed is one of the more extreme examples of this strategy. Their posts have little chance of immediately sending traffic back to BuzzFeed and typically look like this: This post isnt going to directly send traffic to BuzzFeed anytime soon, but it is going to engage users. In this sense, Instagram is basically a http://bit.ly/1W6QSXM branding platform for BuzzFeed. It puts the BuzzFeed name next to engaging content for millions of users and almost certainly increases the effectiveness of BuzzFeeds marketing efforts elsewhere. This doesnt mean BuzzFeed has stopped using social to send traffic back to their site. In fact, almost all of their Twitter posts are click-baity listicles: But the common thread is that BuzzFeed doesnt try to enforce its own goals on the channel. If Snapchat or Facebook or YouTube users want to mostly consume native content directly on those platforms without leaving their feed, then thats where BuzzFeed will reach them. One of the obvious takeaways from all this is to tailor your content to the channel. This has been talked about to death. A more interesting takeaway is using these channels as branding channels rather than conversion channels. Theres nothing wrong with exclusively posting engaging content that doesnt relate to your product. You see the Buzzfeed name every time you interact with a Buzzfeed social post. It comes up in notifications from Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or SnapChat. You see it in the feeds you spend your time in everyday. Isnt there tremendous value in simply putting your name in front of users every day? Isnt this Branding 101? Who cares if youre not talking about your product? Its kind of greedy. You could have the attention of your target market. You could have your name show up next to content they consume EVERY day. You could be the subject of a notification they receive straight to their phone. But thats not enough for most brands. They also need that attention to be closely related to their product. Therefore, the biggest mistake many brands make is forcing social media further down the funnel than it should be. Most brands and products simply arent suited for engaging social media content that converts, and are better off aiming for branding-related goals because it provides more creative flexibility. Engaging & product-related: doing it right The brands that do pull off engaging and product-related content arent social media geniuses they simply have products that lend themselves to interesting social media content. Some examples would be: BuzzFeed: People want to read their articles (on some channels) The New York Times: People want to be kept up to date on the news Etsy: People want to discover unique products Bloomingdales: People want to see cool outfits Theres also a whole class of accounts that have successfully made themselves authorities on certain topics and provide value that way: Distilled: HootSuite: The value prop Whats your social media value proposition?” In other words, what are the reasons someone would follow you on Twitter or Instagram or wherever… OTHER than simply liking your brand? What content are you providing that they would care about? If your social media value proposition isnt strong when focusing on your product, you need to find another one. To put all of this another way… The question most people ask: “How do we use social media to promote our product?” The question most people should be asking: “How do we create engaging social content? (for our target demographic)” Trying to answer both with the same content usually results in awkward content that is tangentially related to your product and almost certainly not engaging: Seen through this lens, youd change 90% of branded social media accounts overnight. Stop trying to force your product or brand into posts. Just post engaging content. Instead of posting this type of content: You would post content that people actually care about product-related or not. Content people care about Some examples of executing social right when you cant focus on your product would be: Red Bull: People arent interested SEO Expert in energy drinks, so they post about extreme sports Dove: People dont care about soap, so they post about inner beauty Intel: People dont care about computer chips, so they post about technology broadly: Changing your core accounts might be too risky. In which case, take another page out of BuzzFeeds book and experiment with a new social feed dedicated exclusively to a certain type of content without overhauling your main accounts. For example: Coke could create an account solely dedicated to highlighting happy and uplifting moments Dos Equis could create an account solely dedicated to profiling interesting men Old Spice could create an account solely about lifehacks for college students Mint.com could create an account solely focused on financial tips and tricks Its easy to treat social media as just another traffic-generating channel. Posts are mostly promotional or product-oriented, with the occasional and reluctant “engagement”-related post sprinkled in. The way Buzzfeed treats certain channels hints at a different goal: brand awareness. Its not about focusing on your products. Its just old-fashioned branding: associate your brand with the right emotion and put it in front of as many relevant people as possible. ” - The Buzzfeed Approach to Social Media Strategy http://bit.ly/1Qe13Th via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1ShWMTg
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Visitors to a website may want to perform certain actions related to Entities (specific places or people or things) that are displayed to them on the Web. For example, at a page for a restaurant (an entity), a person viewing the site may want to create a reservation or get driving directions to the restaurant from their current location. Doing those things may require a person to take a number of steps, such as selecting the name of the restaurant and copying it, pasting that information into a search box, and submitting it as a search query, selecting the site from search results, determining if making a reservation is possible on the site, and then providing information necessary to make a reservation; getting driving directions may also require multiple steps. Using a touch screen device may potentially be even more difficult because the site would possibly then be limited to touch input. A patent granted to Google this week describes a way to easily identify an entity such as a restaurant on a touch device, and select it online and take some action associated with that entity based upon the context of a site the entity is found upon. Actions such as booking a reservation at a restaurant found on a website, or procuring driving directions to that site, or other actions could be easily selected by the user of a site. The patent is: Semantic selection and purpose facilitation Inventors: Paul Nordstrom, Casey Stuart Whitelaw, Assignee: Google US Patent 9,305,108 Granted April 5, 2016 Filed: October 5, 2012 Abstract Computer-implemented methods for proposing actions to a user to select based on the users predicted purpose for selecting content are provided. In one aspect, a method includes receiving an identifier of a referent entity associated with user-selectable content, identifying, based on a prediction of a purpose in selecting the content, at least one action to be executed that is associated with the entity, and providing, for display, at least one identifier of the at least one action to the device for selection by a user. Systems, graphical user interfaces, and machine-readable media are also provided. How an entity and actions might be selected by a site visitor A person searches for a site using text such as sushi restaurants in Mountain View. That person then circles the text we love Ramen Sushi out of all of the places weve been to on the web page they found with that search, by circling the text using a touch input. Based on the content they chose and the context of their selection of that text, The system decides that viewer of the page has selected Ramen Sushi, and it proposes that entity to the user. The user can confirm that, and is then given a number of actions to perform on the entity based on a context of that selection. Someone circles an entity on a touch screen to perform actions on it. The context can include: The current location of the deviceA past location of the deviceThe type of the device A previous action associated with the entity taken by the user or another userA search queryInformation on another user associated with the userThe file from which the user-selectable content was selectedThe remaining content from which the user-selectable content was selected Actions might then be displayed that could include: Directions to Ramen SushiMake a reservation at Ramen SushiOperating hours for Ramen Sushi Reviews of Ramen Sushi Once an action is chosen, it can be performed by the system. Entities are contained in an entity database, which may contain attributes or properties associated with the entity, and those can be pre-defined, and can have associated descriptors such as location, restaurant, and phone number. An entity that is a person such as George Washington can have an associated descriptor notable person. The patent tells us that entities that are listed in the entity database can be associated with one or many user purposes and/or actions based on an associated descriptor. A purpose is something that a user would want to do or find out with respect to an entity that selected. These actions are shown in a menu to the user as choices of actions to take regarding selected entities. These purposes may be referred to as a task. The patent provides a number of examples, that include: play (e.g. for games and sports), rate or evaluate, travel to, contact, communicate, share, record, remember, dine, consume, experience or enjoy (e.g. art, music), reserve (tickets, etc.), compare, learn, study, understand, purchase, repair, fix, teach, cook, and make. For the example purpose dine, an example sub-purpose can be eat dinner, from which example sub-purposes can be make reservation, get directions, and find parking. The patent tells us that users can select multiple entities of the same type at the same time to compare them. Entities, purposes, and actions can be added to the entity database either manually or automatically with a user (or even an owner of the entity) adding information. The patent provides some examples of how information might be added to the entity database, but it seems to be fairly wide open under the patent. The patent doesnt mention Schema vocabulary, which would be one way for a site owner to add entity information to an entity database. Entities may be products, and actions presented to a user could include providing a review of the product, identifying a seller of the product, providing a price for the product, or providing an offer (e.g., discount or coupon) associated with the product. If the entity is a service, such as watching a movie or a plumber for hire, the actions that may be presented to the user could include providing a review of the service, identifying an availability of the service (e.g., show times), identifying a location where the service is being provided (e.g., an address of the plumber), or providing an option to purchase the service (e.g., purchasing tickets for the movie or rates offered by the plumber). Take Aways The entity database described in this patent could be a very big one, containing multiple businesses (like those from Google Maps), multiple products, multiple people (like those found at a knowledge base like Wikipedia), and multiple potential actions and tasks associated with those entities. This seems to be a fairly aspirational patent, which might require a lot of steps being put into place before it is implemented. It does present a vision of how entities on the web could eventually be acted upon by people who see them in web pages. This could be something that Google may intend to do, and some of the pieces for it are in place, such as a knowledge graph filled with entities, and a schema system that is extendable. Its interesting seeing a patent that lays out a framework like this one does. Is this a future path that Google will follow? We may need to wait to see. Total Shares 181 ” - Selecting Entities on Sites and Performing Tasks On Them Through Google http://bit.ly/1SRdwOD via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1NtGZMX |