[Cyrus Shepard] Hi everybody—let me get a look at you here.

It's a little intimidating being up on this stage.

I think after we end today we should just have a line

and everybody gets to come up while everybody else sits down

and just to see what it looks like being up here for just a couple minutes.

I'd like to thank SEO, SEOMoz, Rand for having me.

This is a community that's given me so much.

Can you imagine where the SEO community would be without SEOMoz?

Just this huge vacuum.

I'd like to thank Laura Lippay for doing such a great job last year—that was my job.

Let's give her a round of applause—yes. [applause]

Last year it was my job—this year they traded up.

So—one year ago at MozCon—which was really the greatest

conference I'd ever been to—it really opened my eyes to a lot of things.

One year has passed since then and in that year so much has changed.

Now my topic today is about high ROI content strategies.

But what I really want to talk today about is the future

because the future is coming.

And in the last year we've seen more changes in—from Google and Bing—

targeted to SEO-specific activities than I can remember during

any one-year time in the history of SEO.

A lot of people are scared by change.

But it doesn't really matter; when people start saying SEO was dead

what they're really saying is things are changing, and we're not

brave enough to figure out what's next

because we're still going to be marketers, we're still going to be

promoting things on the web, but I think what particularly frustrates SEOs

is a lot of the techniques that we've relied on for years and years and years

are just starting to go away.

You know—some of the lower quality techniques or the black hat—

or what's considered black hat today techniques like link directories,

low spanning quality networks, article marketing, scams, press releases.

Google has—you know—effectively sort of just wiped these off the map.

Things that we used to rely on that we didn't even consider spammy. Google is changing.

Title tags—you know—we used to preach all the time optimize your title tags for

click through rates and conversions and all this other stuff.

And now Google—it's very common for them to just change your title tag.

It wasn't even a spammy technique; it was best practices but it's going away.

By the way—I stole all my slides from AJ Cone today—just so you know.

And—it's going away.

Popular link building techniques—

any time a link building technique becomes popular it seems like it has a year or two

at the top, and then Google comes by—we find ways to manipulate it—

push the envelope a little too far.

Google comes by and just sort of takes it away.

Now this is coming very soon.

Even the fundamentals of SEO—anchor text—that has been around since the beginning

of page rank, since—you know—Larry Page—you know—started Google

many years ago—we find ourselves trying to build anchor text that says click here

instead of what we really want.

All these techniques are going away.

I spend a lot of time in the Q&A forums at SEOMoz,

and I see that most SEO—the people who practice in the real world—

not necessarily in this conference—but—you know—a more common SEO—

is usually a year or two behind the cutting edge stuff that—you know—

we're talking about today.

Most of us are—that's why we come to these conferences,

so we can learn that cutting edge stuff, but you have to imagine Google

and Bing they're a couple years ahead of where we are today.

We're sort of in the dark.

And what I want to talk about now is instead of chasing these things

that are going away—pursuing what Bing and Google are doing in the future,

so that we can be well ahead of the curve and well ahead of the rest of the online marketing world.

Now—Google hasn't taken everything away.

Google sometimes gives us great, big gifts.

And sometimes we're a little unappreciative of those gifts.

Who's excited about Google Plus? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's usually what happens—last year Kristy Bolsinger—

if you were here for MozCon last year she famously called it the third sock.

Google Plus—the third sock—no one was excited.

A lot of people want Google Plus to sort of fail—to sort of fall by the wayside.

I don't think that Google Plus is a third sock—I had a revelation a couple months ago

that Google Plus is not a social network.

That's what we think of it traditionally as—it's Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus.

How many people are using it and engaging on it each day?

Google really isn't using it as a social network.

They're using it as a knowledge network.

They're pushing it forward for local businesses; it's in the search results.

It's becoming more prevalent than ever despite—you know—

with supposedly low adoption rate, but it's here to stay.

Now—AJ Cone has a presentation later today specifically about Google Plus.

It's an excellent presentation; you don't want to miss it.

He let me have a sneak peak at it.

But even when Google Plus was first introduced there were some things

that I liked about it immediately from a SEO perspective.

Sorry—I already talked about that.

Followed profile links—I mean—these are to die for.

You can put as many followed profile links in your profile as possible.

I checked last night—these are showing up in my Google webmaster tools reports.

You're profile has page rank—the more engaged you are,

the more people who are—have you in their circles,

the more people linking to your page, the more values those have.

I'm never going to get those from Facebook and Twitter.

The same with posts—any link in a post is followed.

Things that you publish on Google Plus tend to be indexed fairly quickly.

Rand did a test about this last week and published it on the SEOMoz blog

comparing different indexation rates between sharing on Google Plus,

sharing on Twitter.

What's funny is you can put anything with a full URL in a Google Plus post

becomes a followed link. I had a post about six months ago.

It went viral. It was linked to by search engine land, linked to by a couple of other media outlets.

It earned a significant amount of page rank, and here's what's funny

it's just like having a Tumblr post—I can go in there, I can edit that post

at any time, I can edit the title tag by changing the first sentence of the post.

It's a great resource that I'm not going to get with—you know—your regular social network.

This really becomes content on the web in a way that

Facebook content, Twitter, and those other networks don't really become content.

That content kind of tends to fall off the link graph and not influence things after a certain point.

But this—this is kind of like your own personal blog.

Finally—it's the only major social media platform with author profiles.

How many of you think this is kind of cheating on Google's part because—

you know—Facebook and Twitter they could implement the real author tag—you know—

on their site—right—and you search for Twitter, and I could have the profile show up.

And it might increase their click through rate, but then they would be

linking through to the Google Plus.

But that's kind of funny—the author profile.

When this came out we all heard stories of,

"Yes—get your author profile on,

and you'll see an increase in click through rate of 30%."

Well—a lot of people tried this, and they didn't see that huge click through rate.

If you're like me you might have a problem.

You might be kind of ugly.

We heard stories of people—you know—I worked for months—months—

to get that author profile on, and when I finally did I was so excited

and nothing happened.

I mean—if anything my traffic actually went down.

And you hear these stories like, "I just don't want to click on that."

At the time this was my standard Google Plus profile pic.

And it took me a couple months of looking at this going,

"You know—maybe that's not the most attractive picture

that I could actually put up."

So—but I'm an SEO—right—so what if I tested this?

So I know enough Photoshop to be dangerous so I started

playing around with some different photos. Thank you. Thank you.

I had someone take some photos—I'd take a photo in Starbucks.

I'd put it up for a week—I started playing around with backgrounds.

You could say possibly I got a little obsessive about it. Yeah.

Anyway—but then some magic started to happen.

When I started to hone it in—when I started to find something that engaged

with my audience, and I—the great thing about it is

once you change your profile in Google Plus the change—

and if you have the real author tag implemented correctly and have your picture showing

it shows up almost immediately—you can see exactly what your profile is.

And I tested this over a several week time period.

I used the click through rate data in Google webmaster tools that's under the

search engine optimization report; it's one of the most underutilized

reports in Google webmaster.

I mean—Google webmaster—Google analytics—I'm sorry.

And I tracked my click through rate over time.

And you can see the little bumps and grinds.

And it played a significant role as I tuned it in, and I found the right photo.

Now here's what I want to say—

I ended up with a photo on a red background.

What I found—this photo is attached to three different properties that

are associated with my Google Plus profile.

It didn't increase the click through rate for all my Web site properties—

just one with my biggest audience.

You know—Rand has that beautiful yellow background that he uses in his profile pic.

It depends—there are no rules—no yellow is going to work or red is going to work.

It depends on your audience and your demographics.

Sometimes female faces are going to work better. Sometimes male faces are going to work better.

When I implemented this and I finally found the system that worked.

From my highest click through rates to my lowest was a change of 56%.

It ended up that that was the high—it ended up being around 35%

that I am sustaining today.

This is a free gift from Google.

Forget the title tag optimization that they started to take away.

This was a sustained 35% increase in traffic that I achieved for free.

Simply—I don't see a lot of—I still see a lot of ugly photos out there in the search results.

So I think there's a lot of room for improvement; if you can go back to your companies—

now obviously the author profile isn't great for everybody.

You know—eCommerce it's not a great platform.

But—if your company uses author profiles—

how many links would it take to be able to increase your traffic 35%

just by changing a few photos, so this was something that's really awesome in my personal opinion.

On a bonus tool there I found this last week—all my plus.com—

if you visit it put in your Google profile ID.

It will go through every data of every post you've ever written and give you back a bunch of statistics.

Google and info-graphics—I don't know if you saw the news

Matt Cutts is getting kind of angry about info-graphics.

That's Matt in one of his infamous halloween costumes from the Princess Bride.

We've seen this before—we've seen this with other link building techniques.

Once it gets kind of popular—you know—right now there are

a lot of info-graphics.

I use info-graphics all the time; my wife is an info-graphic designer.

A significant portion of our household income comes from info-graphics.

But they kind of feel like they're overplayed.

And Matt—I don't have a slide for this, but I don't think that Matt has a problem with

the info-graphics themselves that have been around for years—I think he

has trouble with the anchor text and the widgets that go with those info-graphics.

So I have a few tips—I think info-graphics are going to be around,

but I've approached them—started to approach them a little differently in the last six months.

One—I never use a widget for embeds.

I don't do any of that; I just put the info-graphic on the site.

I thought my links were going to go down.

They might have gone done—you know—5% or 10%,

but the links that I have now are much better because they're editorial.

They're not repeating anchor texts on every site.

Sometimes people do steal the the image—they're more like to steal

if you don't give that embed code.

Well—like Paddy was talking about yesterday—all I do in that case

is I do a Google reverse image search, I reach out to those webmasters,

and nine times out of ten they give me the link anyway.

If you do choose to use an embed code on your info-graphics I would very,

highly suggest not linking to your homepage

because in the wake of penguin—if that ever goes bad—you cannot

cut the link to your homepage—you cannot—you don't want to 404 your homepage—right—or anything like that.

If you ever have to get rid of this link—if Google ever changed their mind—

if you link to the individual page or the individual images

that's much more likely to 404—cut that link.

It'll save you a lot of problem down the road.

And watch your anchor text.

When you have—any time you have a widget that's embeddable

you have the chance for that anchor text to repeat over and over and over again—

exactly the sort of thing that panda—I mean penguin—sort of wants to target.

But info-graphics aren't my favorite way to build links anymore.

I actually—we talk about high ROI content.

I think when Matt Cutts—you know—while Matt Cutts is focusing on info-graphics

I'm actually focusing on eBooks as a major technique to help build my links.

And I think they beat info-graphics in a number of ways.

For one—I found they're much easier to produce.

When you do the research—you know—what makes a good topic for an eBook is

anything that is useful, shareable—I kind of think of it as

anything that's going to be really helpful that's longer than your average blog post

that has great design; I still hire a designer to design the eBooks.

We didn't do this one, but you get the idea.

They tend to be less expensive; a good info-graphic cost $500 to $1,000.

eBooks I can generally produce for $250 to $500.

That's a typical price; you can go into the thousands of dollars

depending on the design, the research—things like that.

Evergreen content—info-graphics tend to have a short linking cycle

where they sort of go viral, they peak after a couple months, and then

the links kind of taper off whereas eBooks that cycle is much more long-tail.

You can get value out of that for a year or two if it's a really good quality resource.

And to link sources you tend to get—tend to be a little higher quality.

It depends on the audience you're going after.

Governments sites, education sites—they are not necessarily going to link to

an infographic, but they're much more likely to link to a helpful resource like an eBook.

There's directories you can submit to.

It can be repurposed easily; the—you know—beginners guide to SEO on SEOMoz

it's kind of a reverse eBook—it's all this beautiful web content that you can also download.

But once you have your eBook you can publish it as a blog post—

do it in any way you want.

And it's not on Matt Cutts radar at this point, so that's a winner for me.

Press releases—I'm kind of embarrassed about press releases.

When you work at a marketing agency or really any company—

this goes for any small business in America.

You're faced with press releases, and they're terribly expensive to put out there

if you're not hiring a press management company.

You know—it's anywhere from $99 for the cheap ones to $800 for—you know—

your typical online web distribution.

It used to be a pretty common technique in the SEO world

to get links to press releases because you got them republished and submitted to lots of sites.

The problem is—the reality is—today most of them are just a waste of time.

No SEO value whatsoever, and I would never advice a normal

person to buy a press release for the sake of buying a press release.

The problem with press releases is you spend your money, you get this

distribution report if you use a better service.

They say, "Oh—your links are—we published in all these places."

And it feels really impressive—it makes you feel like you got your money's worth.

The problem is that's duplicate content, that's low quality sites all over the web,

it does absolutely nothing for you, and then you have the problem of anchor text.

I pulled this one out by random—this person put benign prostastic hyperplasia.

I don't know what that is.

I assume it's a hard keyword to rank for.

Lower back pain—and I checked—do you think this person ranks anywhere near the top 50 for these keywords? No.

Because what happens when you combine repeating anchor text over

a ton of low quality sites—this is exactly the kind of thing that penguin targets.

In fact—this person is killing their chances of ranking for these terms

by putting this exact match anchor text in the keyword.

The problem that—people think this is link bait, but this is not link bait.

The problem with—disclaimer—I use press releases all the time.

That's the point I'm getting to here, and I generally have about an 80% success rate

with getting good, quality, editorial links from news sources and speciality publications.

And the reason is I don't treat the press release as the link bait.

The press release is just to get the word out and target it towards a linkable asset.

I want to talk about linkable assets—I'm talking about things that are new, useful, and newsworthy.

I'm talking about something on your site—your site that's the news

that you're using the press release to link for—Steve Jobs was very good at this.

Tools—when we released Open Site Explorer last year on SEOMoz

we put out a press release; we got links for it because it was a new tool that was useful.

Guides, reports, eBooks again—I love putting out a press release

when I put out a very targeted eBook.

Anything that's free—code academy, video series—

maybe you have new videos, you put out a press release, and it's newsworthy.

Individualizations—now here's a press release that actually is link bait.

When SEOMoz got its $18 million in funding Rand put out this meme

press release—I don't know if you've seen it—you can Google it.

And he used a bunch of memes to actually construct the infographic—

first of its kind—this press release was actually linkbait.

He turned the convention on its head; this is the way to do it.

Taking it one step further—if you have to outsource the writing of your press content

it's great to hire a professional—there are a lot of third party resources out there—

Contently, oDesk, Freelance, Guru, Elance.

Hire a reporter to write your press release for you.

Qualify in your job description—ask for examples of work that have been placed in high quality sites

because not only are you getting a professional writer at that point

you're getting someone who knows, has connections,

and knows how to write stuff that gets put in things like Wired Magazine or Hacker News.

That's what you want to look for—leverage that content.

One more thing while I'm talking about press.

Haro—I thought it was worth mentioning because I used Haro for years.

Anybody use Haro? Yeah.

I used Haro for a lot time, and I hated it.

It was a big waste of time because I would read through the thing.

I would answer the queries; no one would ever call me back.

It felt like I had leprosy.

Then I kind of figured out the system of how to use it,

and once I figured it out it became a joy.

And I was doing the same problem as with the press releases.

I did not have a linkable asset that I was referring to.

I was using my email—you know—as the main source of outreach.

But the first thing I do is I create a gmail canned response—very popular.

The most important thing when you use Haro—you're sending out these

emails to reporters looking for sources—the most important thing you can

put on there is a link to your expert page.

Rand Fishkin has one of the best expert pages in the SEO industry.

This establishes you, lists all of your qualifications, has great photos—

this is your linkable asset that you want to send to reporters

that puts it in their mind that, "Hey—you are someone worth talking about."

And the last thing you put in that email is links to your top articles

or content that establishes you as an expert.

Because not only does it establish you as an expert, but these are exactly the same articles

that the reporters will be linking to when they cite you as a source.

And then just send this out to as many reporters as relevant.

Don't worry if they don't contact you back right away.

If your resources are good they'll put you away in their rolodexes,

and they'll call you back and answer the phone—reporters have ridiculously tight deadlines.

If you don't get them back in 30 minutes you often lose them.

Finally—I want to talk about anchor text because this one is very personal.

I mean—if you're an SEO you think about anchor text frequently.

And in the last year we've seen—you know—it started a couple years ago

with over optimization filters—more recently with penguin—

where anchor text has turned into a bad thing.

It's turned into an evil thing where you're not supposed to use the phrase

that you wanted to rank for.

And we see SEOs asking,"How many—what percentage of my links should be click here?"

Who wants to build a link that says, "click here?"

But that's exactly what we see.

But here's the point—a lot of these methods that I'm talking about that

Google is taking away—they're taking it away because

it's not a ranking signal for them anymore.

We're trying to hold on to the past, but Google has moved on

two or three years into the future, and we're trying to—we need to be step in step with them.

The reason click here is an okay link to build is because Google has

so many other signals that it can draw upon that it doesn't need the anchor text like it used to.

If you just think about it there's probably 200 signals on this page

that Google can draw from to figure out what that anchor text is about

without even using the anchor text—things like

keyword proximity, contextual analysis, block analysis.

If you think about it—reading level—if you think about it

Microsoft Word has been able to figure out their reading level on your desktop

of a document for like a decade now.

Think of where Google is—you know—in terms of figuring out

what audience it is appropriate to.

And—you know—the more traditional things like title tag, page relevance, domain relevance,

inbound links, and author authority—so many signals here

that if these things aren't here—the anchor text is almost meaningless anyway.

So click here—that's the mindset that I'm thinking about right now,

and I encourage you to think about right now—that we don't need these

things that Google is devaluing because they're not using them anyway.

And if they're not using them we should be able to build great

relevant links that raise our authority just by building these sort of links

without the traditional signals.

Three and a half years ago is when I got my start in SEO.

I was actually moved to Seattle, and I was a waiter.

I had been a waiter, an actor for a while, then firefighter—15 years.

I moved to Seattle; I worked in Pike's Place Market.

My crew—I was a good waiter; I would get your iced tea and all that stuff—yeah—I was decent at it.

My career for 15 years was kind of flat; I was good at what I did, but I didn't love it.

I started SEO, I quit my job, started reading books on HTML and CSS,

and I loved it—I absolutely loved it.

I got my first SEO job almost on accident because I was talking passionately to a business owner

who insisted that I do SEO for his company.

A year later I started at SEOMoz working on their help team.

I didn't do SEO at SEOMoz, but I loved the company.

I loved the people there; I loved everything about it.

I loved what I was doing.

Out of the blue I was promoted to the lead SEO at SEOMoz.

Dream job—I loved what I was doing.

I moved on from SEOMoz; I now run marketing for a start-up here in Seattle

that has $1.5 million in funding, 15 employees, we're launching in four weeks,

and I'm loving what I'm doing—once I started doing what I was doing

my career really went like this.

And I think about that in terms of these techniques, how we practice SEO on a daily basis,

the techniques that we choose to employ—do we love these techniques?

Are they making the world a better place?

I was so inspired by Will Reynolds's speech yesterday about doing real stuff

because we have to feel it—when we feel it we're going to have success.

So—are we ready for the future?

In this room are some of the smartest marketers—you know—in the world

on the online space; we're here because we're getting ready for the future.

And it's not going to matter what Google takes away

because we're moving forward, and we're ready. Thank you very much. [applause]

[Female] Thank you, and thank you for the nice words—I really appreciate that.

[Cyrus Shepard] Yes. >>[Female] My hands are freezing.

So—that was fantastic—do we have some questions? We have a few minutes. Oh—all ready to go.

[Female] I have a comment, and this is an unusual way to use

press releases that actually works—we have several clients who

came to us in need of penguin recovery, so they had use blog networks

or built a lot of exact match anchor texts.

So what we did was really strategic—we—as part of the penguin recovery process—

submitted a press release with no anchor text—just a link back

directly to their URL; we had an expert write it.

And we submitted it out to all the press release sites.

And believe it or not—with a client with very few other links—

and those links are mostly low quality link—

a press release alone will pull them back out of penguin and back into

actually ranking in the top 100 for Google for their keywords

So that's an usual way to use press releases that is actually very effective.

[Cyrus Shepard] That's excellent—basically you're diversifying your anchor text

because you had—your proportion was out of whack for this particular term to this particular URL.

I've been very curious about that—I'm glad to hear you've had with it.

I'd like to see some more studies about that to see if that actually works. Thank you for that.

Oh—not you. This is Alex; he lives in Seattle. He runs his own SEO company here.

[Male] Hey Cyrus. >>[Cyrus Shepard] Hey. >>[Male] I actually—it's going to be an easy one.

I just wanted to hear kind of your thoughts on how

the role of an SEO today is evolving, and kind of what that role looks like

now compared to—you know—a few years ago even.

[Cyrus Shepard] That's a tough one—a few years ago

I felt like your—the road to—you kind of had a more clear road map.

You know—you followed the beginner's guide to SEO,

You optimized everything—it's very clear.

I like to tell my clients today that I'm going to fail at at least 30% of everything I do.

Each month I'm going to deliver you a report, and 30% of everything

I tried is going to fail, 10-20% of things that I try are

going to succeed really, really well.

Some months are better than other months—you never like to deliver bad news.

But it's much more of learning process.

I like to say that—you know—it's supposed to get harder.

We're getting more sophisticated as the search engines are going to get sophisticated.

When you're in fourth grade you don't take third grade tests.

You take fourth grade tests, and if you're really good they give

you fifth grade tests just to keep you on your toes, so that's the best analogy I can come up with.

Anybody else? All right. Thank you guys. You've been wonderful. [applause]