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High ROI Content Strategies for SEO
28:33 with Cyrus ShepardNeed to get a bang for your buck? Cyrus focuses in on how to boost your SEO ROI with targeted and precise content.
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[Cyrus Shepard] Hi everybody—let me get a look at you here.
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It's a little intimidating being up on this stage.
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I think after we end today we should just have a line
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and everybody gets to come up while everybody else sits down
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and just to see what it looks like being up here for just a couple minutes.
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I'd like to thank SEO, SEOMoz, Rand for having me.
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This is a community that's given me so much.
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Can you imagine where the SEO community would be without SEOMoz?
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Just this huge vacuum.
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I'd like to thank Laura Lippay for doing such a great job last year—that was my job.
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Let's give her a round of applause—yes. [applause]
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Last year it was my job—this year they traded up.
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So—one year ago at MozCon—which was really the greatest
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conference I'd ever been to—it really opened my eyes to a lot of things.
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One year has passed since then and in that year so much has changed.
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Now my topic today is about high ROI content strategies.
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But what I really want to talk today about is the future
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because the future is coming.
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And in the last year we've seen more changes in—from Google and Bing—
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targeted to SEO-specific activities than I can remember during
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any one-year time in the history of SEO.
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A lot of people are scared by change.
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But it doesn't really matter; when people start saying SEO was dead
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what they're really saying is things are changing, and we're not
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brave enough to figure out what's next
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because we're still going to be marketers, we're still going to be
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promoting things on the web, but I think what particularly frustrates SEOs
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is a lot of the techniques that we've relied on for years and years and years
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are just starting to go away.
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You know—some of the lower quality techniques or the black hat—
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or what's considered black hat today techniques like link directories,
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low spanning quality networks, article marketing, scams, press releases.
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Google has—you know—effectively sort of just wiped these off the map.
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Things that we used to rely on that we didn't even consider spammy. Google is changing.
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Title tags—you know—we used to preach all the time optimize your title tags for
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click through rates and conversions and all this other stuff.
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And now Google—it's very common for them to just change your title tag.
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It wasn't even a spammy technique; it was best practices but it's going away.
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By the way—I stole all my slides from AJ Cone today—just so you know.
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And—it's going away.
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Popular link building techniques—
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any time a link building technique becomes popular it seems like it has a year or two
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at the top, and then Google comes by—we find ways to manipulate it—
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push the envelope a little too far.
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Google comes by and just sort of takes it away.
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Now this is coming very soon.
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Even the fundamentals of SEO—anchor text—that has been around since the beginning
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of page rank, since—you know—Larry Page—you know—started Google
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many years ago—we find ourselves trying to build anchor text that says click here
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instead of what we really want.
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All these techniques are going away.
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I spend a lot of time in the Q&A forums at SEOMoz,
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and I see that most SEO—the people who practice in the real world—
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not necessarily in this conference—but—you know—a more common SEO—
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is usually a year or two behind the cutting edge stuff that—you know—
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we're talking about today.
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Most of us are—that's why we come to these conferences,
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so we can learn that cutting edge stuff, but you have to imagine Google
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and Bing they're a couple years ahead of where we are today.
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We're sort of in the dark.
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And what I want to talk about now is instead of chasing these things
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that are going away—pursuing what Bing and Google are doing in the future,
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so that we can be well ahead of the curve and well ahead of the rest of the online marketing world.
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Now—Google hasn't taken everything away.
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Google sometimes gives us great, big gifts.
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And sometimes we're a little unappreciative of those gifts.
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Who's excited about Google Plus? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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That's usually what happens—last year Kristy Bolsinger—
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if you were here for MozCon last year she famously called it the third sock.
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Google Plus—the third sock—no one was excited.
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A lot of people want Google Plus to sort of fail—to sort of fall by the wayside.
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I don't think that Google Plus is a third sock—I had a revelation a couple months ago
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that Google Plus is not a social network.
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That's what we think of it traditionally as—it's Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus.
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How many people are using it and engaging on it each day?
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Google really isn't using it as a social network.
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They're using it as a knowledge network.
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They're pushing it forward for local businesses; it's in the search results.
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It's becoming more prevalent than ever despite—you know—
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with supposedly low adoption rate, but it's here to stay.
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Now—AJ Cone has a presentation later today specifically about Google Plus.
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It's an excellent presentation; you don't want to miss it.
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He let me have a sneak peak at it.
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But even when Google Plus was first introduced there were some things
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that I liked about it immediately from a SEO perspective.
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Sorry—I already talked about that.
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Followed profile links—I mean—these are to die for.
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You can put as many followed profile links in your profile as possible.
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I checked last night—these are showing up in my Google webmaster tools reports.
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You're profile has page rank—the more engaged you are,
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the more people who are—have you in their circles,
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the more people linking to your page, the more values those have.
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I'm never going to get those from Facebook and Twitter.
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The same with posts—any link in a post is followed.
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Things that you publish on Google Plus tend to be indexed fairly quickly.
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Rand did a test about this last week and published it on the SEOMoz blog
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comparing different indexation rates between sharing on Google Plus,
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sharing on Twitter.
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What's funny is you can put anything with a full URL in a Google Plus post
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becomes a followed link. I had a post about six months ago.
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It went viral. It was linked to by search engine land, linked to by a couple of other media outlets.
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It earned a significant amount of page rank, and here's what's funny
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it's just like having a Tumblr post—I can go in there, I can edit that post
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at any time, I can edit the title tag by changing the first sentence of the post.
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It's a great resource that I'm not going to get with—you know—your regular social network.
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This really becomes content on the web in a way that
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Facebook content, Twitter, and those other networks don't really become content.
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That content kind of tends to fall off the link graph and not influence things after a certain point.
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But this—this is kind of like your own personal blog.
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Finally—it's the only major social media platform with author profiles.
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How many of you think this is kind of cheating on Google's part because—
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you know—Facebook and Twitter they could implement the real author tag—you know—
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on their site—right—and you search for Twitter, and I could have the profile show up.
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And it might increase their click through rate, but then they would be
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linking through to the Google Plus.
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But that's kind of funny—the author profile.
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When this came out we all heard stories of,
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"Yes—get your author profile on,
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and you'll see an increase in click through rate of 30%."
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Well—a lot of people tried this, and they didn't see that huge click through rate.
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If you're like me you might have a problem.
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You might be kind of ugly.
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We heard stories of people—you know—I worked for months—months—
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to get that author profile on, and when I finally did I was so excited
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and nothing happened.
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I mean—if anything my traffic actually went down.
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And you hear these stories like, "I just don't want to click on that."
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At the time this was my standard Google Plus profile pic.
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And it took me a couple months of looking at this going,
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"You know—maybe that's not the most attractive picture
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that I could actually put up."
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So—but I'm an SEO—right—so what if I tested this?
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So I know enough Photoshop to be dangerous so I started
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playing around with some different photos. Thank you. Thank you.
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I had someone take some photos—I'd take a photo in Starbucks.
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I'd put it up for a week—I started playing around with backgrounds.
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You could say possibly I got a little obsessive about it. Yeah.
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Anyway—but then some magic started to happen.
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When I started to hone it in—when I started to find something that engaged
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with my audience, and I—the great thing about it is
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once you change your profile in Google Plus the change—
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and if you have the real author tag implemented correctly and have your picture showing
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it shows up almost immediately—you can see exactly what your profile is.
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And I tested this over a several week time period.
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I used the click through rate data in Google webmaster tools that's under the
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search engine optimization report; it's one of the most underutilized
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reports in Google webmaster.
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I mean—Google webmaster—Google analytics—I'm sorry.
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And I tracked my click through rate over time.
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And you can see the little bumps and grinds.
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And it played a significant role as I tuned it in, and I found the right photo.
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Now here's what I want to say—
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I ended up with a photo on a red background.
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What I found—this photo is attached to three different properties that
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are associated with my Google Plus profile.
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It didn't increase the click through rate for all my Web site properties—
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just one with my biggest audience.
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You know—Rand has that beautiful yellow background that he uses in his profile pic.
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It depends—there are no rules—no yellow is going to work or red is going to work.
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It depends on your audience and your demographics.
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Sometimes female faces are going to work better. Sometimes male faces are going to work better.
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When I implemented this and I finally found the system that worked.
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From my highest click through rates to my lowest was a change of 56%.
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It ended up that that was the high—it ended up being around 35%
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that I am sustaining today.
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This is a free gift from Google.
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Forget the title tag optimization that they started to take away.
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This was a sustained 35% increase in traffic that I achieved for free.
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Simply—I don't see a lot of—I still see a lot of ugly photos out there in the search results.
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So I think there's a lot of room for improvement; if you can go back to your companies—
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now obviously the author profile isn't great for everybody.
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You know—eCommerce it's not a great platform.
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But—if your company uses author profiles—
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how many links would it take to be able to increase your traffic 35%
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just by changing a few photos, so this was something that's really awesome in my personal opinion.
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On a bonus tool there I found this last week—all my plus.com—
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if you visit it put in your Google profile ID.
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It will go through every data of every post you've ever written and give you back a bunch of statistics.
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Google and info-graphics—I don't know if you saw the news
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Matt Cutts is getting kind of angry about info-graphics.
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That's Matt in one of his infamous halloween costumes from the Princess Bride.
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We've seen this before—we've seen this with other link building techniques.
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Once it gets kind of popular—you know—right now there are
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a lot of info-graphics.
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I use info-graphics all the time; my wife is an info-graphic designer.
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A significant portion of our household income comes from info-graphics.
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But they kind of feel like they're overplayed.
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And Matt—I don't have a slide for this, but I don't think that Matt has a problem with
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the info-graphics themselves that have been around for years—I think he
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has trouble with the anchor text and the widgets that go with those info-graphics.
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So I have a few tips—I think info-graphics are going to be around,
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but I've approached them—started to approach them a little differently in the last six months.
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One—I never use a widget for embeds.
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I don't do any of that; I just put the info-graphic on the site.
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I thought my links were going to go down.
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They might have gone done—you know—5% or 10%,
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but the links that I have now are much better because they're editorial.
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They're not repeating anchor texts on every site.
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Sometimes people do steal the the image—they're more like to steal
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if you don't give that embed code.
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Well—like Paddy was talking about yesterday—all I do in that case
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is I do a Google reverse image search, I reach out to those webmasters,
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and nine times out of ten they give me the link anyway.
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If you do choose to use an embed code on your info-graphics I would very,
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highly suggest not linking to your homepage
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because in the wake of penguin—if that ever goes bad—you cannot
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cut the link to your homepage—you cannot—you don't want to 404 your homepage—right—or anything like that.
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If you ever have to get rid of this link—if Google ever changed their mind—
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if you link to the individual page or the individual images
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that's much more likely to 404—cut that link.
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It'll save you a lot of problem down the road.
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And watch your anchor text.
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When you have—any time you have a widget that's embeddable
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you have the chance for that anchor text to repeat over and over and over again—
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exactly the sort of thing that panda—I mean penguin—sort of wants to target.
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But info-graphics aren't my favorite way to build links anymore.
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I actually—we talk about high ROI content.
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I think when Matt Cutts—you know—while Matt Cutts is focusing on info-graphics
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I'm actually focusing on eBooks as a major technique to help build my links.
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And I think they beat info-graphics in a number of ways.
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For one—I found they're much easier to produce.
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When you do the research—you know—what makes a good topic for an eBook is
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anything that is useful, shareable—I kind of think of it as
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anything that's going to be really helpful that's longer than your average blog post
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that has great design; I still hire a designer to design the eBooks.
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We didn't do this one, but you get the idea.
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They tend to be less expensive; a good info-graphic cost $500 to $1,000.
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eBooks I can generally produce for $250 to $500.
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That's a typical price; you can go into the thousands of dollars
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depending on the design, the research—things like that.
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Evergreen content—info-graphics tend to have a short linking cycle
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where they sort of go viral, they peak after a couple months, and then
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the links kind of taper off whereas eBooks that cycle is much more long-tail.
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You can get value out of that for a year or two if it's a really good quality resource.
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And to link sources you tend to get—tend to be a little higher quality.
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It depends on the audience you're going after.
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Governments sites, education sites—they are not necessarily going to link to
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an infographic, but they're much more likely to link to a helpful resource like an eBook.
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There's directories you can submit to.
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It can be repurposed easily; the—you know—beginners guide to SEO on SEOMoz
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it's kind of a reverse eBook—it's all this beautiful web content that you can also download.
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But once you have your eBook you can publish it as a blog post—
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do it in any way you want.
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And it's not on Matt Cutts radar at this point, so that's a winner for me.
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Press releases—I'm kind of embarrassed about press releases.
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When you work at a marketing agency or really any company—
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this goes for any small business in America.
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You're faced with press releases, and they're terribly expensive to put out there
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if you're not hiring a press management company.
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You know—it's anywhere from $99 for the cheap ones to $800 for—you know—
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your typical online web distribution.
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It used to be a pretty common technique in the SEO world
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to get links to press releases because you got them republished and submitted to lots of sites.
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The problem is—the reality is—today most of them are just a waste of time.
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No SEO value whatsoever, and I would never advice a normal
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person to buy a press release for the sake of buying a press release.
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The problem with press releases is you spend your money, you get this
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distribution report if you use a better service.
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They say, "Oh—your links are—we published in all these places."
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And it feels really impressive—it makes you feel like you got your money's worth.
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The problem is that's duplicate content, that's low quality sites all over the web,
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it does absolutely nothing for you, and then you have the problem of anchor text.
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I pulled this one out by random—this person put benign prostastic hyperplasia.
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I don't know what that is.
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I assume it's a hard keyword to rank for.
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Lower back pain—and I checked—do you think this person ranks anywhere near the top 50 for these keywords? No.
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Because what happens when you combine repeating anchor text over
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a ton of low quality sites—this is exactly the kind of thing that penguin targets.
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In fact—this person is killing their chances of ranking for these terms
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by putting this exact match anchor text in the keyword.
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The problem that—people think this is link bait, but this is not link bait.
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The problem with—disclaimer—I use press releases all the time.
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That's the point I'm getting to here, and I generally have about an 80% success rate
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with getting good, quality, editorial links from news sources and speciality publications.
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And the reason is I don't treat the press release as the link bait.
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The press release is just to get the word out and target it towards a linkable asset.
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I want to talk about linkable assets—I'm talking about things that are new, useful, and newsworthy.
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I'm talking about something on your site—your site that's the news
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that you're using the press release to link for—Steve Jobs was very good at this.
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Tools—when we released Open Site Explorer last year on SEOMoz
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we put out a press release; we got links for it because it was a new tool that was useful.
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Guides, reports, eBooks again—I love putting out a press release
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when I put out a very targeted eBook.
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Anything that's free—code academy, video series—
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maybe you have new videos, you put out a press release, and it's newsworthy.
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Individualizations—now here's a press release that actually is link bait.
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When SEOMoz got its $18 million in funding Rand put out this meme
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press release—I don't know if you've seen it—you can Google it.
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And he used a bunch of memes to actually construct the infographic—
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first of its kind—this press release was actually linkbait.
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He turned the convention on its head; this is the way to do it.
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Taking it one step further—if you have to outsource the writing of your press content
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it's great to hire a professional—there are a lot of third party resources out there—
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Contently, oDesk, Freelance, Guru, Elance.
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Hire a reporter to write your press release for you.
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Qualify in your job description—ask for examples of work that have been placed in high quality sites
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because not only are you getting a professional writer at that point
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you're getting someone who knows, has connections,
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and knows how to write stuff that gets put in things like Wired Magazine or Hacker News.
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That's what you want to look for—leverage that content.
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One more thing while I'm talking about press.
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Haro—I thought it was worth mentioning because I used Haro for years.
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Anybody use Haro? Yeah.
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I used Haro for a lot time, and I hated it.
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It was a big waste of time because I would read through the thing.
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I would answer the queries; no one would ever call me back.
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It felt like I had leprosy.
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Then I kind of figured out the system of how to use it,
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and once I figured it out it became a joy.
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And I was doing the same problem as with the press releases.
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I did not have a linkable asset that I was referring to.
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I was using my email—you know—as the main source of outreach.
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20:09
But the first thing I do is I create a gmail canned response—very popular.
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The most important thing when you use Haro—you're sending out these
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emails to reporters looking for sources—the most important thing you can
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put on there is a link to your expert page.
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Rand Fishkin has one of the best expert pages in the SEO industry.
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This establishes you, lists all of your qualifications, has great photos—
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this is your linkable asset that you want to send to reporters
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that puts it in their mind that, "Hey—you are someone worth talking about."
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And the last thing you put in that email is links to your top articles
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or content that establishes you as an expert.
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Because not only does it establish you as an expert, but these are exactly the same articles
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that the reporters will be linking to when they cite you as a source.
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And then just send this out to as many reporters as relevant.
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Don't worry if they don't contact you back right away.
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If your resources are good they'll put you away in their rolodexes,
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and they'll call you back and answer the phone—reporters have ridiculously tight deadlines.
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21:10
If you don't get them back in 30 minutes you often lose them.
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Finally—I want to talk about anchor text because this one is very personal.
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I mean—if you're an SEO you think about anchor text frequently.
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21:25
And in the last year we've seen—you know—it started a couple years ago
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21:28
with over optimization filters—more recently with penguin—
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21:32
where anchor text has turned into a bad thing.
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21:35
It's turned into an evil thing where you're not supposed to use the phrase
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21:38
that you wanted to rank for.
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21:41
And we see SEOs asking,"How many—what percentage of my links should be click here?"
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21:45
Who wants to build a link that says, "click here?"
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21:48
But that's exactly what we see.
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21:51
But here's the point—a lot of these methods that I'm talking about that
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21:53
Google is taking away—they're taking it away because
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21:58
it's not a ranking signal for them anymore.
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22:00
We're trying to hold on to the past, but Google has moved on
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22:03
two or three years into the future, and we're trying to—we need to be step in step with them.
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22:09
The reason click here is an okay link to build is because Google has
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22:12
so many other signals that it can draw upon that it doesn't need the anchor text like it used to.
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22:19
If you just think about it there's probably 200 signals on this page
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22:21
that Google can draw from to figure out what that anchor text is about
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22:24
without even using the anchor text—things like
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22:26
keyword proximity, contextual analysis, block analysis.
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22:31
If you think about it—reading level—if you think about it
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22:35
Microsoft Word has been able to figure out their reading level on your desktop
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22:39
of a document for like a decade now.
-
22:41
Think of where Google is—you know—in terms of figuring out
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22:44
what audience it is appropriate to.
-
22:47
And—you know—the more traditional things like title tag, page relevance, domain relevance,
-
22:52
inbound links, and author authority—so many signals here
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22:55
that if these things aren't here—the anchor text is almost meaningless anyway.
-
22:59
So click here—that's the mindset that I'm thinking about right now,
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23:05
and I encourage you to think about right now—that we don't need these
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23:08
things that Google is devaluing because they're not using them anyway.
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23:12
And if they're not using them we should be able to build great
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23:15
relevant links that raise our authority just by building these sort of links
-
23:22
without the traditional signals.
-
23:29
Three and a half years ago is when I got my start in SEO.
-
23:33
I was actually moved to Seattle, and I was a waiter.
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23:38
I had been a waiter, an actor for a while, then firefighter—15 years.
-
23:42
I moved to Seattle; I worked in Pike's Place Market.
-
23:47
My crew—I was a good waiter; I would get your iced tea and all that stuff—yeah—I was decent at it.
-
23:53
My career for 15 years was kind of flat; I was good at what I did, but I didn't love it.
-
24:00
I started SEO, I quit my job, started reading books on HTML and CSS,
-
24:06
and I loved it—I absolutely loved it.
-
24:10
I got my first SEO job almost on accident because I was talking passionately to a business owner
-
24:15
who insisted that I do SEO for his company.
-
24:18
A year later I started at SEOMoz working on their help team.
-
24:22
I didn't do SEO at SEOMoz, but I loved the company.
-
24:26
I loved the people there; I loved everything about it.
-
24:28
I loved what I was doing.
-
24:31
Out of the blue I was promoted to the lead SEO at SEOMoz.
-
24:34
Dream job—I loved what I was doing.
-
24:38
I moved on from SEOMoz; I now run marketing for a start-up here in Seattle
-
24:43
that has $1.5 million in funding, 15 employees, we're launching in four weeks,
-
24:47
and I'm loving what I'm doing—once I started doing what I was doing
-
24:50
my career really went like this.
-
24:52
And I think about that in terms of these techniques, how we practice SEO on a daily basis,
-
24:58
the techniques that we choose to employ—do we love these techniques?
-
25:01
Are they making the world a better place?
-
25:04
I was so inspired by Will Reynolds's speech yesterday about doing real stuff
-
25:08
because we have to feel it—when we feel it we're going to have success.
-
25:12
So—are we ready for the future?
-
25:15
In this room are some of the smartest marketers—you know—in the world
-
25:19
on the online space; we're here because we're getting ready for the future.
-
25:22
And it's not going to matter what Google takes away
-
25:25
because we're moving forward, and we're ready. Thank you very much. [applause]
-
25:40
[Female] Thank you, and thank you for the nice words—I really appreciate that.
-
25:43
[Cyrus Shepard] Yes. >>[Female] My hands are freezing.
-
25:45
So—that was fantastic—do we have some questions? We have a few minutes. Oh—all ready to go.
-
25:52
[Female] I have a comment, and this is an unusual way to use
-
25:56
press releases that actually works—we have several clients who
-
25:59
came to us in need of penguin recovery, so they had use blog networks
-
26:04
or built a lot of exact match anchor texts.
-
26:06
So what we did was really strategic—we—as part of the penguin recovery process—
-
26:11
submitted a press release with no anchor text—just a link back
-
26:16
directly to their URL; we had an expert write it.
-
26:19
And we submitted it out to all the press release sites.
-
26:22
And believe it or not—with a client with very few other links—
-
26:25
and those links are mostly low quality link—
-
26:28
a press release alone will pull them back out of penguin and back into
-
26:34
actually ranking in the top 100 for Google for their keywords
-
26:37
So that's an usual way to use press releases that is actually very effective.
-
26:41
[Cyrus Shepard] That's excellent—basically you're diversifying your anchor text
-
26:45
because you had—your proportion was out of whack for this particular term to this particular URL.
-
26:50
I've been very curious about that—I'm glad to hear you've had with it.
-
26:53
I'd like to see some more studies about that to see if that actually works. Thank you for that.
-
27:02
Oh—not you. This is Alex; he lives in Seattle. He runs his own SEO company here.
-
27:10
[Male] Hey Cyrus. >>[Cyrus Shepard] Hey. >>[Male] I actually—it's going to be an easy one.
-
27:13
I just wanted to hear kind of your thoughts on how
-
27:17
the role of an SEO today is evolving, and kind of what that role looks like
-
27:21
now compared to—you know—a few years ago even.
-
27:25
[Cyrus Shepard] That's a tough one—a few years ago
-
27:28
I felt like your—the road to—you kind of had a more clear road map.
-
27:34
You know—you followed the beginner's guide to SEO,
-
27:37
You optimized everything—it's very clear.
-
27:40
I like to tell my clients today that I'm going to fail at at least 30% of everything I do.
-
27:47
Each month I'm going to deliver you a report, and 30% of everything
-
27:52
I tried is going to fail, 10-20% of things that I try are
-
27:55
going to succeed really, really well.
-
27:57
Some months are better than other months—you never like to deliver bad news.
-
28:01
But it's much more of learning process.
-
28:05
I like to say that—you know—it's supposed to get harder.
-
28:08
We're getting more sophisticated as the search engines are going to get sophisticated.
-
28:13
When you're in fourth grade you don't take third grade tests.
-
28:15
You take fourth grade tests, and if you're really good they give
-
28:17
you fifth grade tests just to keep you on your toes, so that's the best analogy I can come up with.
-
28:25
Anybody else? All right. Thank you guys. You've been wonderful. [applause]
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