Writing for a World of 36-Hours-a-Day Readers

May 17, 2013 by

The world is certainly not how it used to be. The internet eats up chunks of hours in our everyday lives. We spend at least 1 hour online each day. There isn’t a mall without a Wifi hotspot. Life is getting faster and faster and we all have to keep up. So how do you write for a world of 36-hours-a-day readers? This entry is part of the Breaking Down Content Marketing Series . How the World is Today Fast food, instant coffee, you name it. Everything’s quick. In the internet, things move even quicker. People give you a few handful of seconds for you to present something that would interest them. If you’re not able to grab their attention within that time span, they will probably move on to the next result in the search engine. Don’t think for a second that you’re the best, only resource around even for a very specific niche – you’re not. There are tons of content on the web. I agree that most of them are full of ‘Crap’ (Check out the powerpoint deck below) but then there are the thought leaders, the uncommon voices of exceptional writers, the awesome presentation of data of marketers – and you still have to compete with all of them. So there’s that little tinge of bright light with creating something worth publishing amidst the ton of crap going around. The question is, how do you write them really? How do you do an outline for it? How do you lay it out? Where Greatness Begins A great post doesn’t start with you on your keyboard staring on your blog editor. It starts with an idea. Mine usually starts with a pen and paper or my cellphone. When a light bulb flashes on top of my head, I immediately write it down. I try to gauge if it is something that will intrigue my audience (of course, it should intrigue myself first) and then I write an outline. Tip: Click here to Check out how to write awesome outlines . You’ve got 2 Seconds This is the average time you have as a publisher to grab your reader’s attention through your title. Any more than that and you’re risking them going for another person’s website. Probably your competitor. Make sure your title is straight to the point and spells out ‘time-saver’ to your readers. Examples of great how-to titles are: “5 Tips For Raising Baby Tortoises” – It’s easy to gauge the article’s length immediately because it says how many tips there are in the title itself “ 6 Actionable Steps to Overcoming Pornography “ – The title leverages on an interest that most of the world is experiencing today (overcoming pornography) plus it summarizes it in 6 steps so that it tells the reader “I’m not long or theoretical. I’m actionable and summarized!” “Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat after Forty” – It immediately tells you something that you want. Who doesn’t want to stay sexy? And forever? That’s just too awesome. Then it contains the first part of the title of the article to ‘how to fight fat after 40′ – a more specific approach to contain its content. Tip: Click here to find out about what strong eye-catching words you can use on your article title and how this all affects SEO . People Skim We’re all looking out for the best, most credible stuff that will answer our questions. That being said, everyone has adopted this habit of skimming. That’s life. Even I skim… sometimes. We don’t have a lot of time to spend in just one article. There’s tons of content to behold. We are curious beings. We want to KNOW. And we want to KNOW everything. We, as writers, have to realize that we have to adopt to our reader’s skimming habit. How do we do this? Through headings. If you haven’t noticed, I use headings a lot. In this post, I’ve already used four so far: How the World is Today Where Greatness Begins You’ve got 2 Seconds People Skim Headings are important because it guides skimmers. It grabs the eyes because of its nature. Headings are one-liner, usually comprised of a phrase or a sentence, and are emphasized with a bold or bigger-sized font. Tip: When you create headings, you should give your users an idea to the extent that, even if they just read the headings, they would have an understanding of what your whole article is about. 24 Hours a Day – NOT Does it feel like you’re living 24 hours a day? I know, I know – there’s that common time when you tell yourself “I need more time” , or “I’m too busy” , or “I wish I had more than just 24 hours” . As much as I want to tell you that you’ve got more than just 24 hours, I can’t. Everyone has the same amount of time everyday. For your readers to give you some of that un-replaceable resource, it is a priceless privilege to behold. So you will have to try to ‘give’ your users more time – by having them spend less time rummaging through your stuff. How do you do this? Create a simple, actionable take-away in each and every one of your articles. Thus far, in this entry alone, you’ve already got 3 powerful takeaways: Greatness can come in an instant and doesn’t start when you’re on your editor – always write down great ideas Awesome, intriguing titles are your gateway to being read When you create headings, keep in mind that it should spell out what your article is about These takeaways are appreciated, remembered and practiced. You should get to them and make them as loud as possible in your article. Make it Worth their Whiled People’s eyes will always look for beauty. People’s minds will always hunger for data. Give them both.There’s a website that’s intricately beautiful but that’s it – just design and no data. Yes the website looks nice but the content is crap. Nah. Next! Then there’s this data-rich website but the way the text is outlined, the way the design is taken care of – it spells out boring, old and dusty. Nope. That just won’t do. People will tell themselves: “There might be a better one somewhere else on the web.” And so they move on. You have to make it worth your reader’s while. SEO Hacker might not be the best looking website out there but we do try. We fix our layout, we mind our fonts, we do our research and write our content with the best data we can find. Just recently, we’ve updated6 our SEO Services page . You should do the same. The Thinner the Better Don’t bunch sentences into thick paragraphs. Only grade school students do that (or do they?) It makes it hard to read, skim, and focus. Not to mention it is distracting, unelegant, boring and old – especially to 36-hours-a-day readers. Chop up your sentences whenever you can. You don’t need to pile up sentences to seem like a guru. You need to make your stuff easier and nicer to read. That’s all there is to it. Tell them WHAT to do! Making a how-to article is well and good but sometimes people just need someone to tell them what to do. At the end of your article, always remember to give quick, specific instructions for your readers to immediately write down on their to-do list. Besides, people are busy – you have to push them to make a move that will benefit them. And perhaps a move that will benefit you as well. Tips for Keeps: Write for  the 36-hours-a-day reader. Because they ARE the majority.

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How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content – Whiteboard Friday

May 16, 2013 by

Posted by randfish Many owners of established, older pages are facing a similar issue: they’ve been ranking decently for a keyword for some time, but they want to move into the coveted number one spot. However, older pages don’t drive a ton of new press, new social signals, or awareness. If you want to boost your rankings for the same keyword you’ve been targeting for awhile, how can you move up to move the needle on your business? Adjusting your existing, quality content can be used to help bump your site up in the SERPs. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand lays out the tactics you can use to boost your older page to the next level! How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content – Whiteboard Friday Here is a screenshot of the whiteboard used in today’s video:    Video Transcription “Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to get a little down in the gritty details. Sometimes you’ve got a situation like this. Someone’s performed a search for air conditioners. You’re ranking number four. From an SEO perspective your real need is not, “Let me expand things and look at bunch of different channels.” It’s, “If I could move this ranking up, I could really move the needle on our business because this is a highly performing, a highly converting term, and I really want to move it just on this particular piece.” Hyper-tactical, but it’s good to know all the ways that you can move the needle on this. So if you want to go from number four to number three to number two and you’ve got essentially an older page, not a new page – so you’re not getting lots of new press, attention, or awareness, driving all these social signals, etc. – and you’re not targeting a new keyword, you have this kind of stale, older page and you want to get it ranking, there’s a bunch of tactics that you can pursue, and I want to talk about each of them in a bit of detail. So number one, point more external links to the URL. This is probably the most classic thing that folks in the SEO field have done over the last decade, 12 years. It does work, and it still does work, although it’s less powerful than it used to be because search engines, Google in particular, are looking at such a broader set of figures and data sources for their ranking signals. However, a few things about this. This is going to be pretty darn hard to do with commercial content. It’s much easier if you got educational or non-promotional stuff, because reaching out and getting links from other types of folks, from other websites is much easier when it’s authentic and not directly promotional or not directly revenue generating, that kind of thing. Now this is much easier for folks who are in like a non-profit space or in an educational or content space because they can reach out and say, “Hey, I have this great resource. I think your people might like it. Do you want to shoot over a link to it? Can I contribute something to your site and point to it?” Yes. It’s much harder to do that when you have a page that’s ranking for air conditioners and you’re just trying to beat out three other e-commerce retailers for air conditioners. This is the way it goes. I do have some specific recommendations. I’m not going to dive into every one of these, but these are the tactics that, in my experience, work the best. So that’s guest content, basically when you’re writing on other people’s sites. Of course, just like everything, it’s got to be authentic, got to be high quality. You can’t just be spamming other people’s sites or submitting to really low quality ones. Promotions do tend to work pretty well. If you’re doing a promotion on your air conditioners, other people may pick that up. You can get press and attention, social attention. Partnerships can work well. Testimonials and reviews. So other people who are writing reviews about maybe an air conditioner line that you’ve just launched, or someone’s writing a review about a new air conditioner that’s come out, and you happen to be the retailer featuring that, you can be included in those types of places. List inclusion, if you know about a list that already exists where people are covering places to get air conditioners online, you can get included in those. Again, be really careful. You don’t want to go to those spammy, generic directories. You want to be going to high-quality lists. CNET Reviews is very different from Articles-about-electronics-online.info. Apologies if that’s your site. If not, we should register it. I’m kidding. Press and blogs, of course. Social media pushes you can do, especially if you’ve got something to announce around air conditioners. Summer’s coming up, right? A Facebook page, a push on Pinterest, a push on Twitter, or on Google+. Link reclamation, meaning you go back and find places that used to link to you that don’t anymore, places that used to link to your competition but those links are now broken. You can go talk to those kinds of folks. Those are the kinds of link building techniques that have worked best, in my experience. Please be so super careful not to build the wrong links. If you haven’t watched it already, Matt Cutts has been tweeting and talking in video – Matt Cuts being the head of the Web Spam Team at Google – talking about how they’re going to be taking even more aggressive action than what they took with Penguin in a Penguin 2.0 algorithm that’s coming out in the next few weeks. So just please be super cautious about where you’re getting these external link sources from. Especially since links are a little less powerful than they used to be and because a lot of the linking sources are more dangerous than they once were, there are some other ways I want to mention. Those include increasing your click-through rate. Now, I’m not trying to say here that correlation equals causation, or that it even implies that, but what we do know is more people clicking through on your listing means fewer people clicking through to your competitors and a higher chance that some of those people are going to take actions that we know does increase ranking, so things like linking to you and sharing you and those kinds of things. Your page is clearly providing a more compelling experience. That tends to be exactly what Google’s algorithm is trying to accomplish, and so increasing your click-through rate can help with this. One of the ways that this can be done, and this is not to say that Google is sort of biased to people who do it, but if you supplement with PPC, with paid search ads, it tend to be the case, and lots of people have tried different tests around this and gotten different performance, but, on average, it tends to be the case that one plus one equals a little more than two. I put 2.25 for that. Your mileage may vary. But basically, if I take a look over here and I’ve got my air conditioner page and I also have an ad on the sidebar or on the top up here, it tends to be the case that the click-through rate here, plus the click-through rate here, is a little more than if I just had a paid ad or if I just had the organic listing. So two listings on the page slightly better than one and one. So that’s certainly an angle you can try again. Again, I urge you to test this, not to just take it on blind faith. Included in that test methodology should be testing modifications to the title and the description. So if your air conditioner page here has got a description and a title and a URL – the URL matters too, and you can do things like 301 redirect the old one to a new one – this can move the needle. I have found a lot of the time that what I’d call keyword-stuffed, kind of SEO 1.0, back in the late ’90s, early 2000s type of things where it says, “Air conditioners, your air conditioners, get the best air conditioners here,” followed by a brand name that’s kind of off, after what people can see in the title in the search results, doesn’t perform nearly as well as a brand people recognize, a compelling title that has a little bit of authenticity, a little bit of your brand and your culture and your unique value proposition embedded right in the title and the description. The same story with the URL. Lots of hyphens separating something, a longer URL, a dynamic URL versus one that has readable keywords in it and readable text in there. Again, you’re going for authenticity. You’re going for, “Boy, what would I click on? What do I tend to click on? What do people like?” Think of this just like you’d think of a paid search ad. You want to optimize all the areas of this and try and test it and get better performance out of that click-through rate. Another thing you can obviously do is add rich snippets. These are things like we could add a video to the page and add the video XML sitemap so that we get the video markup next to that result. We could add rel=author and get our profile picture next to it, assuming we connected with Google+. For some types of rich snippet results, recipes in particular, news items, you can add images and get those in there. For other types of results, air conditioners, any ecommerce result, you can have star reviews and number of reviews. All of those things can help move the needle on click-through rate. Number three, improve and revitalize the page’s content itself. Again, this isn’t always a direct needle mover. It can be indirect. But Google is pretty sophisticated with analyzing content. Better content, I don’t mean better content in terms of it has more keywords stuffed into it, or better content in terms of it just happens to be longer or more in-depth. I mean more compelling, more uniquely valuable, more interesting, more worthy of being shared, more special. That kind of stuff tends to perform better in Google. They’ve got a wide variety of text-based content analysis algorithms that tell them all sorts of stuff about a page, not just keywords and TFIDF and stuff like that. So things like rich media, video, images, graphics, the layout design, the user experience, the visual aesthetics, how the page looks, these actually can move the needle, not just on how it performs in the search results, but how it performs in terms of conversion rate. Conversion rate actually tends to be tied pretty nicely to how it performs in search results, because again, Google is looking at all those pieces of the algorithm, trying to piece together what provides the best experience for our users. Text content too. I’m not just talking about keywords. I’m talking about that unique value. If you haven’t seen the Whiteboard Friday on unique value versus unique content, you should check that out. I know I didn’t have enough room, so I switched sides. Number four, internal links and redirects. So there are a few things that can happen here. Sometimes you have an orphaned page. It’s only linked to from one section. You’ve got to drill way deep down into a subcategory or sub-subcategory to find this page on your site. E-commerce sites are particularly messy with this kind of stuff a lot of the time. Make sure that the page is getting link love, internal link love, relevant link love. I’m not  talking about stuffing an anchor text-rich link in the footer of every page or the category section or something like that. I’m talking about when you have pages that are relevant to air conditioning, you have a page on summer appliances, you have a page on electronics, you have a page on what should homeowners be thinking about to upgrade their homes, great. Make sure that you’re linking to your air conditioner page. Those are relevant pages where people would want to see that. If you’re confused, do an “air conditioners”site:yourdomain. See all the pages where you mentioned it, and yet have somehow failed to link over to your air conditioner’s page that you actually got. Consolidation. This is a really powerful one. So this is essentially saying, “I’m going to take all the pages that are targeting that same term or phrase and 301 them all together.” We’ve done this a number of times on Moz, because we’ll have a bunch of old blog posts or old content pages that are all talking about exactly the same thing. Then we go, “Man, why do we have seven of these? And, by the way, six of them are more than three years old.” Let’s just take those and 301 them back to the most relevant, most high-quality content. If we have some content that was on those other pages that we want to put on the existing one, let’s do that. Let’s consolidate so people don’t get lost in terms off which is the most relevant page about air conditioners on your site. Google shouldn’t be confused about that either, and that can actually really move the needle. I’ve seen that a number of times pop us from page two to page one, or pop us from the bottom of page one to the top five results, that kind of stuff. Number five, newer signal, but something that I’m pretty sure in this year’s ranking factors is going to prove to be very interesting, and that is branding, co-occurrence, and mentions. What I mean by this is if your brand name, that’s usually your domain name and usually your company name as well, is often connected with the words “air conditioners” – by connected I mean connected when the press talks about you, when third party sites talk about you, when people blog about you, when social media users talk about you – if those words tend to appear frequently together, your brand plus thing you want to rank for, you tend to do quite well. We’ve seen some early signals that mentions, that co-occurrence of terms, phrases plus brand can really move the needle. So don’t ignore that either. All right. Hope these five techniques are things that you can try out. Share your experiences with the rest of the Whiteboard Friday readers in the comments, and I’ll look forward to seeing you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.” Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content – Whiteboard Friday

Filed Under: Advertising, affiliate marketing, articles, Beginner, blogging, conversion, Ecommerce, email marketing, facebook, Featured, Google, Google: Analytics, How To, Interviews, keywords, Link Building, linkedin, location, Marketing, mitt, online marketing, Paid Search, phil internet marketing and social media and seo, PPC, research, sea, Search Marketing, seo, social media, success, Testimonials, Top News, traffic, twitter, Video, websites Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Mozscape API Wiki Update

May 16, 2013 by

Posted by Zach Corleissen Greetings, Mozfolk! My name is Zach, and I’m a technical writer here at SEOmoz. We’ve consistently heard from you that Mozscape needs better documentation. I’m pleased to tell you: your requests have been granted! The Mozscape wiki just underwent a thorough update and review by developers, help teamsters, and testers. We incorporated your feedback from help tickets and forums to make Mozscape easier for new users to learn, and more functional for experienced users to reference. Hopefully this documentation update helps you get the most value from Mozscape. If you haven’t taken a look through our documentation yet, we hope it encourages you to see how Mozscape data can help your business grow. Legacy documentation: a (very) brief history Like documentation at most startups, the legacy documentation for Mozscape was inconsistent. Not all features were documented; for example,  metadata  supports a command called  index_stats , which returns information about the contents of the current Mozscape Index update. It’s been in production for a while, but hasn’t been documented until now. (Check it out, it’s pretty cool.) When features changed, sometimes the changes weren’t documented. Well-intentioned authors added and edited content in ways that weren’t always comprehensive, followed by other well-intentioned authors who did the same. Not everything made sense, either; the  next_update  and  last_update  features of the  metadata  API return dates for the next scheduled and most recent Mozscape Index updates, but the value returned is in  Unix Epoch  format, which only makes semi-intuitive sense if you already understand the “Expires” part of  signed authentication . I compare Mozscape legacy documentation to how pearls are formed: created in gradual layers; often valuable; frequently irritating. With these updates, the Mozscape documentation is definitely on the mend and ready for your viewing pleasure. What’s new (and a new feature) The What’s New page makes it easier to track feature changes in future updates. From now on, any time we add or change features in Mozscape, the change and the date it went live will appear there. For example: as of May 15th, Mozscape now supports HTTP Secure. What’s different: easier to learn If you’re an SEOmoz PRO user and have never tried Mozscape, now is the perfect time! Our help team emphasized that we need a better introduction to Mozscape, especially for how Mozscape calls are formed. We responded by streamlining  the introduction and improving the way we describe Mozscape’s call anatomy . What’s different: easier to reference The  query parameters  are now organized in the way you’re actually using them: Scope and Sort together, and  Limit and Offset together. We distributed parameters and values specific to each endpoint into their respective articles; for example, possible Scope values for the links endpoint… …are discrete from the possible values of Scope for the anchor-text endpoint: Glossary entries are re-pointed to existing (and often better) resources on SEOmoz’s main site whenever possible, and we added a few much-needed entries. (How did we get this far without defining target and source URLs?) What’s different: complete parameter value tables A complete list of parameter values is a big improvement for Mozscape users. For example, the links API accepts the Sort parameter, but the possible values of Sort weren’t listed. Also, only some values of the Sort and Scope parameters are compatible. Today’s doc update addresses both of these: What’s different: better organization We’re excited to release re-organized topics and reduced duplicate information. An example of all three is free vs. paid access to Mozscape . Here’s what it looked like before: Here’s what it looks like with one of the most-requested features: a side-by-side comparison of free versus paid access to Mozscape. The legacy documentation referred to different “versions” of Mozscape for free and paid users. This isn’t technically accurate, as there’s only one version of Mozscape with different access tiers. Also: notice the cleaner fonts and layout? Our awesome UI guy, Kenny brought the API wiki in line with our site-wide standards. Best Practices is a single article now. It used to be a category: Most of the “best practices” in the legacy documentation weren’t best practices per se ; they were required practices. For example: there’s no way to use Mozscape without signed authentication, making it a practice that’s “required” rather than “best.” With the update, Best Practices now lives up to its name with value-adding information about batching calls and maximizing your value by making requests in parallel. What’s different: less information? Our users are pretty hardcore (a good thing!), so you may notice that two or three topics now contain less information than previously. For example, some response fields were listed as being “for internal use and subject to change”. If a response field can only be generated from an internal call, there’s no reason to expose it to users, so we removed them from the documentation…and it would be a rare feature indeed that wasn’t subject to change. I know what you might be saying.  ” But less information is less transparent! Less transparent is less TAGFEE !” That’s true; transparency is critical for good documentation. When it comes to user guides, though, more does not always mean better . TAGFEE also means empathy; if extraneous details make it harder to learn Mozscape, then the documentation lacks empathy, and that’s bad. We’re striving for the right balance between abundant information (transparency) and providing knowledge that will actually help you (empathy). Mozscape is awesome, and we want it to be as valuable for you as possible. Closing with a question How can we keep improving Mozscape documentation? Please let us know in the comments! Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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