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Content & RankBrain What we have here is a failure to communicate. Cool Hand Luke's famous quote applies to SEO and content marketing in the age of a semi-autonomous almost sentient ranking algorithm as this excellent INC post shares.
Machine learning is becoming more and more prevalent in the SEO industry, driving algorithms on many major platforms. In this post, Eric Enge reveals his discoveries, insights, and predictions from his research on machine learning, discusses its influence on SEO, and introduces a machine learning tool he built to predict the chances of a retweet.
Bang Ouch Blow Up SEO Infographic Our post (http://www.curagami.com/bang-ouch-blow-up-seo-infographic/?v=7516fd43adaa ) and infographic shares how easy it is to blow up had won seo due to inadvertent code, name or content changes. DON'T DO THESE 5 things!
We've done 3 out of these 5 (and we know better). It is EASY to damage your relationship with Google's spider and not even know it. Don't do these 5 THINGS and you will avoid some of the SEO pain we've experienced.
SEO #1 organic listings are great, but not all keywords are equal - of Scenttrail Marketing's top posts the most promise comes from a Google #3 because ...
We Added a page on top gamification tools such as SweetToothRewards.com (affordable gamification), Badgeville and Bunch Ball.
We now have pages for our favorite Analytics (just added Marin Software to that list), Content Curation and Gamification tools. We will develop a "gallery" of profile pages on http://www.Curagami.com to share how and why we like THESE tools over others.
What about you? What are your favorite online marketing tools? Email to Martin(at)Curagami.com or tweet using #favtools
Thanks, Marty
Digest... Parallax design sites are growing in use because they embrace the fluidity of the Web, provide simplicity, and offer a scrolling technique that creates a neat 3-D effect. You should be aware of some concerns when deciding whether to use a parallax design. Concerns include the following.
Load times Parallax design is highly animated with a lot of scripts, so it can decrease the load time of a website.
Browser support Not all browsers are able to support the parallax design. That inability can lead to problems for the user. Not mobile-friendly
Parallax scrolling is also not ideal for mobile as it makes the website bloated. Parallax adds layers of code to a website. Deficient for analytics
If all your content is on one page, understanding what content is capturing visitors can be difficult. There can be workarounds to this obstacle, such as using event tracking or tying a pageview in Google Analytics to sections of parallax scrolling, but parallax design does add a layer of complexity to analytics.
SEO SEO and new design techniques often don't mesh. In addition to being deficient on the analytics side, many parallax websites are not built with SEO in mind. Content often takes a backseat to the visual, and parallax pages typically aren't geared towards specific topics and targeted websites. External websites may only have one page to link without linking to specific subpage with more relevant content.
Via Marteq, Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com, b2bmarketingpartners
New SEO's invisible Giant uses magician tricks such as Google's floating filter bubbles, social media's disappearing act & friends you never knew you had.
Wow, what a day for Invisible Giants. After my Haiku Deck account went down taking the fastest "views" deck we've ever created into the void we received a dramatic lesson in almost every "Invisible Giant" idea discussed.
TIME and the growing importance of "near real time" response was absent. Not anymore (lol). Wrote up what happened today as an example of "Invisible Giant" values and just how our online marketing world is turns on a different axis now.
Enjoyed speaking with Janet Kennedy in this podcast interview, but Janet posted as 009 [title]. Typing name of the episode into Google it didn't come up DESPITE Janet and I being connected in circles.
I would have had to know Janet's archive number of "009". We suggested Janet move 009 to the back and that created good and bad news. Good news it fixed the URL. Bad news is it wiped the tweets and social shares widgets clean (mostly). Worth that pain though as explained here.
We lucky few Internet marketers make sand castles on the beach and he tide is always coming in. I started this G+ summary of "tiny advantage" thinking how similar Internet marketing is to Outward Bound.
But Dual Survival is a more apt analogy. No one summit our new marketing Everest alone anymore. We need TEAMS of great climbers, Sherpas and rope...lots of ROPE :).
I remember the deer in the headlights look I got from my last boss, founder of one of the larger web dev companies in the southeast, when I told him the most valuable "product" we created wasn't an individual website or app as much as it was a team capable of creating that app, SEO or email marketing
The PROCESS is what remains after the tide sweeps all yesterday's hard work out to see. I remember he looked at me funny :).
Source: RKG [download page]
Notes: Mobile's 33% of Google search visits in Q1 2014 represented only a slight uptick from Q4 2013 (32%), but a more robust rise from 27%
SEO helps you get recognition from all quarters for your business. It boosts your marketing strategies and gets you more clients and consequently sets the sales register ringing. The only drawback of…
A Dramatic Week of SEO PAIN As a New Media Leader (@NewMediaLeaderz) HELLFIGHTER Phil (@1918) and I met with two websites this week who've seen their value sliced in half by Google's algorithm changes. I would rank one of the managers as in the upper group of DIY content marketers and bloggers. Both websites are on fire. Value is burning up into the sky daily. Fixing the raging inferno is NOT for just anyone. These are jobs for highly specialized cross-functional teams like the ones Phil Buckley is pioneering at New Media Leaders. In one of the lunches the owner of one of the stricken sites had already hired "a friend" to "fix" his site. BIG MISTAKE since these kinds of problems require triage, testing and a long term "we are now the good guys" strategy. Once your site's reputation has taken such a Google hit you must WORK your way out, you must fight the fires in front of you and the ones behind you or bad things happen fast. I'm the original DIY guy. I love to tinker and test, but I'm here to tell you things are simply too valuable and complex now to tinker on your own. If you don't hire Phil's HELLFIGHTERS hire one of the other handful of people who know how to get your website back on track.
This Haiku Deck and ScentTrail Marketing blog post captures ideas percolating from launching one of the first crowdfunding cancer research platforms (http://www.curecancerstarter.org) l last week. One of the big Should of Had A V8 moments last week was the realization that the way the new Google set the table does not favor a rebel Rat-Tag army. Since climbing the latter to AUTHORITY and TRUSTED status now can take years and you will have a giant pissing our your head every step of the way, better to create conversations not website and then inject your conversation into their castles via widgets, apps and white label embedding. Can a rebel army survive when the new Google swings the machine gun so deliberately and giants are trying to knock rebels to the ground? Yes IF they THINK WEB FIRST and this post should help with that. What about you? Do you think web first already? How did you get there? What have you changed?
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2 + 2 = Zebra When we are trying to explain the unexplainable crazy digital marketing business we use a dada-like math and art analogy. Two plus Two equal Zebra speaks to the surreal nature of what we do, the clash of art, science, reason, understanding, serendipity and random BUMMERS and joy every SEO knows and doesn't know.
We're riffing Larry Kim's great RankBrain Judgement Day post for SearchEngine Watch. We only understood parts of Kim's brilliant post, but all the right ducks are in the right rows. Kim's post feels like the future of seo's math even if we only understand it half as well as that differential calculus class that kicked our butt in college. Why is Rankbrain, Kim's post and the future of SEO important?
2 + 2 = Zebra :). Marty
Top Haiku Decks Haiku Deck is an easy to use cool tool perfectly timed for the visual marketing revolution we find ourselves within. We've created more than 30 Decks, but 11 stand out.
They stand out because they've been viewed more than 101,000 times, have almost 1,000 social shares and are the kind of easy to create content curation helping to define the lean content movement so dear to our friends at Scoop.it (another great lean content / visual marketing tool).
See our top 11 Haiku Decks http://www.curagami.com/top-haiku-decks/?v=7516fd43adaa
See All of Our Haiku Decks https://www.haikudeck.com/presentations/Martin.Smith
PageRank Matters We love it when goofy stupid people say stupid things. But we hate it when friends who should know better say goofy stupid stuff. The other day at a lunch with SEOs and web marketing friends from around my Durham, NC home a friend who should know better said, "PageRank (PR) doesn't matter anymore".
I pointed out that PR is one of the few FREE and universal metrics. I went on a bit of a rant about how any metric can be modeled into significance. The new PR is a valuable, universal (everyone is treated equally by Google more or less) and FREE metric capable of helping anyone's we marketing.
This post discuses why PR is important and what THEIR (competitor) PR can teach you Google uses PR the way an instructor uses a pointer. They hold up and reward examples of what they want. If your competitor's have PR 2 to 4 points higher than you then emulate what they are doing.
Never stop at emulation. Once your site's "emulation" "cost of poker" feet are under it DISRUPT and reset your industry's deck. Emulation + disruption is one of the formulas teams I've managed made more than $30M in B2C commerce sales.
I paid for lunch to show my friend his momentary brain fart was okay (lol). M
**** Added a correction from my friend Mark Traphagen. PR, at least what you can access with free tools, is DEAD. Mark recommends the paid tool we use (MOZ.com). Shouldn't be a huge surprise that FREE is gone. All great FREE things cost money now. We've used MOZ.com for customer work, but thought we could model with PRChecker too. Not so much as it turns out sadly. Appreciate Mark's note. M
Why I'm Not A SEO Thanks to readers and those who share the first part of our 3 part Why I'm Not A SEO triptych is now #1 on Google for the term. THANKS!
Why I'm Not A SEO on Scenttrail Marketing http://www.scenttrail.com/why-im-not-an-seo/
Bad links can kill your website's hard-won authority, reputation & traffic. Use Google's disavow tool to protect your site's traffic from SEO bandits.
Klout, Context & Links This post links to my G+ summary in prelude to my http://www.curatti.com blog post tonight. Here are some preliminary thoughts on the page of notes I took during Dixon Jones talk.
Links & The Real Value of Content Dixon works at Majestic SEO (http://www.majesticseo.com/ ). Majestic is asking the right question - what is the value of a link. They've even created tools that help intelligently answer that question.
"Inbound links" as a measurement is clouded by "bot spam". In a great example of the power of the "flow" tool Dixon shared. Even more powerful was an example of Majestic SEO vs. two competitors. On a purely inbound link review Majestic doesn't win.
But are all of those links valuable? Value is contextual and any spammy ways of inflating inbound link numbers need to be discovered and factored out.
Once links are run through Majestic SEO's "trust flow" tool evaluating where links came from and the respective trustworthiness of sites sending links in Majestic wins the comparison.We finally have a tool to separate white and black hats.
Think of that for a second. If you were to simply use aggregate inbound links you would buy ads with Majestic's competition or, and this is worse, you might think the competition's inflated (probalby by spam) value is something you should buy.
Once the Majestic SEO tool separates wheat from chafe a more accurate and "influential" picture emerges. SEOs and Internet marketers know how to parse page spread, social following and inbound links to pierce the veil of most who spam, but, for an outsider, "most links" may translate into "most trusted".
There is the web's biggest rub. Since the web is an interconnected system discovering if real people who have real value are passionate about a site tool, or brand with metrics such as high inbound links or big pagespread (pages in Google) is the only way to make an informed decision UNTIL Majestic wrestled context and content to the ground.
Curagmai & Majestic The reason our Startup Factory funded startup Curagami and Majestic fit together like Lego blocks is relationships between a site and its 1% Contributors, 9% Supporters and 90% readers. Curagami helps FIND the Contributors, Supporters and Readers and Majestic helps define each of member of those "tribes" by their CONTEXTUAL influence. I may not have high Klout and be irrelevant for a conversation about women's fashion, but be perfect to help discuss cycling (since I rode a bicycle across America in the summer of 2010). .
If the first job is to FIND Contributors, Supporters and Readers and the second is to ask them to JOIN with Contributors and Supporters high on the Ambassadors list then the 3rd job is to contextually empower advocates in each group. We know the future is about community and real people not bots are the building blocks of online community.
What Dixon shared today and Majestic SEO has been working hard on is helping marketers know what kind of ASK will work best for Jill, John and Bob. Jill might know women's fashion, pets and be a car mechanic in her spare time. John may know email marketing, gourmet cooking and wines. Bob may know finance and cycling.
Curagami helps find 'em & Majestic helps define 'em in order to create an ASK that works. Powerful and very cool tool since the future is about building community and not every Contributor, Supporter and Reader who visits your site is the same. As we begin to create "rich personas" thanks to tools such as Majestic and Curagami our content relevance will go up, and up and UP.
If you are thinking more content relevance = more LOVE and MONEY we agree :). M
Don't accept a slow WordPress site. Here's exactly how, with just a few tweaks, I improved the performance of a site dramatically.
Storytelling is the new SEO shares examples of how your website and online marketing can tell engaging stories to win the NEW SEO.
Learn how you can stay up to date on the latest SEO trends and algorithm updates.
Scoop.it Study I've often thought Slideshare was the great underutilized weapon of content marketing. Thinking that and having the data to prove are two different things.
Thanks to the team at Scoop.it we now have the data to prove what I've FELT. In an extensive study the Scoop.it team shifted my thinking on Slideshare.
Always knew Slideshare was POWERFUL SEO VooDoo because I've had several decks BLOW UP such as:
http://www.slideshare.net/martinmartysmith/storytelling-new-seo Absolute #1 position on "Storytelling is the new SEO" and has been top ranked for over a year.
http://www.slideshare.net/martinsellingzoe/content-marketing-network This deck held on for a year and has slide out of ranking now.
You don't get much more SEO competitive than "Storytelling is the New SEO" and "Content Marketing Network so personal validation supports the Scoop.it team's great work here.
The other paradigm they shifted for me today was thinking of Slideshare as an important "visual marketing" tool. Decks are LEAN, FAST and VIRAL so great ways to share and build authority and traffic. Just wish I could get my Slideshare profile styled better. Anyone know the secret sauce for that?
Great work Scoopiteers!
SEO Controversy The SEO controversy seems to be understanding exactly what Gooogle has and has not killed with their algorithm changes. This post explains the history from the first time I heard "SEO is Dead" two years ago right up to present day where any marketing unsupported by social signals is a dog that just doesn't hunt.
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