Great Content Long-Form Content

[Estimated read time: 2 minutes]

Yes. I’ve read the studies. I know the correlations. Long-form content, on average, earns more engagement, higher rankings, and more shares than their more concise brethren.

Not sure where the idea that “great content” = “really, really long content” came from, but we need to dispel that myth.

Rand Fishkin (@randfish) March 30, 2016

But, that does not make long-form content the same as great content.

It does not make long-form content the goal of every content effort.

It certainly does not mean that longer content is better content.

Confounding variables are, in my opinion, behind many of these correlations. Long-form content, at least the good stuff, intentionally targets SEO Expert searchers and browsers seeking lengthier, more comprehensive information. If you want to challenge those “longer content performs better on average” statistics with equally unapplicable numbers, check the data on diminishing attention spans, ever-increasing abandonment rates, and what percent of visitors actually read long content to its end.

The right content:

Serves visitors’ intent by answering their questions and helping them complete their goals Delivers an easy, pleasurable, accessible experience on every device and every browser Gets the right information and experience to visitors FAST Does all of the above better than any of the competitors in the space

The phrase “great content” doesn’t mean “long-form” content. In fact, as Ronell Smith recently pointed out, “great content” doesn’t, universally, mean anything at all. Its definition is subjective and sometimes mythical when what we need are pragmatic, clear boxes to check to determine whether our content efforts are on track.

My proposal: rather than applying a tactic like long-form content universally or setting length as the bar (or even a metric) for greatness, we instead match our content to our audience’s needs and our business/personal goals. 700 more words will not help you reach your goals any more than 7 more words. Create content that helps people. Do it http://ift.tt/13qkLe2 efficiently. Never write an ultimate guide where a single image could more powerfully convey the same value. Trust me; your audience and your bottom line will thank you.

P.S. If you’re seeking some examples of long-form, short-form, interactive, visual, and even single-blog-post content that I think fits with the philosophy above, check out my list of 10X Content and Ross Hudgens’ recent list of content marketing examples. Both have lots of short-form excellence included.

p.p.s Buzzsumo put out this superb piece on how IFL Science does masterful short-form content. They showed that IFL actually does far better with their short, <1,000 word posts, than with their longer ones.

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The 9 Most Common Local SEO Myths Dispelled

Posted by JoyHawkins

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

I regularly hear things in the Local SEO world that many people believe, but which are completely false. I wanted to put some of these myths to rest by listing out the top 9 Local SEO myths that I run into most frequently.

1. Deleting your listing in Google My Business actually removes the listing from Google.

Business owners will often question how they can get rid of duplicate listings on Google. One of the more common things people try is claiming the duplicate and then deleting it from the Google My Business Dashboard. When you go to delete a listing, you receive a scary message asking if you're sure you want to do this:
The truth is, removing a listing from Google My Business (GMB) just makes the listing unverified. It still exists on Google Maps and will often still rank, provided you didn’t clear out all the categories/details before you deleted it. The only time you’d really want to delete a listing via GMB is if you no longer want to manage the listing.

Google confirms this in their help center article:

When you delete a local page, the corresponding listing will be unverified and you will no longer be able to manage it. Google may still retain business information from the page and may continue to show information about the business on Maps, Search, and other Google properties, including marking the business as permanently closed, moved, or open, depending on the information that’s known about the business.

2. Failure to claim your page means your business won’t rank anywhere.

I’m sure most of you have received those annoying phone calls that say: “Your business is not currently verified and will vanish on Google unless you claim it now!”

First of all, consider the authority of the people who are calling you. I can say with certainty they are not experts in this industry, or they wouldn’t resort to robo-calling to make sales.

The Moz Local Search Ranking Factors does list verifying your listing as #13 for making an impact on ranking in the 3-pack, but this is often because business owners add more data to the listing when they verify it. If they left the listing exactly how it was before verifying, the verification “status” would not likely impact the ranking much at all. We often see unverified pages outranking verified ones in really competitive markets.

3. "Professional/Practitioner" listings on Google are considered duplicates and can be removed.

Google often creates listings for the actual public-facing professionals in an office (lawyers, doctors, dentists, realtors, etc), and the owner of the practice usually wants them to disappear. Google will get rid of the listing for the professional in two different cases:

a) The professional is not public-facing. Support staff, like hygienists or paralegals for example, don’t qualify for a listing and Google will remove them if they exist.

b) The business only has one public-facing individual. For example, if you have a law firm with only one lawyer, Google considers this to be a “Solo Practitioner” and will merge the listing for the professional with the listing for the office. Their guidelines state to “create a single page, named using the following format: [brand/company]: [practitioner name].”

In the case that the professional has left your office, you can have the listing marked as moved if the professional has retired or is no longer working in the industry. This will cause it to vanish from the search results, but it will still exist in Google’s back-end. If the professional has moved to a different company, you should have them claim the listing and update the address/phone number to list their new contact information.

4. Posting on G+ helps improve your ranking.

Phil Rozek explains this best: “It’s nearly impossible for people to see your Google+ posts unless they search for your business by name. Google doesn’t include a link to your 'Plus' page in the local pack. Google doesn’t even call it a 'Plus' page anymore. Do you still believe being active on Google+ is a local ranking factor?”

No, posting on G+ will not cause your ranking to skyrocket, despite what the Google My Business phone support team told you.

5. "Maps SEO" is something that can be effectively worked on separately from "Organic SEO."

I often get small business owners calling me saying something along the lines of this: "Hey, Joy. I have an SEO company and they’re doing an awesome job with my site organically, but I don’t show up anywhere in the local pack. Can I hire you to do Google Maps optimization and have them do Organic SEO?"

My answer is, generally, no. “Maps Optimization” is not a thing that can be separated from organic. At Local U in Williamsburg, Mike Ramsey shared that 75% of ranking local listings also rank organically on the first page. The two are directly connected — a change that you make to your site can have a huge influence on where you rank locally.

If you're a local business, it's in your better interests to have an SEO company that understands Google Maps and how the 3-pack works. At the company I work for, we've always made it a goal to get the business ranked both organically and locally, since it’s almost impossible to get in the 3-pack without a strong organic ranking and a website with strong local signals.

6. Google employees are the highest authority on which ranking signals you should pay attention to.

Google employees are great; I love reading what they come out with and the insight they provides. However, as David Mihm pointed out at Local U, those employees have absolutely no incentive to divulge any top-secret tips for getting your website to rank well. Here are some recent examples of advice given from Google employees that should be ignored:

1. Duplicate listings will fix themselves over time.
2. Posting on Google+ will help your ranking (advice given from phone support reps).
3. If you want to rank well in the 3-pack, just alter your business description.

Instead of trusting this advice, I always suggest that people make sure what they're doing matches up with what the pros are saying in big surveys and case studies.

7. Setting a huge service area means you’ll rank in all kinds of additional towns.

Google allows service-area businesses to set a radius around their business address to demonstrate how far they're willing to travel to the customer. People often set this radius really large because they believe it will help them rank in more towns. It doesn’t. You will still most likely only rank in the town you're using for your business address.

8. When your business relocates, you want to mark the listing for the old location as closed.

The Google My Business & Google MapMaker rules don’t agree on this one. Anyone on the Google MapMaker side would tell a business to mark a listing as "closed" when they move. This will cause a business listing to have a big, ugly, red "permanently closed" label when anyone searches your business name.

If your listing is verified through Google My Business, all you need to do is edit the address inside your dashboard when you move. If there's an unverified duplicate listing that exists at your old address, you want to make sure you get it marked as "Moved."

9. Google displays whatever is listed in your GMB dashboard.

Google gives business owners the ability to edit information on their listing by verifying it via Google My Business. However, whatever data the owner inputs is just one of many sources that Google will get information from. Google updates verified listings all the time by scraping data from the business website, inputs from edits made on Google Maps/MapMaker, and third-party data sources. A recent case I’ve seen is one where Google repeatedly updated an owner-verified listing with incorrect business hours due to not being able to properly read the business hours listed on their website.

Were you surprised by any of those Local SEO myths? Are there others that you come across regularly? I’d love to hear about it, so please leave a comment!

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Does Organic CTR Impact SEO Rankings? [New Data]

Posted by larry.kim

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

Does organic click-through rate (CTR) data impact page rankings? This has been a huge topic of debate for years within the search industry.

Some people think the influence of CTR on rankings is nothing more than a persistent myth. Like the one where humans and dinosaurs lived together at the same time — you know, like in that reality series "The Flintstones"?

Some other people are convinced that Google must look at end user data. Because how in the world would Google know which pages to rank without it?

Google (OK, at least one Google engineer who spoke at SMX) seems to indicate the latter is indeed the case:

Next time I hear a Googler say "we don't use query/click data in rankings," I'm pointing to https://t.co/qETZpGEbm9 http://pic.twitter.com/m9DO3cBVXb

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) March 17, 2016

I also highly encourage you to check out Rand Fishkin's Whiteboard Friday discussing clicks and click-through rate. In short, the key point is this: If a page is ranking in position 3, but gets a higher than expected CTR, Google may decide to rank that page higher because tons of people are obviously interested in that result.

Seems kind of obvious, right?

And if true, we ought to be able to measure it! In this post, I’m going to try to show that RankBrain may just be the missing link between CTR and rankings.

Untangling meaning from Google RankBrain confusion

Let's be honest: Suddenly, everyone is claiming to be a RankBrain expert. RankBrain-shaming is quickly becoming an industry epidemic.

Please ask yourself: Do most of these people — especially those who aren't employed by Google, but even some of the most helpful and well-intentioned spokespeople who actually work for Google — thoroughly know what they're talking about? I've seen a lot of confusing and conflicting statements floating around.

Here's the wildest one. At SMX West, Google's Paul Haahr said Google doesn't really understand what RankBrain is doing.

If this really smart guy who works at Google doesn't know what RankBrain does, how in the heck does some random self-proclaimed SEO guru definitively know all the secrets of RankBrain? They must be one of those SEOs who "knew" RankBrain was coming, even before Google announced it publicly on October 26, but just didn't want to spoil the surprise.

Now let's go to two of the most public Google figures: Gary Illyes and John Mueller.

Illyes seemed to shoot down the idea that RankBrain could become the most important ranking factor (something which I strongly believe is inevitable). Google's Greg Corrado publicly stated that RankBrain is "the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query."

Illyes also said on Twitter that: "Rankbrain lets us understand queries better. No affect on crawling nor indexing or replace anything in ranking." But then later clarified: “...it does change ranking."

I don't disagree at all. It hasn't. (Not yet, anyway.)

Links still matter. Content still matters. Hundreds of other signals still matter.

It's just that RankBrain had to displace something as a ranking signal. Whatever used to be Google's third most important signal is no longer the third most important signal. RankBrain couldn't be the third most important signal before it existed!

Now let's go to Mueller. He believes machine learning will gain more prominence in search results, noting Bing and Yandex do a lot of this already. He noted that machine learning needs to be tested over time, but there are a lot of interesting cases where Google's algorithm needs a system to react to searches it hasn't seen before.

Bottom line: RankBrain, like other new Google changes, is starting out as a relatively small part of the Google equation today. RankBrain won't replace other signals any time soon (think of it simply like this: Google is adding a new ingredient to your favorite dish to make it even tastier). But if RankBrain delivers great metrics and keeps users happy, then surely it will be given more weight and expanded in the future.

RankBrain headaches

If you want to nerd out on RankBrain, neural networks, semantic theory, word vectors, and patents, then you should read:

• Getting Your Head Around Google’s RankBrain by David Harry
• RankBrain: What Do We Know About Google’s Machine-Learning System? by Virginia Nussey (concentrate on Marcus Tober's SMX presentation recap in the section "Machine Learning Ranks Relevance")
• How Google Works: A Google Ranking Engineer's Story by Kristi Kellogg

To be clear: my goal with this post isn't to discuss tweets from Googlers, patents, research, or speculative theories.

Rather, I’m just going to ignore EVERYBODY and look at actual click data.

Searching for Rankbrain

Rand conducted one of the most popular tests of the influence of CTR on Google's search results. He asked people to do a specific search and click on the link to his blog (which was in 7th position). This impacted the rankings for a short period of time, moving the post up to 1st position.

But these are all transient changes. Changes don’t persist.

It's like how you can’t increase your AdWords Quality Scores simply by clicking on your own ads a few times. This is the oldest trick in the book and it doesn't work.

The results of another experiment appeared on Search Engine Land last August and concluded that CTR isn't a ranking factor. But this test had a pretty significant flaw — it relied on bots artificially inflating CTRs and search volume (and this test was only for a single two-word keyword: "negative SEO"). So essentially, this test was the organic search equivalent of click fraud. Google AdWords has been fighting click fraud for 15 years and they can easily apply these learnings to organic search. What did I just say about old tricks?

Before we look at the data, a final "disclaimer." I don’t know if what this data reveals is definitively RankBrain, or another CTR-based ranking signal that's part of the core Google algorithm. Regardless, there's something here — and I can most certainly say with confidence that CTR is impacting rank. For simplicity, I’ll be referring to this as Rankbrain.

A crazy new experiment

Google has said that RankBrain is being tested on long-tail terms, which makes sense. Google wants to start testing its machine-learning system with searches they have little to no data on — and 99.9 percent of pages have zero external links pointing to them.

So how is Google able to tell which pages should rank in these cases? By examining engagement and relevance. CTR is one of the best indicators of both.

Head terms, as far as we know, aren't being exposed to RankBrain right now. So by observing the differences between the organic search CTRs of long-tail terms versus head terms, we should be able to spot the difference:

We used 1,000 keywords in the same keyword niche (to isolate external factors like Google shopping and other SERP features that can alter CTR characteristics). The keywords are all from my own website: Wordstream.com.

I compared CTR versus rank for 1–2 word search terms, and did the same thing for long-tail keywords (4–10 word search terms).

Notice how the long-tail terms get much higher average CTRs for a given position. For example, in this data set, the head term in position 1 got an average CTR of 17.5 percent, whereas the long-tail term in position 1 had a remarkably high CTR, at an average of 33 percent.

You’re probably thinking: "Well, that makes sense. You’d expect long-tail terms to have stronger query intent, thus higher CTRs." That’s true, actually.

But why is that long-tail keyword terms with high CTRs are so much more likely to be in top positions versus bottom-of-page organic positions? That's a little weird, right?

OK, let's do an analysis of paid search queries in the same niche. I use organic search to come up with paid search keyword ideas and vice versa, so we’re looking at the same keywords in many cases.

Long-tail terms in this same vertical get higher CTRs than head terms. However, the difference between long-tail and head term CTR is very small in positions 1–2, and becomes huge as you go out to lower positions.

So in summary, something unusual is happening:

• In paid search, long-tail and head terms do roughly the same CTR in high ad spots (1–2) and see huge differences in CTR for lower spots (3–7).
• But in organic search, the long-tail and head terms in spots (1–2) have huge differences in CTR and very little difference as you go down the page.

Why are the same keywords behaving so differently in organic versus paid?

The difference (we think) is that RankBrain is boosting the search rankings of pages that have higher organic click-through rates.

Not convinced yet?

Which came first: the CTR or the ranking?

CTR and ranking are codependent variables. There’s obviously a relationship between the two, but which is causing what? In order to get to the bottom of this “chicken versus egg” situation, we’re going to have to do a bit more analysis.

The following graph takes the difference between an observed organic search CTR minus the expected CTR, to figure out if your page is beating — or being beaten by — the expected average CTR for a given organic position.

By only looking at the extent by which a keyword beats or is beaten by the predicted CTR, you are essentially isolating the natural relationship between CTR and ranking in order to get a better picture of what’s going on.

We found on average, that if you beat the expected CTR, then you're far more likely to rank in more prominent positions. Failing to beat the expected CTR makes it more likely you'll appear in positions 6–10.

So, based on our example of long-tail search terms for this niche, if a page:

• Beats the expected CTR for a given position by 20 percent, you're likely to appear in position 1.
• Beats beat the expected CTR for a given position by 12 percent, then you're likely to appear in position 2.
• Falls below the expected CTR for a given position by 6 percent, then you're likely to appear in position 10.

And so on.

Here's a greatly simplified rule of thumb:

The more your pages beat the expected organic CTR for a given position, the more likely you are to appear in prominent organic positions.

If your pages fall below the expected organic search CTR, then you'll find your pages in lower organic positions on the SERP.

Want to move up by one position in Google's rankings? Increase your CTR by 3 percent. Want to move up another spot? Increase your CTR by another 3 percent.

If you can’t beat the expected click-through rate for a given position, you’re unlikely to appear in positions 1–5.

Essentially, you can think of all of this as though Google is giving bonus points to pages that have high click-through rates. The fact that it looks punitive is just a natural side effect.

If Google gives "high CTR bonus points" to other websites, then your relative performance will decline. It's not that you got penalized; it's just you're the only one who didn't get the rewards.

A simple example: The Long-tail Query That Could

Here’s one quick example from our 1000-keyword data set. For the query: “email subjects that get opened,” this page has a ridiculously high organic CTR of 52.17%, which beats the expected CTR for the top spot in this vertical by over 60%. It also generates insanely great engagement rates, including a time on page of over 24 minutes.

We believe that these two strong engagement metrics send a clear signal to Google that the page matches the query’s intent, despite not having an exact keyword match in the content.

What does Google want?

A lot of factors go into ranking. We know links, content, and RankBrain are the top 3 search ranking factors in Google's algorithm. But there are hundreds of additional signals Google looks at.

So let's make this simple. Your website is a house.

This is a terrible website. It was built a long time ago and has received no SEO love in a long time (terrible structure, markup, navigation, content, etc). It ranks terribly. Nobody visits it. And those poor souls who do stumble across it wish they never had and quickly leave, wondering why it even exists.

This website is pretty good. It's designed well. It's obviously well-maintained. It addresses all the SEO essentials. Everything is optimized. It ranks reasonably well. A good amount of people visit and hang out a while since, hey, it has everything you'd expect in a website nowadays.

Now we get to the ultimate house. It has everything you could want in a website — beautifully designed, great content, and optimized in every way possible. It owns tons of prominent search positions and everyone goes here to visit (the parties are AMAZING) again and again because of the amazing experience — and they're very likely to tell their friends about it after they leave.

People love this house. Google goes where the people are. So Google rewards it.

This is the website you need to look like to Google.

No fair, right? The big house gets all the advantages!

Wrong!

So now what the heck do I do?

A bunch of articles say that there’s absolutely nothing you can or should do to optimize your site for Rankbrain today, and for any future updates. I couldn’t disagree more.

If you want to rank better, you need to get more people to YOUR party. This is where CTR comes in.

It appears that Google RankBrain has been "inspired by" AdWords and many other technologies that look at user engagement signals to determine page quality and relevance. And RankBrain is learning how to assign ratings to pages that may have insufficient link or historical page data, but are relevant to a searcher's query.

So how do you raise your CTRs? You should focus your efforts in four key areas:

1. Optimize pages with low "organic Quality Scores." Download all of your query data from Google Search Console. Sort your data, figure out which of your pages have below average CTRs, and prioritize those — it's far less risky to focus on fixing your losers because they have the most potential upside. None of these pages will get any love from RankBrain!
2. Combine your SEO keywords with emotional triggers to create irresistible headlines. Emotions like anger, disgust, affirmation, and fear are proven to increase click-through rates and conversion rates. If everyone who you want to beat already has crafted optimized title tags, then packing an emotional wallop will give you the edge you need and make your listing stand out.
3. Increase other user engagement rates. Like click-through rate, we believe you need to have higher-than-expected engagement metrics (e.g. time on site, bounce rate — more on this in a future article). This is a critical relevance signal! Google knows the expected conversion and engagement rates based on a variety of factors (e.g. industry, query, location, time of day, device type). So create 10X content!
4. Use social media ads and remarketing to increase search volume and CTR. Paid social ads and remarketing display ads can generate serious awareness and exposure for a reasonable cost (no more than $50 a day). If people aren't familiar with your brand, bombard your target audience with Facebook and Twitter ads. People who are familiar with your brand are 2x more likely to click through and to convert.

Key summary

Whether or not RankBrain becomes the most important ranking signal (and I believe it will be someday), it's smart to ensure your pages get as many organic search clicks as possible. It means more people are visiting your site and it sends important signals to Google that your page is relevant and awesome.

Our research also shows that achieving above-expected user engagement metrics result in better organic rankings, which results in even more clicks to your site.

Don’t settle for average CTRs. Be a unicorn among a sea of donkeys! Raise your organic CTRs and engagement rates! Get optimizing now!

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The Buzzfeed Approach to Social Media Strategy

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

I initially started writing a post about how BuzzFeed tailors its content to different social networks. What image sizes do they use? What type of content works on one network but not another? What tactics do they employ? But as it turns out, there isnt anything that revolutionary in the way BuzzFeed approaches their content on these social networks. There are a few interesting things they do, such as:

Using silent, square videos on Facebook that work well on any device and dont require sound to be understood more info from Tom Critchlow here: Intermodal Media

Matcha Green Tea Swiss Roll

Posted by Tasty on Thursday, January 21, 2016 Posting almost exclusively list-based articles on Twitter:

Aggregating Reddit-type content from elsewhere onto their Instagram feed without much connection to BuzzFeed:

Having different individuals run their Snapchat account in a story format that you would expect from your own friends. For instance, someone might document her time at a concert or trying a new type of food or visiting Central Park. Occasionally appending ?sub_confirmation=1 when linking to their YouTube channel to generate a subscription popup: https://www.youtube.com/user/BuzzFeedVideo?sub_confirmation=1

But, I dont think these tactics are the most interesting part of BuzzFeeds approach to social media.

A different approach to social strategy

BuzzFeed made a fundamental change to its social strategy in early 2015. This is what BuzzFeeds publisher/data guru Dao Nguyen had to say about it:

Our CEO, Jonah Peretti, started talking about BuzzFeeds distributed strategy to internal teams in January 2015. Instead of focusing primarily on our website and apps, and using social networks as a way to send traffic to them, we were going to aggressively publish our content directly to platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat.

Id recommend checking out the entire article as well; its awesome.

BuzzFeeds Instagram feed is one of the more extreme examples of this strategy. Their posts have little chance of immediately sending traffic back to BuzzFeed and typically look like this:

This post isnt going to directly send traffic to BuzzFeed anytime soon, but it is going to engage users. In this sense, Instagram is basically a branding platform for BuzzFeed. It puts the BuzzFeed name next to engaging content for millions of users and almost http://addpro.com/ certainly increases the effectiveness of BuzzFeeds marketing efforts elsewhere.

This doesnt mean BuzzFeed has stopped using social to send traffic back to their site. In fact, almost all of their Twitter posts are click-baity listicles:

But the common thread is that BuzzFeed doesnt try to enforce its own goals on the channel. If Snapchat or Facebook or YouTube users want to mostly consume native content directly on those platforms without leaving their feed, then thats where BuzzFeed will reach them.

One of the obvious takeaways from all this is to tailor your content to the channel. This has been talked about to death. A more interesting takeaway is using these channels as branding channels rather than conversion channels.

Theres nothing wrong with exclusively posting engaging content that doesnt relate to your product. You see the Buzzfeed name every time you interact with a Buzzfeed social post. It SEO Expert comes up in notifications from Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or SnapChat. You see it in the feeds you spend your time in everyday. Isnt there tremendous value in simply putting your name in front of users every day? Isnt this Branding 101? Who cares if youre not talking about your product?

Its kind of greedy. You could have the attention of your target market. You could have your name show up next to content they consume EVERY day. You could be the subject of a notification they receive straight to their phone. But thats not enough for most brands. They also need that attention to be closely related to their product.

Therefore, the biggest mistake many brands make is forcing social media further down the funnel than it should be. Most brands and products simply arent suited for engaging social media content that converts, and are better off aiming for branding-related goals because it provides more creative flexibility.

Engaging & product-related: doing it right

The brands that do pull off engaging and product-related content arent social media geniuses they simply have products that lend themselves to interesting social media content. Some examples would be:

BuzzFeed:

People want to read their articles (on some channels)

The New York Times:

People want to be kept up to date on the news

Etsy:

People want to discover unique products

Bloomingdales:

People want to see cool outfits

Theres also a whole class of accounts that have successfully made themselves authorities on certain topics and provide value that way:

Distilled:

HootSuite:

The value prop

Whats your social media value proposition?” In other words, what are the reasons someone would follow you on Twitter or Instagram or wherever… OTHER than simply liking your brand? What content are you providing that they would care about? If your social media value proposition isnt strong when focusing on your product, you need to find another one.

To put all of this another way…

The question most people ask:

“How do we use social media to promote our product?”

The question most people should be asking:

“How do we create engaging social content? (for our target demographic)”

Trying to answer both with the same content usually results in awkward content that is tangentially related to your product and almost certainly not engaging:

Seen through this lens, youd change 90% of branded social media accounts overnight. Stop trying to force your product or brand into posts. Just post engaging content.

Instead of posting this type of content:

You would post content that people actually care about product-related or not.

Content people care about

Some examples of executing social right when you cant focus on your product would be:

Red Bull:

People arent interested in energy drinks, so they post about extreme sports

Dove:

People dont care about soap, so they post about inner beauty

Intel:

People dont care about computer chips, so they post about technology broadly:

Changing your core accounts might be too risky. In which case, take another page out of BuzzFeeds book and experiment with a new social feed dedicated exclusively to a certain type of content without overhauling your main accounts. For example:

Coke could create an account solely dedicated to highlighting happy and uplifting moments Dos Equis could create an account solely dedicated to profiling interesting men Old Spice could create an account solely about lifehacks for college students Mint.com could create an account solely focused on financial tips and tricks

Its easy to treat social media as just another traffic-generating channel. Posts are mostly promotional or product-oriented, with the occasional and reluctant “engagement”-related post sprinkled in. The way Buzzfeed treats certain channels hints at a different goal: brand awareness. Its not about focusing on your products. Its just old-fashioned branding: associate your brand with the right emotion and put it in front of as many relevant people as possible.

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Age Gracefully With These Simple Tips And Techniques

Do you miss the beautiful skin you had when you were younger? Do you wish you had as much energy as you used to? Then this article is for you! The advice in the article above can help you regain some measure of how you looked and felt by improving you health and well being.

Starting and keeping good relationships is a vital part of the aging process. Participating in community activities has been shown to increase lifespan. In order to get the greatest benefit of your social interactions, you should focus on those which involve intimacy with people you can pour your heart out to.

If you eat well, you will likely experience fewer age-related problems. Fiber, whole grans, fruits and vegetables that are low in cholesterol, saturated fats and trans fats are essential to a healthy diet. This gives your body all the nutrients and vitamins it needs to be strong and healthy.

Aging can take a rough toll on us. Caring for yourself might no longer be possible at some point in life. Research local nursing homes, assisted living facilities and retirement communities to find the right place for you. Even though this doesn’t seem like a good situation, it is a good option in a few cases. A nursing home or assisted living facility can provide the special assistance and medical care that is often needed in our later years.

You must get enough sleep each day. Depending on your own body, most people need between seven and nine hours of quality sleep each day. Sleep deprivation can wear your mind and body down, exacerbating issues like depression and heart disease.

Your life is a wonderful adventure that should be embraced at every given moment. Find goals for yourself and do your best to achieve them. This will help you stay motivated and feel accomplished.

Avoid the company of grouchy, unhappy people, and spend your time with your positive, upbeat friends. Laughing and having a good time Women Health will help you look younger. In order to have something to laugh about, you need to hang around people whose company you enjoy, not those who make you frown.

Don’t go to environmental extremes. Every season and all types of weather have the potential to damage your skin. This may lead not only to severe diseases such as skin cancer but also to premature growing older.

Eating inordinate amounts of sugar can contribute to a shortened life span. Eating a lot of sugar accelerates the aging process and shortens your life. Refined sugar should be avoided as much as possible, including foods that contain high fructose corn syrup, basically just another unhealthy sugar. Research has shown that sugar significantly shortens the lifespan of all animals.

Get a kick out of life! Age has its privileges and you should focus on them rather than worrying about lost youth. Find ways to savor each day and to take advantage of whatever life brings.

To prevent heart disease, eat less red meat and more fish. It is known that the saturated fat in meat increases cholesterol which in turn contributes to heart disease. Plaque build-up is one of the leading causes to both heart attacks and strokes. Fish oil helps to remove the cholesterol from your body, which lowers your risk of developing these issues.

They say youth is wasted on the young, but that’s all the more reason to get your youth back. With the tips in this article, you’ll be able to look and feel like you did years ago, but you’ll retain all the wisdom age has brought you. You won’t mind growing older now that you have this advice to guide you.

The post Age Gracefully With These Simple Tips And Techniques appeared first on DQ2.

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Linking Internally and Externally from Your Site - Dangers, Opportunities, Risk and Reward - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

Navigating linking practices can be a treacherous process. Sometimes it feels like a penalty is lurking around every corner. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the ins and outs of linking internally and externally, identifying pitfalls and opportunities both.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about linking externally and linking internally, and some of the risks and rewards that are involved.

So some of you probably have seen April 11th, Google made this big move. They sent out a bunch of penalties to, well, a noticeably large number of websites — it was covered on a bunch of the SEO forums and in the SEO news — basically saying, this is Google sending out these warnings saying, "You are linking to unnatural looking sites or in unnatural patterns, and we've noticed and we think that those links shouldn't be there. We may be penalizing your site, or we may not be passing PageRank or other types of link mechanisms, link value through your website anymore."

This isn't the first time Google has done this. They've done it many, many times over the last 10, 15 years. We've seen plenty of this. This was just another explosion in that.

It is also the case that we've seen some other cool things on the other side of the aisle, which is Google rewarding internal links in a way we had not seen previously. In fact, some cool experiments were done recently — hopefully they'll be made public soon, and then we can link over to them — around internal links and the power that internal links still have.

So we know that it still matters and it's still important to consider who we link to and what we link to from our sites and pages. So I thought maybe we'd talk through a few of those scenarios.

1) When you're linking to external sites and pages.

Let's say I've got my mobile phones compared website here. It is actually a very positive thing to link out to places like the official website of maybe Samsung's S7, or to link out to the Engadget review if I'm collecting a bunch of reviews and aggregating that data there to give the reference point. This is positive.

However, if I'm linking, let's say I'm getting some affiliate value or someone's paid me to link, or I'm linking to the site because it turns out that I own it or someone connected to me owns it and I'm getting some benefit from it, this "mobile info 4 UR life," maybe that could be a little suspicious.

It is the case, it is true and we've seen plenty of evidence to support this. I think ever since Marshall Simmonds from Define came in here many years ago and did his Whiteboard Friday about how The New York Times saw so much benefit from linking out, lots of folks have been investigating that and seen that benefit repeated over and over. So good external pointing links can give a boost to your site's relevance, to how search engines consider you, and even to your rankings. Linking out is a positive thing.

It's also the case that sites and pages that link out tend to earn more links back in, which seems obvious. They're more helpful and relevant to people, they can serve as better resources, and it's also the case that often that's a very direct correlation because linking out might drive traffic to other websites who then notice it and say, "Oh yeah, I'd like to check you out. I might link to you."

Engadget might see my link and say, "Oh, you guys do a great job of that comparison stuff. Maybe we'll link to one of those in a future blog post that we do." Or Samsung might see our comparison and say, "Hey, that's some pretty cool data you've got. Do you think we could partner with you on a future research project and maybe we'd link to you from that project?" Very cool things.

That said, manipulative linking is dangerous. This is sort of the inverse of what we classically think of as link penalties, where we've gotten links that have pushed us up in the rankings, and they are from bad places, linking out to bad places or to good places for bad reasons, bad reasons being manipulative reasons, someone's paid you, you're getting some benefit from it. Google recently, a few months ago, made this announcement around how if bloggers are receiving free items from companies, and then they're linking back to those products, that could be penalized or could be perceived as violating FTC rules if there's not an advertisement or advertorial sponsor message on there. So all kinds of things here.

2) Linking to internal pages or other sites you own or control.

All right. Let's move over to internal links. On internal links, we've got a little bit of the same story but with some caveats. So again, my mobile phones compared page is here.

I could be linking off to my own review. I could be linking off to my video category, maybe if I've got a video at the bottom of this page. I'm providing navigation. I'm helping visitors go where they want to go. This is a very positive thing. It cannot only help to get those pages indexed and crawled, it may also help them rank higher with a few caveats. So the right internal links, good ones, can have a large positive impact across a big website.

Internal links that tend to perform the best, the ones that help the most tend to be the ones that drive real traffic, and they sort of continue a visitor's journey. They help people find what they're looking for, and it's also the case that the ones that don't drive traffic, that aren't perceived as helpful seem to have less of an impact on the pages they link to.

Now, I will point this out. If you're worried about like, "Oh, should I add one more link on here to another category page, or should I reference another page from here," you generally don't need to worry about that. As long as you think that some small portion, even a small portion of your audience would be potentially interested in that and it makes sense from a usability perspective, you should go ahead and add the link. I don't tend to worry at all about like, "Well, the difference between 52 links on a page and 53 links is those 52 links will get a little bit less PageRank or a little bit less link energy, whatever it is, voting power than the 53rd link." I would not sweat that at all. Those days are long since gone.

But it is true that internal links tend to have the largest impact on already authoritative sites. If you've already got a lot of authority on your site, you can help many of the pages deep in your site structure to get crawled and indexed and to rank better by linking to them. We've seen this pretty substantially with some very big websites lately where they've gone through these redesigns and had remarkable results.

That said, manipulative links, for example, let's say I went through and I just wrote a little bot that crawled my entire website, found every instance of the word "LG," the manufacturer, the phone manufacturer and linked to my LG page. It gets a little manipulative. There's probably some places where it makes great sense, but every single time the word is mentioned — you've probably seen some websites like these, although fewer of them in the last three or four years than in the five years before that when this tactic was really prevalent and Google wasn't penalizing for it.

We've actually seen examples where people removed that, and they made it much more subtle. They only did it on the first instance of the word on a page, and they only did it on category-level pages or blog-level pages, not deeply index pages or paginated versions of things, that kind of stuff. In fact, they saw their rankings rise. I love this. They saw their rankings rise like almost immediately. There was a really a cool example a few years back. I think I might have done a Whiteboard Friday about that.

So with manipulative internal links, especially ones that are stuffed into footers or jammed into every word instance or those kinds of things, Google tends to perceive that as manipulative, which in fact it really is. You're not doing that for visitor's benefit. You're hoping that it helps you with your rankings, and in fact it's probably doing the opposite.

General rule of thumb: If you can't find any way to justify how something that you're doing for SEO also benefits a visitor, maybe you should reconsider it, with a few exceptions. XML sitemaps might be a reasonable one.

It's the case that oftentimes the ones that are in footers or in structured template areas of a website that tend not to get clicked by people, sometimes a sidebar can do it, sometimes top nav can do it, sometimes even in-content stuff that's wrapped around can do it, that tends to be the most dangerous places, but it's not the only kind that gets penalized. In fact, it's not even always bad.

We've seen instances again on very big websites where they've done very significant footers and linked off to all their properties that the site or the company owns and controls. We've seen it where they use it to get greater indexation, and in fact it's positive because the footer is well done, because it tends to link to good places, because it's clearly a high-quality one, and it's not anchor text stuff. Anchor text is again a big risk here with internal linking.

So this is a very fine line, and it's a fine meandering line. I can't give you a clear-cut "never do this, always do this." It's a considered process. That's true for internal linking, and it's true, maybe a little less true for external linking.

If you've got great advice that you'd like to share, or some experiences, or you want us to take a look at some of your internal or external linking practices, feel free to leave a comment. We'll check them out, and I'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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3 Tactics That'll Make Writing Tighter as Easy as 1-2-3

Posted by ronell-smith

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

One of my most memorable interactions in college took place in English 202, when my professor would have us come to the front of the class and share with him (while seated in a chair right beside his desk) what our thesis was for the assignment we'd be working on for the first half of the semester.

In nearly every case, my thesis was too long, something my professor had no truck with.

"Smith," he'd say, "if you cannot explain it in a sentence, you don't understand it clearly."

I'd always walk away wondering how on Earth I was supposed to distill my idea into one sentence.

It would be years later, while studying physics, that I encountered a similar quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein ["Unless you can explain it simply, you do not understand it fully"], before I finally understood the message my professor was trying to get across: "The better you understand an idea, and can distill its essence internally, the easier it is for you to share the idea succinctly and clearly to the reader."

We now live in a world overflowing with words, even as the time we have to read them gets shorter and shorter.

All around we hear, see, and read where people don't have time to write — yet when they do write, it's more essay than note. All the while, the folks consuming our content are crying out, "Give me the damn info, already!"

Ann Wylie, one of the preeminent writing and communication coaches in the world, agrees, writing in a recent newsletter: "The longer your story, the less of it your readers will read — and the less likely they are to understand and act on it."

In fact, she shares research conducted by Wilbur Schramm, who she calls the “father of communication studies,” highlighting the effect of story length on reading:

• A nine-paragraph-long story lost three out of 10 readers by the fifth paragraph.
• A shorter story lost only two.The short and the long of it: More people read further when the story is shorter rather than longer.

"That’s the 33% reading gap between a short piece and a longer one," says Wylie. "Bottom line: The longer your piece, the less of it they’ll read."

People read more of shorter content (Image source)

I think it's time we all took a stand against word bloat, focusing our attention on writing shorter, punchier content.

If you're in (and I hope you are), I'm going to share three simple tips for creating amazing short content, replete with real-life examples showcasing exactly what I'm talking about.

Where digital can take a cue from print

Before I dive into the tactics, I'd like to quash what I think might be three objections to writing shorter content:

• Brevity is tough.
• But some people enjoy reading longer content.
• What about those times when I need more words to make my point?

Let me take them in order:

• I cannot help you here. Life is tough; but the alternative is far worse. The same can be said for people not consuming your verbose content. It's worth the effort to attempt to write shorter.
• Yes, and they'll likely enjoy it even more if you cut needless information. Most importantly, imagine all of the OTHER people who'd consume, enjoy, and share your content if it didn't take forever to read it.
• In almost every case, we could make our messages more effective if we actively looked for ways to write more succinctly.

“We take it as a given that the more information decision makers have, the better off they are,” wrote Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. However, “that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all … In fact [it’s] more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues.”

In my opinion, the rise of blogs, where we're all free to write as much as we like, has helped to ruin great writing. I wish we'd steal from print — where space is anything but free — the notion that each word needs to make a case for its own existence.

Why listen to me?

In some way, shape, or form, I've been an editor for more than half my life, going back to college when I was an Opinions Page editor. I've since held editing jobs for newsletters, magazines, and websites. I've also won numerous writing and editing awards, including from the Associated Press.

Maybe my most fun editing job is the one I have now as the head of YouMoz, Moz's user-generated content website.

In this role I get to work with hundreds of writers, sees thousands of posts, and have meaningful interactions that lead to authors becoming better at sharing ideas than they ever thought possible.

Also, given the high volume of posts we receive, I've developed a strong sense of what typically derails a piece. All things being equal, it's length. In nearly every case — even for content that we eventually accept — posts come in far too long. Sadly, most authors refuse to cut pieces, even for the sake of clarity.

The authors who are up to the challenge typically follow one of three paths:

Tip #1: Show, don't tell

Instead of using words to tell your story, use screen captures. How-to content is vital in the content marketing space. People want to know how to do what you've described. Why not show them?

This works very well for any step-by-step posts where readers would be better served seeing what they are to do.

A few great examples include:

• How to Find and Fix Structured Data Markup Errors via the Google Search Console, by Al Gomez
• The Brand Halo Effect: Does Brand Awareness Impact Organic Search Rankings?, by Tom Coad
• Here’s How to Automate Google Analytics Reporting with Google Sheets, by Gabriele Toninelli

Notice how, in each case, the authors use an economy of words but place a priority on screen captures.

Also, don't be afraid to use a single image or a short video to capture and share your idea. Not all ideas need the added weight of text.

Tip #2: Make a statement

This was my go-to tactic when I first started blogging for my own site in 2010. I keep track of the information listed in the screen capture in a Gmail draft, but you can use Evernote or whatever note-capturing platform you prefer. (I sometimes capture the initial idea in a Moleskine pad, then transfer it to Gmail later. I like using Gmail because it's easy to search for my idea when I'm ready to work on it.)

The key element with this approach is that it ensures I have a clear, strong point to make, then can back it up with supporting facts. The real genius of this approach is once I've covered my three points, I'm done.

The goal isn't to write everything there is to write on a topic; the goal is to share sufficient information that leads to learning and/or opens the topic up for further discussion.

If you decide to use this approach/style of post, keep these numbers in mind:

• 100: Number of words to make your point in the initial paragraph
• 300: Total number of words for the three supporting points
• 50: Number of words in the closing paragraph, including the call to action

I've seen this approach work very effectively for SMBs and enterprise brands.

Tip #3: Write anecdotally

If you're familiar with the Wall Street Journal, you've no doubt seen the treatment they give to the beginning of many of their stories. It's called an "anecdotal lead," where you use a real-life person/example to make the reader aware of what the story is about.

The goal is to make them so interested they cannot walk away, but not provide so much information that they don't read the story.

And by using a real person to make the point, the stories are more interesting, more personal, more memorable, and more likely to be read.

Last year we rolled out a section on YouMoz called called "Here's How," where people share how they/their team/their brand did or does something using a story to provide step-by-step details to make the impact real to the audience.

Authors have readily cottoned to the idea of sharing content in this form, in large part because they're living through the experience, so sharing it with rich detail is easy. They simply share a little of the who and the what, then go straight to the how. In fact, the goal with regard to Here's How is for 90% of each post to be how-to information.

Here are a few examples:

• Here’s How to Turn First-Time Customers into Loyal Fans with Context-Rich Content, by Rocio del Moral
• Here’s How a Brand New Website Built an Email List of More than 1,300 Contacts in Three Days, by Sam Anthony
• Here’s How to Break down Reporting Options in Mobile Analytics, by Ran Avrahamy

Don't be afraid to steal this approach. It works. But remember, don't over-tell the story.

Leave them yearning

Speaking of over-telling, I've gone on far longer than I'd hoped to with this post. But there's one final point I'd like to leave you with.

Take advantage of the comments sections on blogs. Instead of trying to cover everything under the sun, use the comments to share additional elements that didn't have to go in the story itself, but would provide great insight for those who've read your content.

By taking this approach, you can leave a little to the imagination in the post, then reward readers for sticking around.

What are your thoughts on the three ideas shared above?

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