Speak to anyone who knows a thing or two about SEO, 9 out of 10 times they will tell you that “Content is King”. Read any book about online marketing, visit any blog about search and read any article about content marketing, they all convey the same message – great content should be both engaging to users and be relevant to search engines. Here are some of my personal favourite resources that outline the importance of content in SEO:

• The Golden Rule of SEO: Content is King

• Infographic: Why Content is King for SEO

• Chapter 2: Content & Search Engine Ranking Factors

In this blog post, I’m going to share with you how I managed to help a client of mine achieve great visibility in the SERPs and drive targeted traffic by investing in great quality content and with minimal link building.

Before I start, I had to exclude and hide some of the data/information due to a skin-tight NDA that have with this client. Here it goes…

Introduction

This client of mine is a startup in the ecommerce space, competing in the home *censored* space. They were just starting up and were in the wireframe stages of their website. This was the perfect time for me to get involved, this was the window opportunity for me to get all the SEO goodness on the website. Convinced the client, signed them on and away we go. This was the beginning of July 2012.

SEO Best Practice Was Applied

Like any SEO agency and consultant would do, I did my due diligence and conducted a series of audits and analysis to ensure that the website is moving in the right direction. You know, the usual keyword research, technical audit, information architecture optimisation, etc. I basically used this ecommerce SEO checklist. By the time I was done, I made sure that the website was technically sound, products and pages were properly siloed/categorised and addressed all potential issues for duplicate content. This whole process took about 2.5 weeks, which would have bring us close to the end of July 2012.

Content, Content & More Content

By this stage, I have done all my persona development and keyword mapping to every single category, subcategory and page on the website. I had a clear picture what every page on the website needed to achieve, whom it had to target and what relevant keywords to it should rank for. With all these information ready in an excel template, I met up with the client to run them through and explained to them how we were going to put this into action. These were my content requirements that I recommended:

Like any business owner or marketing person they had questions, they had some concerns:

• How it was going to look like with the current design – This is where wireframes and annotations come in handy. By providing mockups for the client, it will help them visualise the look and feel and from there, the website designer can then bring it to life by working their magic

• Every page and product needs to have unique content? Are you serious? How much is that going to cost? – This is where I had to do some convincing and encouraged them to invest in copywriting using real life examples of how existing ecommerce players are utilising content

Once we got through all the hurdles and got everyone on the same page on how we were going to proceed with content production, I provided the client with detailed writing guidelines that they could pass on to their copywriters that they have already engaged. The guidelines were pretty basic, it was basically the excel template that I generated earlier on with keyword mappings plus a few additional points outlining the word count and preferred call-to-actions that can be used. Never once in the guidelines I mentioned anything about SEO or keyword density. I wanted the ensure that the copywriters write content for the users and not for the engines.

I have a saying that I use frequently “The quality of work is only as good as the brief you provide”. Put it simply, if you do not take the time to put together a detailed and specific brief/guideline if you are getting someone else to write your content, you bound to get CRAP back.

Content production took about 3 weeks in total including several iterations and revisions. By the time this entire exercise was done, we were in the middle of August 2012.

Preparing for Launch

By this stage, everything was in order. Content was entered to the website, meta-data were optimised, internal links were optimised and a website launch strategy were in place. We published the website on a staging server for testing. I did a crawl with Screaming Frog just to sanity check that there weren’t any major issues with the website prior to launch.

Due to some budget constraints, we couldn’t do a  HUGE launch strategy. Besides, by this stage, we would have spent most of the investment and dollars on copywriting. All we had plan for were some press releases, social and some blogger outreach (nothing massive).

Finally, we launched the website mid September 2012. Let the monitoring and measurement begin.

Results

Let’s now fast-forward to the end of March 2013, 6 months later…

Here’s how SERP visibility improved since the website launched:

• We were tracking 100+ non-brand keywords

• On launch, within a week we had 14 page 1 rankings

• Position 1 rankings grew by 600% compared to the first benchmark

• Page 1 rankings grew by 157% compared to the first benchmark

The improvement in SERP visibility, contributed to the increase in traffic:

• Organic traffic to the website has been increasing month-on-month since launch

• Website now generates an average of 5000 visits per month

Before you say anything, here’s organic traffic excluding brand and (not provided):

• Month-on-month growth

• Non-brand traffic now accounts for 36% of overall organic traffic

• Brand traffic accounts for 44% of overall organic traffic

• (not provided) accounts for 20% of overall organic traffic

Here’s the growth for one of their key head terms:

What About Link Building

The purpose of this post is to prove a point that having awesome content F@#$ing works. As mentioned earlier in the post, we had very limited budget to play around, therefore have not done massive amounts of link building. Here’s the proof:

As you can see, these metrics aren’t HUGE, compared to these guys who are also competing in the same vertical:

Conclusion

Happy Client = Happy Me

I hope that I have provided enough information and data to prove to you that CONTENT IS REALLY F@#$ING KING! I wish I could share more information and show you real life examples of the content. Unfortunately, unless someone wants to pay my legal bills – I am locked into a skin-tight NDA.

Before you dive straight in to producing content for your website, always make sure that you are well informed with data collected from keyword research and persona development. Make sure you do your homework and if you are outsourcing or getting someone else to produce the content for you, take the time and make sure that your brief is detailed and specific.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment, connect with me on Twitter or Google+.

The post Great Content F#$%ing Works…Seriously appeared first on Jason Mun.

Speaker Profile:

Name: Phil Ohren

Company: Mindshare

Twitter: @phillohren

Google+: https://plus.google.com/111566730325766406864/posts

Notes:

• Relationships is more than a <a> tag
• Penguin was designed to target webspam and not SEO – anyone hit by penguin was deemed to be spamming
• Penguin focused on 4 areas to decipher relationships
  • Count over time
  • Link source / Ease to obtain that links
  • anchors
  • Sorry…..wifi got cut off…
• The new disavow tool enables Google to see the links we think are spam – user generated link reporting
• Despite everything, spam still works in Australia…it is alive and well
• Phil used “Credit Cards” as an example – a website with blatant spam ranking highly for that keyword
• Phil covers Portent’s spam study
• Introduce a risk vs reward when you are looking at your links
• Manage your link profiles with Cognitive SEO which combines all data sources from Moz, Majestic and Ahrefs. Export to CSV and analyse, slice and dice
• Phil recommends to manually remove links by either nofollowing or taking down the link before using the disavow tool by Google
• Panguintool.com overlays algo updates to GA data
• Link Detox is a tool that Phil likes to use as well – it is a semi automated link profile management
• Netcomber by ex-googler Andre eposes website relationships between websites
• Stop link building and sart link earning through relationships
• Look at the market leading website, analyse their link profile and try and achieve better results
• 60% brand 20% non-brand 20% ontopic/generic
• Do genuine guest blogging – form real relationships. Don’t stress and worry about links. Integrate your efforts with Media, PR and social teams.
• Quality content only ticks the Panda box, you need HIGH VALUE content
• Performa a gap analysis and identify content opportunities according to the conversion funnel
• Great content and HIGH VALUE = shortcutts
• Evergreen content – Seomoz algo change history
• If you are stuck for ideas, engage creative and PR teams.
• Use creative commons, allow other users to use your content
• Links that drive traffic have higher value
• Seed content and create some ripples
• You can also use paid media to seed content like outbrain, taboola and disqus
• You will get comments, shares and most importantly links!
• Advertorials are OK – nofollow it!
• identify social influencers – Problogger Darren Rowse used as an example
• Invite authors to contribute to your blog – adds credibility to your websites through recognition

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc. 

The post [Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – Link Building Post Penguin appeared first on Jason Mun.

Speaker Profile:

Name: Paddy Moogan

Company: Distilled

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paddymoogan

Google+: https://plus.google.com/104334957300160196129/posts

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/paddy_moogan/10-link-building-tools-paddy-moogan-smx-sydney

Notes:

• Paddy is going to map out what the link building process would look like from end to end
• How to do it, how to report it and how to measure it, what tools to use
• Download his slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/paddy_moogan/10-link-building-tools-paddy-moogan-smx-sydney
• Use bidsketch to create cool proposals to share with clients if you are a freelancer – create proposals in minutes
• Use it to sell link building
• Searchmetrics is an awesome tool to monitor status of link profile – it provides more visbility if you cannot get access to analytics during the pitch process
• You must start a link profile analysis before start building links
• Find what you and have and need before u kick off
• Tom Anthony’s Link Profiler tool is great to graph moz metrics for analysis
• Linkdetective categorises type of links – my favourite
• Project planning doesn’t get talked about enough in SEO
• Distilled uses Trello to plan SEO projects – share boards with clients and give them transparency
• Planscope is another project planning tool for workflow and time tracking
• Create content that deserves links
• Use Google related searches to gather content ideas
• Soolve.com scrapes ideas from multiple sources – this is definitely in my toolbox
• Quora can help with content creation greatly – ask a question on QUora about your content idea and let the community do the research for you
• Paddy likes using Odesk to get cheap resource for research
• Piktochart and Infogram to create infographics really quickly – use these to create a proof of concept. Test it and then invest with a proper designer.
• Tableau is great for quick visualisation by plugging in a data set
• Twitter Bootstrap is quick and easy way to knock a website together
• Paddy is getting in to some pretty advanced tech to create cool looking tools and interactive infographics
• Super scrollorama for scroll animation
• Broken link finder tool gets a mention www.brokenlinkbuilding.com
• URLopener.com atomatically opens up a list of URLs in the browser for link prospecting
• Linksy email finder to find a email of a person
• Scraper in Chrome can easily scrape URL list on a SERPs when link research and prospecting – time saving with 2 clicks scrape
• BuzzStream is the BEST outreach tool – it keep track of communication with bloggers/webmasters. Great for a large team of link builders
• Rapportive is great to provide information about a person and customise emails for outreach
• Text Expander in Mac allows shortcodes to pull in outreach templates loaded quickly
• Always follow up when you are link buidlign and outreaching
• Use Boomerang which is a GMail add-on to remind you with an email notification. Create canned responses to insert a template for easy customisation
• FOllowup.cc is a similar tool
• Link monitoring, you can use SEOtools for Excel, Mozscape API by SEOgadget, Buzzstream and Raven
• Linstant! Discovers new links immediately via email

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc. 

The post [Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – 10 Link Building Tools – How to use them to get links appeared first on Jason Mun.

Speaker Profile:

Name: Bill Hunt

Company: http://back-azimuth.com/

Twitter: @billhunt

Google+: https://plus.google.com/102882782290769103406/posts

Notes:

• Programmatic Optimisation is all about – Leverage templates, business rules and data structures to achieve optimisation scale and performance
• Always start with setting up Business Goals
• IBM catalog used to be block by spiders – WOW!
• Bill is showing examples of how be applied his programmatic optimisation when he was at IBM where he was the only search guy looking after a Global company
• simplified and reduced template resulting in savings of 3k annual man hours
• IBM created a uniform XML sitemap tech that resulted in 98% of pages indexed and 150% redirection of error
• Intro paragraph improved snippet relevance and clicks by 3000%
• IBM saw 82% of tier 1 phrases in all markets ranking on page 1
• 8000% increase in traffic in first 30 days
• Exponential increase in sales immediately after indexing
• Inclusion, relevance, authority, clickability – SEO pillars
• Realign priorities to Scale, create a framework to help with programmatic optimisation
• Maximise templates at the design level – make sure designers understand template opportunities and risks. Find the person responsible.
• develop building rules into CMS integration
• Optimising the templates reduces the amount of work necessary in the local markets
• Set rules within the CMS – what is the title structure, meta data structure, etc
• Have fail process in template – if SEO is no good and compliant, do not publish
• Mark up wireframes from creative agencies and identify issues early
• Fight to be part of the wireframe process before it goes in to coding before it is too late
• Bill believes that you should build the database first then the website not the other round
• Create rules/ and formulas for meta-data structures
• Make sure you understand your CMS in order to scale
  • How to insert content from a db
  • template creation and restrictions
  • page management
  • error management
  • redirect management
• Create a workflow structure on the web development process and start identifying where SEO should be involve and where QA needs to be
• Bill uses SEO for Firefox to evaluate keyword frequency audit on a page
• Segment your XML sitemaps by product categories, lines of business and country
• Great for engines and great for management
• Eaier to monitor crawl rates
• Ensure that XML sitemaps have less than 1% error rate
• Verify URLs in sitemaps with Screaming frog to ensure that they return 200
• Make sure the format is CORRECT
• Create a Search Engine Style guide for conformity – incorporate SEO guide in negotiations with developers
• Have a content colloboration matrix – find our what resources are available in-house
• Leverage scorecards for governance
• Monitor Duplicate title tage in GWT – listen to what google tells you in GWT
• Tools – Bing and Google Webmaster Tools, SCreaming Frog, ISS SEO tools, SEO tools for excel

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc. 

The post [Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – Programmatic Optimisation appeared first on Jason Mun.

Speaker Profile:

Name: Bastian Grimm

Company: Grimm Digital

Twitter: https://twitter.com/basgr

Google+: https://plus.google.com/111367517659623076437/posts

Notes:

• Things are officially kicking off
• It seems that there are a few people in the audience who have had their WordPress sites hacked
• Bastian runs Grimm Digital, Blue Fountain Group and Ads2People
• gdig.de/sydney1 for slide deck and links in the presso
• Bastian is German and apologises for the bad accent – we love Germans here in Australia
• WordPress are the most the targeted by Hackers due to the WordPress footprint
• Setup WordPress properly
  • Use unique keys and salts to add random elements for encryption
  • Use a cryptic prefix to prevent automated scripts and SQL injections in the table prefix
  • $table_prefix = ‘wp_Vadsvdgadf_’;
  • Use the table rename plugin is it is too hard
• Protect your wp-config.php file
  • Move the file outside of www
  • Add some code to the .htaccess to prevent external access
• Remove the default “admin”
  • Setup new user as admin and delete the old one
  • Make sure to use a STRONG password
• Lock out multiple failed login – limit login attempts plugin. Specify how many fail attempts and lock access for X hours/days
• Watch out for free wordpress themes – links are usually sneakily embeded within the theme.
• Generally if you try to remove those links, the theme breaks! Sneaky MOFOs
• Always use Theme Authenticity Checker to do a pre-check. It checks for encryption, redirects, erroneous code, etc
• AVOID FREE WordPress themes – they generally are dodgy with erroneous code
• Make sure you run updates regularly – get WP Updates notifier to get email notifications
• ManageWP can do on-click mass updates for all your blogs if you are managing multiple WordPress websites
• Keep your installation clean – remove all non-active plugins as well as themes. It is a security and performance risk
• Daily scan your theme with WP Antivirus plugin – it checks the theme for modification with email notification
• Harden your security settings with Secure WordPress plugin which is FREE. It removes version numbers from all components and blocks malicious URL requests
• Protect wp-admin – use Lockdown WP Admin plugin to protect PHP files
• Fix file and folder permissions with WP-Security Scan plugin – chmod your wp-config.php to be read-only
• Use SSL Logins & Administration – force SSL Login with some additional code – check the slide deck later
• WordPress SEO by Yoast gets a plug – if you are using this plugin you are 80% there
• Make sure you uncheck the security settings in the plugin
• Noindex subpages of archives
• Check all the options in the “Clean up the <head>” section
• Make sure you are using the author meta-data information to bring in G+ authorship
• Bastian suggests that we do not include date snippet preview unless you’re publishing news – users don’t like outdated content
• Noindex and nofollow tags, they are useless pages
• Disable the author archives – it automatically 3013 redirects to homepage
• Remember to check for URL excludes to remove from XML sitemaps
• Setup proper permalinks settings
• Check out SEO data transporter – migrate one plugin to the other SEO plugin
• Make sure you know who are the creators and authors of plugins
• Fix pagination issues with wp-pagenavi plugin to solve it
• Internal cross linking with Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – personal fav of Bastian
• SEO friendly images plugin forces post title & image name to be used as img alt attribute – YES!
• Redirection plugin to help redirect old contents – can use regular expressions – AWESOME!
• Easily redirect 404 errors
• Use Schema Creator from Raven tools
• If you are running affiliate links use Eclipse Link Cloaker
• Tweak your robots.txt file to block some folders and files
• Responsive sliders for engagement soliloquy slider plugin
• Ubermenu creates functional and engaging manu types, very flexible and scalable – SEO friendly
• Do beautiful popups with Ninja Popups for call-to-actions (social shares, subscription, etc)
• Use relevanssi search plugin to replace the default WordPress internal search – it is more relevant and recommended to just use the default settings
• If you are selling digital goods use Easy Digital Downloads plugin
• WPML is Bastian’s preference for multi-lingual blogs
• Make it work on Mobile Devices with WPtouch plugin
• Use theme test drive to do all your testing without changing user experience
• Debug your WordPress with P3 plugin perf. profiler
• Enable Akismet – enable and get an API
• Use BackWPup to backup your database and files – ability to back up to Dropbox account – GREAT!
• Maintain categories and tags with Term Management Tools plugin to mass merge and purge
• Use WP SMush.it to compress and optimise all the images for smaller file size and load time
• TinyPNG and Jpegmini for image filesize optimisation
• Setup a caching plugin with W3 Total Cache – can integrate with CDNs. It combines multiple CSS files, minify big files same goes for javascripts to reduce amount of requests
• Do CSS sprites using SpriteMe
• Bastian like to use edgecast as a CDN – they’ve integrated Google Pagespeed data
• Offload JS libraries – user WP use google libraries
• Check out Bastians slideshare account for more performance tips!

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc. 

The post [Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – 40 WordPress Tips: Security, Engagement, SEO & Performance appeared first on Jason Mun.

Speaker Profile:

Name: Jon Quinton

Company: SEOGadget

Twitter: @jonquinton1

Google+: https://plus.google.com/100878256385748589476/posts

Notes:

• We are overwhelmed with data, we generally struggle to mine the right data
• Jon will be cover some of the tactics they use at SEOgadget
• Start by understanding the user flow from the start to the end of the funnel. Identify all steps and help them transition from each step and make it seamless
• Need (is it addressing a problem/need) -> Search (Fast answer) -> View (Do i trust this?) -> Purchase (can i complete my goal)
• GO back to basics and define how a brand can help
• Start by defining business goals (traffic? sales? engagement? social shares?)
• Tip 1: Identify why people search
• Jon is using the example of beach holidays with users that are famlies, couples, elderly crowd, thrill seekers, etc.
• Focus on the audience that you want to target
• Map out keywords based on intent and audience types. Instead of just targeting broad keywords like beach holidays, target super targeted keywords like relaxing beach holidays
• Q&A sites is a great way of identifying what users are looking for. Quora and Tripadvisor
• Jon uses Chroms Scraper and Google Docs using Xpath to scrape Q&A sites
• Scraper will scrape all topics based on a keyword search to allow scalability – generate content and topic ideas
• FOur Seasons website are doing this really well…content, website an keyword targetting is spot on (very audience driven)
• Tip 2: Identify the weak points on your website
• Export non-brand keywords from GA, generate a list of keywords in excel
• Get the full URL and start pulling in the search volme and on-page data with SEO TOols for Excel with Niels BOsma
• You end up with referral keyowds, landing page, traffic – start identifying good/bad keyword match
• Start looking at proportion of matches vs missed opportunities
• Use Excel skills to start graphing up cool data such as top ten bounced terms that are a non match
• TIP 3: Identify influencers in your space
• Followerwonk is great for identifying influencers on Twitter – search and sort by social authority
• Its not just the who and its how and why they are influencers
• Use the compare users report in followerwonk – find deeper common connections
• Mentionmapp.com is another tool that Jon uses to identify how and why those people are influencers
• Tip 4: Find out what your influencers are sharing
• This is useful when you are trying to pitch content to. Identify what influencers like and know which buttons to push.
• Allmytweets is a tool that can pull in all tweets for a specific person – scrape with Chrome Scraper to get the domain and URL that the influencer is sharing
• Take the URL and domain that is commonly shared, start identifying where these influencers hang out online and what are they sharing
• Tip 5: Find the most shared authors
• Get the list of domains in tip 4, use seotools for excel with xpath to start pulling in author information
• scrape rel=author =XpathonURL
• Then you pull in social metrics with SEOtools for Excel – you can then find out which authors and content are successful
• Tip 6: Identify what’s Hot
• Use Google Trends drilled down to youtube only to identify hot trends
• GO and see Diesel’s awesome days to live campaign
• Tip 7: Find ways to do things better
• Find the demand with keyword research
• Jon uses example of pension calculators…great awesoem and better calculators
• Tip 8: Use Conversion Rate Optimisation to test
• Usertesting.com is great to get recordings on how user interactions
• Tip 9: Use Real Metrics
• Measure multiple goals for your content (email sign ups with event tracking)
• Monitor internal search – unlocks insight as to how users are interacting with the website. Is your content helping users
• Is new content required?
• Monitor customer service phone hours. Try to move the most common questions to the website and start tracking the impact of new content on customer enquiries
• Monitor user perception and sentiment
• Use Olark for live customer service
• Monitor forums and review websites
• Use google Alerts
• Tip 10: Keep Hunting and Repeat!
• Keeping finding new data and be creative
• Great job JON – awesome speaker

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc. 

The post [Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – Mining Your Search Keywords & Social Data for New Revenue Opportunities appeared first on Jason Mun.

Name: Jeremy Bolt

Company: Bruce Clay Australia

Notes:

• Jeremy is filling in for RIchard Baxter on Conversion Rate Optimisation
• CRO is all about understanding people and real people
• Creating desires and influence at different touchpoints
• CRO is part of the SEO/PPC/SMO ecosystem – they all intersect!
• CRO drives better rankings, traffic and conversions – it’s an integrated play
• The CRO and SEO intersects in these areas:
  • Information Architecture
  • Content Strategy
  • Landing Page Design
  • User Journey
  • Build – Technical
• CRO only works when you have good amounts of traffic for a good sample size
• 3 reasons why you should care about CRO:
  • customers leaving you
  • you’re leaving money on the table
  • your competitors are already testing
• Demographics and Psychographics play a big role in CRO – understand who your users are!
• Map CRO initiatives based on the user intent funnel
• Map keywords based on the user intent/journey funnel as well
• Psychographics is all about understanding why users are and not converting on your website
• Design should be user focused, not what the marketing, IT or CEO thinks is good
• Relevance is important – is the page addressing the needs, wants and desires of the user
• You have to answer what value is the page to the user. Use the so what? test. What is the unique proposition?
• What are the call to actions? Make it obvious. Provide confidence signals on the page. Security pages, etc.
• Start creating a conversion funnel and start analysing the loss at each stage of the funnel
• Track the user takes, navigating and converting
• Have a persuasion architecture – provide persuasion signals at every step of the user journey to help users along the way
• Have clear navigation, clear language, clear CTA and clear reminders
• There are 2 types of CRO testing: A/B split tests and Multivariate testing
• Sorry guys, gotta cut this one short, off to another session in the other room

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc. 

The post [Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – Conversion Rate Optimisation for SEO’s appeared first on Jason Mun.

Speaker Profile:

Name: Rand Fishkin

Company: SEOmoz

Twitter: @randfish

Google+: https://plus.google.com/111294201325870406922/posts

Notes:

• Rand just walked in to the conference hall, no yellow pumas though
• Dowload Rand’s slide bit.ly/mightynudge
• The title of the presentation has changed to The Nudge is Mightier Than the Sword
• Rand is taking us on a journey with examples of social conformity
• Automatic system trumps reflective system
• some signals are more effective than others
• Instead of bludgeoning ppl and algos, nudge instead
• Nudge users to click your listings
• nudge google to rank
• nudge blog reader to share
• nudge tweeters to share
• Don’t Bludgeon
• Don’t be in your face with SEO, don’t be aggressive. NUDGE
• 12 tips to nudge for marketing
  • Employ social proof through user generated reviews (Rand shows eg of Yelp, Pinterest and Amazon)
  • Play the name game (use aspirational naming – it converts better. Instead if silver gold packaged. Call it growth, pro, etc)
  • Anchor your audience (Grasshopper as example displaying prices in reverse. Brought a larger conversion rate, numerical anchoring)
  • Limit choice (Don’t over populate pages with social sharing buttons. Rand using example from Social Media Examiner. Too many choices confuses users, makes it harder for users to decide. Another example OKtrends blog, an online dating blog. Awesome functionality when you scroll, social engagement functionality is awesome. Timing is perfect. Lots of testing went in to that blog. Facebook like button get the best ROI for them based on testing of different social sharing buttons. Moz is going to be testing and publishing results of their own. Another good example is RIngcentral – great testing of different pricing structures. Fewer choices led to more conversions.)
  • Serve up behavioral data (The more specific data is the ore relevant data nudges are. Social connection is a simple powerful way to nudge those actions. Rand recommends reading Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. )
  • Don’t Make Them Think (Rand using Obama campaign as an example of landing page testing. Simpler landing page has 5% better conversion rate. Not forcing some to think at all works better. People like quick and easy even if it means more steps)
  • Tap the Power of Reciprocation (Urban airship sends out free skateboards for reciprocal conversations. Moz use reciprocation all the time with giving away free advice with Whiteboard Fridays, case studies, transparency. Giving stuff away makes people happy. Give and you shall receive. A user will visit the website 7 times before they sign up with a free trial on Moz. )
  • Familiarity Biases Our Behaviour (Users affiliate themselves with brands that they know, they are bias when they search.)
  • Brand Recognition Nudges Clicks
  • Quality + Consistency + Repetition = Good Branding
  • Use Ego & Competition to Drive Participation (Empower users and make them feel like they matter. Example used is with Isidewith…website. When you complete the quiz you get “Because of you, 25 people have taken this quiz”.)
  • Leverage the Power of Defaults (Example Rand used is the payment system at the back of NYC cabs. Default options make higher tips more prevalent. Default embed code means Sldeshare controls the links and the anchor text.)
  • Nudge over time, not all at once (Example used from Microsoft Surface EDM campaign. They sent a series of EDMs, each containing small actionable tips rather than one EDM with everything crammed in it. Small actionable and bite size information works better. Multiple, shorter request for actions works and converts better)
  • Embedded Steps can Create Powerful Nudges (Rand uses example of app gaming, social sharing within games are genius. When you complete a level, incentivise users with credits when you tweet and FB share. Embedded steps allow steps that users can complete. Putting share buttons in to the process makes participation goes skyhigh)
• Rand recommends Nudge by Richard Thaler
• Rand is AWESOME!
• It is Q&A time….
• Rand reckons SEO will still be around in 10 years, it is going no where. SEO is a tactic and should be part of an overall marketing strategy.
• Good question about how Moz uses nudges for their own properties. Rand says that Fresh Link Explorer, they have applied lots of nudges with simplicity, etc. He would love to try price anchoring, giving away free stuff.
• Brand and link co-occurrence will be strong ranking factor according to Rand.
• New ranking factor study will be out in July

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc. 

The post [Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – Behavioural Psychology Meets Web Marketing appeared first on Jason Mun.

Speaker Profile:

Name: Brian White

Company: Google

Twitter: @brianwhite

Google+: https://plus.google.com/117362177282595168386/posts

Notes:

• Brian White is the program manager of the Search Quality Webspam from Google
• Brian works in the manual webspam team in Google
• How Search Works infographic is up on screen – It is to provide more transparency
• Search quality is a large group in Google broken up in to two teams: Quality Evaluation & Manual Webspam teams
• Quality Eval – They tackle ratings for algorithm development (no changes to rankings)
• Ratings are aggregated based on manual side by side evaluation on algorithm changes
• Manual Webspam – they do manual investigation, actions (demotions/removals)
• Manual webspam teams investigate and find out how people are trying to game the system, result of their work ends up with a manual action
• Live spam screenshots – check it out! Google are providing real time removal of spam websites. Check and see what type of websites are getting removed from the index.
• Brian is showing a graph on manual spam actions from 2004 – 2012. They are committed to fighting spam and created several offices around the world
• Google classifies their spam in to types: pure spam, hacked sites, legacy, unnatural links, cloaking, user generated spam, etc
• Brian just handed out a collectible android by guesssing Parked Domain girl
• Brian is now showing some examples or Pure Spam – mainly in the casino vertical
• Links embedded between unreadable content articles are classified for pure spam
• Hacked sites, cloaking and sneaky redirects are considered as spam too
• Typical hacked site behaviour would be injection of gibberish content with links without the webmasters knowledge
• The footprint that web spam leaves is astonishing!
• Brian White recommends using Fetch as Googlebot – see what google sees with their user agent
• Battle thin content by adding value to the user: provide useful features. Brian is using example of Amazon Light
• Create functionality that is useful to users, Amazon Light generate tonnes of links and mentions for years
• Doorway pages are dreadful webspam – Brian demonstrates a crushing rabbits example on a rock crushing business
• User generated spam on social bookmarking sites are being looked at by Google. Blog comment spamming spam – anchor text links as identity/name is also being looked at closely by Google.
• Hidden text & keyword stuffing not only happens in english but in other foreign languages as well
• They look for patterns
• Automatically generated pages such as infinite Calendar entries on a website can trigger a manual action – use robots.txt to block those pages
• Digg.com was not a manual penalty, it was a mistake
• In 2005, Google accidentally removed all .com.au websites from the index – shit happens, mistakes do happen
• Messages sent via GWT spiked significantly in 2012 – Google’s way of providing more transparency
• Reconsideration requests have also been increasing between 2006 – 2012
• Brians advice when you do a reconsideration request is to be frank and honest. Be straightforward and don’t lie.
• Example Brian used: Hi…Yes we buy links from XXX. This backlink is auto generated and cannot change html code. Regards…
• Google ignores shit like that
• Algos are awesome but not perfect, humans tend to be perfect but with no scale. Together, they provide better results.
• Hints and reports from webmaster tools on spam get some priority – starting reporting dodgy sites via GWT!
• There is going to be a major crackdown on spam in 2013, watch out blackhatters
• Next penguin update is going to be significant!
• Penalties tend to be very granular, they tend to penalise page level and not site level

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc. 

The post [Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – Google Webspam – What are they looking for? appeared first on Jason Mun.

Speaker Profile:

Name: Ben Bale

Company: Weber Shandwick (CMG)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/benbale

Google+: https://plus.google.com/106984672263766555316/posts

Notes:

• Be an authority by meeting people, Ben Bale is taking us back to 1940′s and how they did it back then
• Google is taking authorship seriously to clean up the SERPs and start rewarding authoritative authors
• 4 things you need to take action on: Be visibile with G+ and rel=author, Be connected (create real relationships – be human), Be a prepared author, Be accessible
• Authorship = Real People = Relationships = Links & Shares
• Be a real person and not troll on the web. Be a real person with credibility.
• If you are going to say something negative, be prepared with a backup and transition plan
• Be an accessible author, live the brand and provide transparency. Let users in to the values of the company, be transparent. Great a loyal following
• Authority comes from a real person
• Real people has a past and a future, it doesn’t start and end with rel=author
• It comes from being visibile, connected, prepared and accessible

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc. 

The post [Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – From Authorship To Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters appeared first on Jason Mun.