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Posts tagged SEO
Google + 1 your site to be featured
0It’s official. Today, Google launched the button + 1 for Web sites. This is potentially a changer of hunting for SEO companies as you can change the way that Google ranks Web sites. According to Google, the button will allow visitors of the Web site provide a “+ 1″ rating to the content that is useful. This system of classification will allow visitors to the Web site influence the content that appears in search results.
With a single click you can recommend waterproof, news story or science fiction film favorite friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time that you search for connections, could see its + 1 directly in your search results, helping them to find their recommendations when they are most useful.
Webmasters can use the tool that is shown in the image below to create a custom button from + 1 to their Web sites. The tool provides code based on your customizations. After that just copy and paste the code into the pages of your Web site. You can see the button + 1 as it can be seen now in our blog.
With the launch of the + 1 button for Web sites, Google seems to be telling us that they like the results which have seen other versions of the button. But do affect how this button the way Google ranks Web sites? In a previous post, David Scoville reviewed + 1 button and the question “doHow could change SEO?” do if Google is going results based strictly on the algorithm of search, the results are more influenced by social media, will provide higher quality results?
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New update means that companies must follow Google places
0When seeking something local, such as care of dog for my impressive cocker spaniel, jumps in Google Maps to see what is near me. In 2009, there were 27.5 million small enterprises in the United States, according to estimates by the Office of advocacy.
As I was talking yesterday on Twitter about all things SEO, in # SEOchat was noted by Thos003 that there is a small but significant change to how Google Maps returns results. If you look for “care of dog” through the United States, the images now return a little different. But it is best that the Red fall increases when it is placed on the list on the left side of the page.
So it might be asking, what like? As a company of any size must claim your listing and upload your own pictures. A business that was watching yesterday has never claimed his announcement but had more than 30 negative reviews. This is where the reputation management of SEO that come into play.
Claiming your Google account places only as you request your domain. If you choose no, then it is not in control and they are leaving your business for the control of the masses. A good search engine optimization company can be responsible for the management of reputation, but help you claim your Google account locations.
According to Vanessa schneider, the administrator of the community for Google places:
“I can confirm that a couple of changes we implemented Google maps yesterday.” To improve the design of the information in the search results, business photos have been moved from the left side of the organic listings on the right. In addition, when it moves on a list of companies in the left pane, the corresponding pin on the map marker now increases size to help you quickly and easily identify the places that interest you.
Claim your listing and fill all, post photos and attract your customers to leave comments for which you qualify. This is one of the few things you can do to improve your SEO. If you have your business, you need to have their presence on the Internet and is the first step with Google places.
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8 Easy victories for SEO on page
0Even the best advice is useless if you can’t put it into play. As a consultant who started his professional life as a coder, I always try to consider the effort and cost of implementing any changes I advise. Don’t get me wrong – some difficult changes have to be made, despite the pain. Usually, though, there are a few easy wins that won’t take days of development or thousands of dollars to put into play. I’m going to give you 8 fixes to on-page SEO problems that I see pop up regularly…
A quick disclaimer – what’s “easy” for one person or on one platform might not be so easy on another. Sitewide changes (TITLE tags, for example) can be tricky, but they’re generally a lot easier than to complete study or to switch to a new platform. One area I won’t mention in this list is improving your URLs. Although that can be a powerful tactic, I’m seeing too many people who want to make relatively minor changes to URLs for SEO purposes. Sitewide URL changes are risky and often difficult to do correctly – they aren’t worth it to go from “good” to “slightly better”. The changes I’m proposing here are generally low-risk.
While there may not be a duplicate content penalty (with a Capital “P”), there can be serious consequences to letting your indexed pages run wild, especially in a post-Panda world. Google often does a poor job of choosing the right version of a page, and low-authority sites can end up diluting your site’s index and pushing out deeper, more important pages (like product pages).
There are three common varieties of internal duplicates, in my experience:
Duplicates caused by session variables and tracking parametersDuplicates caused by search sorts and filtersDuplicates caused by alternate URL paths to the same pageIf search spiders see a new URL for the same content (whether that URL appears static or dynamic), they’ll see a new page. It’s important to canonicalize these pages. When the duplicates really are identical, using the canonical tag or to 301-redirect is often the best bet. In some cases, like search sorts or pagination, the situation can get more complicated.
The TITLE tag is still a powerful ranking factor, and it’s still far too often either abused or neglected. Pages that you want to rank need unique, descriptive, and keyword-targeted TITLE tags, plain and simple. You can easily track duplicate page TITLEs through the SEOmoz PRO Campaign Manager, including historical data:
This data is available from multiple locations, including the Campaign Dashboard and “Crawl diagnostics” tab. You can also track exact duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools. You can find it under “diagnostics” > “html suggestions”.
The solution here is simple: write unique TITLE tags. If you have a huge site, there are plenty of ways to populate TITLE tags systematically from dates. Writing some decent code is well worth it to fix this problem.
While the META Description tag has little or no direct impact on ranking these days, it does have 2 important indirect impacts:
It (usually) determines your search snippet and impacts click-through rate (CTR).It’s another uniqueness factor that makes pages look more valuable.Again, there are plenty of ways to generate META descriptions from data, including just using snippets of product descriptions. Try to make descriptions meaningful and attractive to visitors, not just sentences loaded with keywords.
Long TITLE tags tend to weaken the SEO impact of any given keyword, and can also turn off search visitors (who tend to skim results). The most common culprit I see is when someone adds their home-page TITLE to the end of every other page. Let’s say your home page TITLE is:
“The Best Bacon Since 1983 |” “Bob’s Bacon Barn”Then, for every product page, you have something like this:
“50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon |” The Best Bacon Since 1983 | “Bob’s Bacon Barn”It may not look excessive, but you’re diluting the first few (and most important) keywords for the page, and you’re making every page on the site is up with your home-page unnecessarily. It’s fine to use your company name (or a shortened version, like “Bob’s Bacon”) at the end of all of your TITLE tags, but don’t repeat core keywords on a massive scale. I’ve seen this go to extreme, once you factor in long product names, categories, and sub-categories.
On larger, e-commerce sites, it’s common to list categories and sub-category information in TITLE tags. That’s fine up to a point, but I often see a configuration that looks something like this:
“Bob’s Bacon |” Bulk Products | Bacon Sacks | “50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon”Not only does every TITLE tag on the site end up looking very similar, but the most important and unique keywords for the page are pushed to the very back. This is an issue for search usability, too, as research has demonstrated that the first few words in a title or headline are the most critical (possibly as few as the first two). If you’ve got a structure like the one above, flip it around:
“50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon |” Bacon Sacks | Bulk Products | “Bob’s Bacon”It’s a relatively easy change, and it’ll put the most important keywords up front, where they belong. It will very likely also increase your CTR search.
On sites with 100s or 1000s of pages to “flat” architecture isn’t possible or even desirable. So, you naturally end up taking a hierarchical approach where products are 3 + levels deep. I think that’s often fine, if the paths are clear to crawlers and visitors, but it can leave critical pages with very little ranking power. One solution is to pull some of your top sellers to the home page and link directly – this effectively flattens the architecture and pours more link-juice where it’s needed. Don’t go overboard, but to “featured products” or “top 10 sellers” list on the home page can really help boost important deep pages.
I’m amazed how often I see internal links, even main navigation links, given cryptic, vague, or jargon-loaded labels. If you’re trying to rank your category page for “kid’s clothing”, don’t label the button “apparel (K-12)” – it’s a bad signal to search engines, and it probably doesn’t make much sense to visitors. Your internal anchor text should reflect your keyword strategy, and your keyword strategy should reflect common usage. Use labels people understand and don’t be afraid to be specific.
There’s an old adage in copywriting – say what you need to say in as few words as possible, and then, when you’re done, try to say it in half that many words. I think the same goes for internal linking. If most of your inbound links are coming to the home page, then your site architecture is the single biggest factor in flowing link-juice to deeper pages. It’s natural to want to link to everything, but if you prioritize everything, you effectively prioritize nothing. Find 10 links on your home page that are either low priority for search or that visitors never click on (a click-mapping tool like Crazy Egg is a great way to test this), and remove them. Focusing your remaining link-juice is an easy way to boost your most important pages.
I’d love to hear any tips you may have for easy wins on-page. I’d also recommend Rand’s post on building a perfectly optimized page. While link-building is critical, fixing on-page issues is often a lot easier and can have an immediate impact, so it’s important not to ignore either front of the SEO battle.
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Boston SEO Conference – may 16/17 2011
0Translate Request has too much data Parameter name: request Translate Request has too much data Parameter name: request The author’s posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
You might have seen some of the buzz about the recent #linklove events we ran with SEOmoz in London and New Orleans. These were single-day events focused purely on link building. In a little over a month’s time, we are running our first 2-day deep-dive expert conference stateside. I’ve spoken at a bunch of the MozCon events in Seattle, and we thought it was about time we brought the show to the east coast. Without further ado, I present Pro SEO Boston:
Where: Boston, MA – Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical SchoolWhen: 16th / 17th May 2011What: advanced SEO, actionable tips and new stuff you’ve never seen beforeWho: the best speakers we could find, including Rand, Dharmesh, Seth Besmertnik, and many moreHow much: only $799 with the SEOmoz PRO discount (grab a free trial if you aren’t a PRO member)Tickets are available now – you can:
Yes, that is the appropriate response
We pour our heart and soul into these events and recent feedback suggests we’re going in the right direction. 92% of attendees of our recent London #linklove event said they’d attend again! Typical criticism of advanced events is that it’s really tough to get the level right – when we ran #linklove in New Orleans, 94% of attendees said the level was “just right” (vs. too advanced or too basic).
Since this is our first event on the East Coast, many potential attendees won’t have attended a Distilled / SEOmoz event before. If you need more convincing than I can give, I suggest you read a recap of our last event (#linklove in NOLA) from Tom Harari who said:
“The SES New York conference was being held at the same time as the Distilled seminar and I almost went to SES instead – man, am I glad I didn’t”
The first thing you should know is that Rand and I will once again be battling head to head. Previous battles have been quite “big picture” – so this time we’re taking it to the trenches to put together two competing SEO plans for specific sites. We’ll present them, you’ll decide whose is best, there will be only one victor. (Place your bets now – I’m currently ahead 3-1, but I’ve never won in the US and I believe Rand has been cheating by taking presentation classes…). We’ll also be presenting a regular session each:
Live data analysis: it may well be that in the long run, the only thing that separates search marketers from “traditional” marketers is our obsession with data. I will be presenting a session where I will show you in real time some of the skills you need to become the master of that data – from new sources, APIs and Excel wizardry up to hacking programs together to get you the information you need. I am increasingly of the opinion that every SEO should be comfortable with at least one scripting language / method. If you’re not automating, you’ll find it harder to be effective.Blended and verticals: fewer and fewer searches are returning 10 regular blue links these days. Rand will be showing you how to win in a multi-vertical search world. Some sites live in areas where everything is vertical, others have upside opportunities from (for example) news or video. Whichever applies to you, Rand’ll be showing you how to rank.
I’m a little scared of Rand’s presentation training
When programming our 2-day events, I focus on the things that I know advanced SEOs want to know; what would I be quizzing these guys about if I saw them in the bar? What does Tom need to learn about? What doesn’t Rand already know?
Out of all this brainstorming came a schedule that looks a little bit like the following:
Taming the panda: Google didn’t just change an algorithm – they changed the web: How has the world changed with the recent Google updates?How is it going to continue to change?What should you be doing right now to win over the medium term?Possibly the hardest question: if you’ve been negatively impacted, what can you do to recover? How permanent are the impacts likely to be?Laura Lippay has had a unique perspective on the evolving landscape of search over the last few years as she’s moved from working in SEO at a search engine to consulting alongside ex-Googler Vanessa Fox to running her own show. If she can’t help work out the answers to this, no-one can.A Geek’s Guide To Crafting Code To Lure In Links: how the geek shall inherit the earth: A large proportion of the web’s links go to functionality that people find useful – engineers are the new link buildersHow can developers create link worthy applications?How do you build link-worthiness into your core product?Is this really a good use of your time? How do you make sure that you get the right kind of business benefit from building popular products?Dharmesh Shah is the only person I want to present this session – who else do you know who has those engineering chops alongside the ability to build businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars?How not to fail at link bait: not everything works – learn from it: How should you coordinate research, writing and design?What tools and sources create the most link-worthy content?What link bait fails and why?Chris Bennett and his company are behind some of the most shared content on the web. It’s inspiring to hear his stories of success, but what about the stuff that went wrong? I’m going to be pushing Chris to share both details of his process (from brainstorm, to data, to wireframes, to finished designs) as well as notable failures along the way.Social media: an engineer’s perspective: the new social skills: Whether as a ranking factor or simply as a traffic / business driver, social media is becoming ever more important.How do you architect your site to get liked, shared, clicked?How do you measure social interactions through closed ecosystems?Mat Clayton recently blew me away over coffee with some of the stories he shared about the growth he has driven for mixcloud.com . Is it possible the true social media guru is an engineer?Effective link building: still necessary, still hard: Tips and tricks from an effective link builderWhat really makes a difference?Channelling your “creativity” – everyone has evil ideas; how do you use them for awesome?Justin Briggs has had remarkable success building links for his clients out of the Seattle Distilled office – I want to see his presentation to help carry some of the knowledge back across the pond to London HQ.Information Architecture 2.0: if it can’t be crawled, it can’t be found: How can you decentralise IA decisions to cope with rapid publishing and / or UGC?What can smaller sites learn from enterprise?How should you change your decisions as crawling gets ever faster?What should be your top priorities when presented with a brand new site? What about when you are struggling to get change implemented?Marshall Simmonds is behind some of the biggest site architectures on the web and has thought long and hard about the different difficulties facing legacy sites with inflexible CMS constraints and start-ups without the authority to support immense architecturesForecasting, presenting and explaining SEO to management: you have to get the budget from somewhere: What’s the right balance between detail and story?How do you reconcile the things you need to say to win budget with describing progress month on month?What metrics do management understand that actually correspond to real success?Seth Besmertnik blew me away with his presentation in Seattle last year on taking SEO to the next level in the enterprise. Out of everyone I know, he has done more thinking on “managing managers” into understanding, investing in and rewarding SEO than anyone. Bring your notebooks to this one.Keyword culture: whatever else changes, we’re still typing words into boxes: What has changed in the world of keywords while you weren’t watching?What are the best sources of data?What’s the latest thinking on targeting keywords and implementing a keyword strategy?Kate Morris has helped implement keyword cultures with in-house teams at some of the biggest brands in the world. With backing from Distilled’s resident data junkies, she’s going to change the way you think about keywords.Moving the needle: if there’s no return, there’s no point: How do you manage your investment across multiple channels?How does the new GA functionality impact multi-channel marketers?What lessons can this teach us for SEO? How should we allocate our time between activities?How do you forecast in a world of uncertain results and outcomes? What does this mean for your planning?If you’re working with big sites, manually tweaking every page might not be possible. What marketing activities have genuinely moved the needle for SEOmoz over the past 12-18 months?Joanna Lord is not only one of the best and most energetic speakers I know, she’s also got a unique insight into cross-channel challenges in a hyper-competitive industry. She’s going to share key formulae and tools they use to manage this process at SEOmoz.New technologies: the future has to be useful for something: How can you create crawlable AJAX?What does HTML5 mean for SEO?What do you need to know about PUSH?Rob Ousbey loves the future and he’s going to show us a bit of what it looks like. As one of our most experienced SEOs, Rob’s combination engineering / management degree sums him up perfectly – technology for business purposes. I can’t wait to see what the future holds.
Tom’s presentations got better when he started wearing nice shirts
Bonus sessions:
Live site review / link building – it’s not a normal presentation, but it’s perennially popular. Watch the sparks fly as experts battle to be the first to find issues and opportunities live on stage.Getting $hit done – the section of Tom’s presentation at #linklove NOLA on how to cause change and actually get things done was a surprise hit. Causing change is becoming one of the most powerful internal memes at Distilled and Tom’s going to share some of the lessons we’ve learnt and implemented in a short energiser session.Give it up – best thing on the internet – we love the energy you get when you put all the speakers on stage at once. In Boston, we’re trying a new tack: aiming to inspire us all towards awesome. What are the ideas and implementations that these great minds have been most impressed by? I personally can’t wait to hear what they all come up with.A bit more about the people who are coming to share their knowledge – I’m really exciting to be speaking alongside a bunch of old friends as well as some people I’ve been wanting to meet for a long time. I hope you’ll join us to learn from all these people used their skills to create success and awesomeness all around themselves:
Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot - I am in awe of Dharmesh’s ability to pilot an amazing growth story of a company, geek out and write code and have a family life all at the same time. I will definitely be picking his brains for tips. I can’t believe that after speaking online so frequently and with both Duncan and Tom having met Dharmesh, that Boston will be our first real life encounter. I, for one, can’t wait.Seth Besmertnik from Conductor - another great East Coast entrepreneur. I first met Seth in Seattle back in 2007 and he has repeatedly inspired us to set the bar higher. No-one knows more about what steers big companies through the SEO maze than Seth. Whether you’re in-house or a consultant, Seth will help you bring the data that will convince management and clients of what you need.Marshall Simmonds of Define Media Group - when we made the list of people who could talk authoritatively on the topic of large sites and complex architectures, Marshall’s name was right at the top. Our decision was absolutely not influenced by our shared love of whisky. Not even a little bit.Laura Lippay of How’s Your Pony? (I know, really?) – I first saw Laura speak on her SEO forecasting process. I was blown away by both the effectiveness of her model and (probably more importantly) the explanation of the underlying assumptions in management-friendly terminology. It was immediately clear why she has been successful working with some of the biggest websites in the world. You might also have read her 8 step SEO strategy (if you haven’t, you should go read it now, I’ll wait….)Chris Bennett of 97th Floor - I asked Chris to speak at #linklove in NOLA because I knew just how much of the internet was created by him and his company. If you haven’t seen him present, you are missing a serious trick. This time around, we’re asking him to reveal even more of the actual process behind the success. Last time he spoke, I immediately started sending notes back to our team. This time, we’re going to see even more of the magic.Mat Clayton of Mixcloud - right now, you might not have heard of Mat, but I’ve heard some of what he has to say, and it’s quite possible that his is the session I’m looking forward to most. One of a team of 4 University of Cambridge graduates behind Mixcloud, Mat has been more successful than anyone I’ve come across at baking social sharing and mechanics into the core of his business. He has a self-deprecating way of saying he isn’t an SEO and doesn’t know much about it. But don’t believe his British reserve – he has the data to prove exactly how well his approach works and I think he might just add more value to some websites in the audience than the rest of us put together.and… of course, from Distilled and SEOmoz:
Rand Fishkin and me going head to head in a competition to see who can bring a better, more actionable, more powerful strategy for some lucky sites in unloved nichesMy brother, Tom Critchlow, who’s been appearing in Whiteboard Fridays and webinars all over the place recently. He’s been in-house at SEOmoz for a little bit now and so he’ll be combining his agency and client-side lessons into advanced tipsOthers from the Distilled Seattle office: Kate Morris whose ability to combine marketing and technology is second-to-none, Justin Briggs who, in the short time he’s been with Distilled has been tearing it up with great blog posts and speaking engagements and Rob Ousbey who has done such a phenomenal job of running our West Coast outpost over the past year.The bundle of energy that is Joanna Lord (from SEOmoz) is going to kick your ass if you don’t bring it. I’m already feeling pumped.
Who let that guy ask questions?
The reminder information:
Where: Boston, MA – Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School (it’s at Harvard Medical School – how could you fail to learn?)When: 16th / 17th May 2011What: advanced SEO, actionable tips and new stuff you’ve never seen beforeWho: the best speakers we could find, including Rand, Dharmesh, Seth Besmertnik, and many moreHow much: only $799 with the SEOmoz PRO discount (grab a free trial if you aren’t a PRO member) There is also a VIP dinner on the Sunday night before the conference. You’ll get 1-1 access to the speakers and a handful of other delegates – this costs $299 / person and is extremely limited - it will sell out quickly so don’t hesitate if you’d like to join usWe have negotiated a discounted hotel rate for our delegates at The Holiday Inn Boston Brookline, just a short cab ride from the conference venue. The rate is $189 per night. In order to qualify for the discounted rate please call the reservation department directly on 617-277-1200 and quote ‘Distilled Delegates’
If you’re really lucky, you’ll even get to sing karaoke with the Distilled crew (or maybe that’s if you’re unlucky):
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How to do SEO happen – slate on Friday
0Sure, you know SEO like you know the back of your hand. You know how to linkbuild, and you know how to do keyword research. Of course you’ve got a lot of SEO knowledge – you’ve been watching these Whiteboard Fridays every week, right? =P Well, now it’s time to get crackin’! Unfortunately, it feels like you never have enough time to get done all the things you know you should do. Maybe the people in charge aren’t willing to do the things you know they need to do to get positive results, or maybe you can’t implement all the changes you’d like to in the short time you have because you’re too busy building an encyclopaedic report for your client. There’s a lot of ways to make SEO not happen for your client’s site, but this week, Tom Critchlow from Distilled will show you how to avoid stagnation and keep the SEO ball rolling!
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Tom Critchlow. I’m currently here in Seattle helping SEOmoz with a few various bits and pieces, and today I’m going to be talking about how to make SEO happen.
So, very common in the SEO industry, and actually across all kinds of consulting, I hear a common complaint, which is I know what to do, I know what the SEO technique is, I know maybe I need more links, maybe I need to change something on the site. Figuring out the problem and solution is not the hard part. The hard part is getting stuff done. Today I am going to talk through a few tips about how to actually translate from knowing the answer to actually making the answer a reality. So, let’s start straight in.
Number one, no more reports. This is my biggest bugbear with SEO consulting. I see this all the time from other agencies, lone SEOs, in-house SEOs. I see it all the time. Big, lengthy, you know 50 to 100 page reports. I’m really not a big fan.
Here at Distilled we try really hard to keep all of our reports really, really short. That is something that I really try to instigate in everyone that I teach within Distilled, because a long report isn’t getting things done. Right? Like, you’ll send across a report. It will be 100 pages, and you’ll think, yes, this is a great report. You send it through to your client. They’re probably not going to read it. Reports don’t actually help get stuff done. So, instead of sending a lengthy report, consider the two primary functions in my eyes for what a report does.
There are two things. A report needs to convince somebody to do something, and it needs to tell them how to actually get it done. In my eyes, when you send a report through that is 50 pages or 100 pages, you are very often confusing the two. So, really, to convince somebody to make change happen, you only need one page or maybe you need a phone call or maybe you need a meeting. Let’s say it is a whole bunch of on-page changes and you say I’m going to need a huge amount of developer time to get all these changes done. You go to the marketing director or the marketing boss or whoever it is that you report to, and you go, “I need to get this stuff done.” And they go, “Why?” So, you need to answer that question. But you don’t need 100-page report to answer that question. So, make sure that you convince whoever the stakeholder is, independently of the report, that this change needs to happen, and then as a secondary function, you need to actually make that change happen. But that change is often, like, go work with the developer team or go and have lunch with the guy who runs the developer team or actually go in and do the change yourself on the site.
Whatever it might be that it takes to get it done, focus on that separately from the big report. Sometimes, yes, you do need to spec things out. You need to go in and you need to say, “Well, actually, all these pages need these keywords changing, or the information architecture needs to look like this.” There are things that you need to put down in writing, particularly for developers when you need a tight spec, but don’t confuse that with what a lot of consultants will do, which is sending through a big report that has both some justification in it and some nitty-gritty technical details. Try to divorce those two things so you have the convincing separately to the doing. Just generally, write less reports. Just make stuff happen.
Secondly, processes. I see this a lot again in reports that people send out and in consulting and SEO recommendations, even in blog posts. I see people saying, well, you should do X. But there is very little explanation as to how a particular company or a particular website will actually go about doing X. For example, guest posting. Let’s say that you put in a report, “Guest posting would be a great way of building links for your niche.” I have seen this kind of thing in plenty of reports. But that is not actionable. How does the client actually take that recommendation, and how do they turn that into actually doing guest posting?
Well, the key lies in processes. When you’re doing consulting, when you’re trying to get things done, processes are at the heart of everything a business does. If you want to make something happen that isn’t already happening, you need a new process, or if there is an existing process, you might need to modify that process to make it SEO friendly or make it happen in a particular way.
The key to coming up with processes and improving processes is to understand what the existing processes are. So, if you go into a business or you’re consulting for a website or maybe even if you are in-house, understand how things work currently. If you don’t understand how things are working, how on earth can you go in and recommend changes or say you should be doing this or you should be doing that. If you don’t understand how things are working, you’re going to fail.
When you are putting forth your recommendation, try not to frame things as, “Go and do guest posting.” That’s not an actionable thing. Instead, try to frame things as, “Here is a process for guest posting that is tailored for you.” That might involve understanding who is going to do it. Do they have the staff? Do they need to hire more staff? Are there existing people who could take on the task within their existing roles? How are they going to do it? Are the people who are going to do it trained? Do they have the skills? Do they have the tools? Is other tracking in place? How much? Should there be five people doing this all day long? Should it be part of one person’s job? So, understanding these three things will really help you get closer to getting things done. Okay. Now switch over here now.
Number three, pre-deliver. So, when you are doing consulting or when you are trying to get SEO changes to happen, there’s a big tendency I think to, you want to go away. You want to work in a dark room for days or weeks or months, and then you want to come back and you want to go, “Tada!” I’ve just made this amazing thing or I have just built this big report for you, and here’s what needs to happen. The problem is if the person you are presenting it to, they’re seeing it fresh for the first time, then it’s a surprise to them, and surprises don’t equal getting things done. So, instead, consider pre-delivering what you’re going to be recommending. So say, “I need some time to figure out exactly what the information architecture looks like, but you can be sure that there are going to be some information architecture improvements or changes.” That will give the person that you are reporting to, or the person that you need to convince to make change happen, that will give them the time to prepare. They’ll be like, “Okay, great. Well, we’ve got a new version of the website going live in three months. We’ll need the spec from you by the end of this month.” Great. So, now you have a time frame. Now you have a framework within which to work.
There is a very natural tendency, I think, with human beings to want to kind of make things absolutely crystal right before you release it, before you let your baby be seen by other people. But actually, in reality, in the business world, you want to pre-deliver. You want to overcommunicate with people and say, “This is what I am thinking of changing. Is that okay? Does that fit with you? Are you able to make that change?” Again, understanding either the client or internal resources. Understanding how much developer time they have will be a great framework for your recommendations.
Number four, communication. So, I have written a quote on here which is that, “Change happens when people like you,” which is a fantastic quote that I got from a management consultant who came in and helped do some training for Distilled. It is so true. You think of businesses as these cold, hard, rational entities, and they’re just not. Businesses are run by people like you and me. Well, maybe not like me or you. But anyway, businesses are run by people, okay. So, if you want to make change happen, you have to make people like you. So, take people out for lunch. Be nice to them. Socialize with people. Pick up the phone to people. Speak to them. E-mails are a very cold form of communication. Instead, try and build a rapport with people. Again, whether in-house or in agency, just make people like you. Make people understand where you’re coming from, understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. If people don’t value or understand why you’re doing something, they are far less likely to actually make that change happen.
So, make people like you, and face-to-face meetings are crucial to this. I think, again, whether you are in-house or agency side, face-to-face meetings and beers and lunch, all of that will actually make change happen, because when people meet you face to face, they are so much nicer, they are so much warmer, and you’re so much more able to actually convince them that what you are recommending or what you are working on is important to them.
There is a favorite saying within Distilled, which is that communication solves all problems. So, if you are ever stuck with the question of how to make SEO happen, think about communicating with somebody. Whether it is somebody on your team, whether it’s your boss, whether it’s the client, whoever it is, communicate with somebody, and that’s how change will get done. Don’t write a 50-page report.
All right. Thanks guys.
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