Through integration with the Open Graph API, third party content appears to users as updates through the timeline, news feed and ticker — allowing users to interact with content directly through Facebook, while observing the activities of their friends and receiving social recommendations accordingly.

This stuff is gold dust for any SEOs/Developers working with sites that regularly produce or host engaging online content/resources - be that blog posts, videos, apps, images, informational resources or any content form which involves active engagement from the user base.  If you’ve got any sort of engaged community that typically visits your site on a regular/semi-regular basis — you need to be thinking about building an open graph app in order to catapult that engagement to a new level and really begin to see ROI from social media. It’s not complicated to do and to explain the whole system to us, Distilled have brought in an expert.

Mixcloud’s Mat Clayton, a frequent speaker at distilled conferences popped into the office to give us the low-down on Open Graph — what it is, how it works and how you can use it to increase traffic and user engagement.  

Here are the topics and resources covered in the video:

1. What is Open Graph?

Mat covers the basics of Open Graph, explaining “Objects” and “Actions” concept and how some of the biggest sites in the world are using it to improve social media ROI. For more information, Facebook have a great page Explaining the Open Graph and a page Explaining how the ticker works with Apps.

2. Enabling your App for Social Graph

Mat explains the process of creating an app, some of the technical elements involved, and how you need to think of the Open Graph concepts as relating to elements of your content. For further reading, check out Facebook’s excellent tutorial for building an Open Graph App. To start creating your app, you will need to register at Facebook Developers Center

3. Social Plugins with Open Graph

Facebook’s social plugins, such as Facepile are the core of building functionality into your site, which encourages users to link up their activity on your site with their activities on Facebook. Mat explains the conversion value of these social plugins with Open Graph functionality.

4. Authenticated Referrals

Mat explains what authenticated referrals are and how the system helps to dramatically improve brand awareness and engagement from users who may have never even visited your site prior to discovery through Facebook.

Phil Nottingham Phil is an SEO Analyst at Distilled London, where he specialises in video, wacky link-building strategies and complaining about poor design.

Follow @philnottingham

Phil Nottingham

With less than six weeks until LinkLove 2012 commences, we thought you might want a little insight in to what you can expect from this years line-up. We’ve been chatting and working closely with our speakers over the last couple of weeks. They are now busy wading and mining through data, testing theories and preparing hard to bring you the very latest tactics for link building. Here’s how the sessions are shaping up so far. Brace yourself, it’s going to be killer:

Schedule so far*:

Rand Fishkin - London and Boston

The process of link building sucks. We’ve all spent the hours slogging away, trying desperately to get a link from site after site, jealous of those “fun industries” where links simply pour in. Well, no more. Content can earn links in any niche – it just needs to be the right content, targeted at the right audience, promoted in the right way. In this presentation, Rand will walk through a process for doing just that – and winning the link battle through content that scales, engages and out-earns link “building” efforts every time.

Rhea Drysdale - Boston

Not all months were created equal. Businesses’ calendars vary through the year; based on their market, their own stage of growth and the flow of news. With careful planning, you can use all of this to your advantage. Without the planning, you’ll never achieve the results you want at your most critical times of year. Rhea is bringing detailed tips and ideas for getting the best results throughout the year.

Branko Rihtman - London

We love science at Distilled. Branko brings science. He’s going to be educating us all on the ways he applies scientific techniques to his work and, in particular, showing us his methodology for determining what kinds of social sharing actually bring links. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to make content and promotion plans based on actual data rather than gut feel and guess work.

Kris Roadruck - London

Kris has never been shy about pointing out that there are greyhat tactics that still work. We know, however, that we are never going to recommend that kind of thing to our clients – and nor do most of you. We’ve asked Kris to share the things about an industry or set of search results that make him turn towards the light. What beats grey? What can you and your clients do to dominate enough that the greyhats stay away from your space?

Adam Audette - Boston

It’s all very well building links to non-commercial content, but you need to round out your plans with links to your money pages as well. There’s no-one better to present the best ways of getting links to product pages, category pages and the like than Adam Audette.

Wil Reynolds - London and Boston

Wil’s on a mission to provide you with the most actionable advice. He won’t be satisfied unless more delegates implement more of his ideas than any other speaker. He’s shared a few of the tips with us already – and there are some blinders. Building targets, building relationships and building links – it’s all there.

Jane Copland - London

No link is impossible. Jane has built links from the hardest link targets on the web. Want to identify and nail the hardest golden links? Jane’s going to show you how.

Ross Hudgens - Boston

You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. In fact, Ross would argue that you should normally be standing on the shoulders of giants. Understand what has worked (and how!) in your industry, for your competitors and for others with similar profiles – then recreate it, only better. You can get to #1 this way as long as you innovate on top of what others are doing and scale it better.

John Doherty - Boston

Link building tools are improving and proliferating rapidly. John’s going to show us the state of the art tools – from the freebies to those at enterprise level. He’ll then show us all how to recreate the benefits of the expensive enterprise tools on a constrained budget.

Tom Anthony - London

How and why we link to pages is changing. New technologies change our definition of “link-worthy” and new social tools change the way we recommend pages. Tom is going to talk about the attributes of pages that get links and how you can build links with smart development.

Will and Tom Critchlow - London / Boston

The brothers are giving a pair of presentations split between London and Boston (the provisional plan is to make the other half available to each audience on video). They are going to be presenting their “methodology for fame” – the recipes and checklists they believe propel businesses from good to great online.

Mike King - London

The stuff Mike is going to present is just as cool as you would expect. It’s currently so secret, I can’t even give a hint as to what it is. OK – just a little hint – making outreach effective – in his own unique style.

*Subject to change

Too excited to wait? Here’s some Pro tips to keep you fuelled:

Add these tips to your site

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/36705199?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" frameborder="0" width="640" height="360"></iframe><br><span style="font-size: 12px;">Linkbuilding protips from <a href="http://www.distilled.net/events">Distilled Conferences</a>

Network. Now. 

Remember Tom’s pro tip about building relationships? Well we’ve set up a dedicated group on LinkedIn for you to network before, during and after LinkLove 2012 with fellow attendees on both sides of the Atlantic. Use this group to gain links, ask questions, and network. We’ll be keeping this group updated regularly with more information, so keep an eye out.

Still not registered your place?

Don’t miss out on the only specialist link building conference around. We’re set to sell out, so register your place now, and if you need any more convincing on why you should attend LinkLove 2012, I urge you to read this post and watch the video:

Need buy-in from your boss? This ROI story should just about cut-it. Thank you David, we are stoked to have been one of the reasons for your companies amazing success. We’d love to hear about any other success stories and achievements which have directly stemmed from attending our conference. Get in touch @distilled #linklove.

Learnch: get involved. Educate. 

Here at Distilled we have an internal meme for learning at lunch, we’ve taken that into our conferences and now run topic tables during the lunch break. You can sign up to a table when you register on the morning of the conference. We’ll have some of our consultants hosting, plus some guest hosts. We have a couple of tables that we are opening to the floor, so what would you like to discuss? Do you want to host a table? Get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.

Hope to see you all there! Oh and don’t forget about the FREE site clinics, one on one time with our consultants. Did I mention they were free? Email events@distilled.net to register your appointment now.

Lynsey Little is the Events Manager for our search conferences in the UK and US, based out of the London office. She can often be found running around the conference venues in a red dress.

Follow @lynslittle

Lynsey Little

I’m not going to lie, most have fallen by the wayside already – however one which seems to have stuck (for now at least) is reading more books. First up – Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin.

I figured I really ought to read this – not just because everyone else already has done, but because whilst I don’t think SEO is dead – I do think that our remit as SEOs is changing. The most common question we’re asked as SEOs is ‘Why doesn’t my site rank?’ – and I’m guessing our most common response (technical issues aside) is ‘No one’s linking to you.’

However that response, whilst true, is often a symptom of a much bigger issue – namely that the site doesn’t deserve to rank.

There are many reasons why a site might not deserve to rank – a product or service that’s undifferentiated, lacks a USP, is un-targeted, the site looks like a MySpace page, there’s no content (I could go on).

Perhaps we ought to answer like this instead -

“Your product / service and site content is unremarkable. Your site doesn’t speak to your consumer. You’ve failed to engage with your audience.”

Even if it’s true, it’s difficult to say in polite company – it’s like calling someone’s baby ugly.

But if you really want to move the needle, you need to make big changes. Meatball Sundae is about exactly that – Making large scale changes.

“New marketing doesn’t demand better marketing. It demands better products, better services and better organisations.”

~ Seth Godin

In his book Seth identifies the key trends which he sees are scuppering many companies efforts online. Here’s a quick and dirty run down:

Trend One – Direct communication & commerce between producers and consumers

This is about permission marketing and the elimination of middle-men. Rather than trying to dig up customers for existing products, companies can create products specifically for sub-sets of customers – like Threadless.

Trend Two – Amplification of the Voice of the Consumer

Thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc – consumers all have a voice:

Trend 3 – Getting your story straight, everywhere

Saying one thing, but doing another fails – because you’ll get caught:

Get your story straight everywhere.

Trend 4 – Extremely short attention spans

Complex messages rarely get through. Keep it short and simple. Break down barriers to entry.

Trend 5 – The Long Tail

If you’re an SEO you already get this. There’s more opportunity in the long tail – ’nuff said.

Trend 6 – Outsourcing

“Either what you’re doing is repetitive, in which case you ought to outsource it, or it’s homemade, insightful and filled with initiative and judgement, in which case you can charge for it.” ~ Seth Godin.

Actually I got a little lost in this chapter. Outsourcing can be perilous – not everything can be outsourced. I think he’s saying figure out what you can outsource to save costs, but keep your eye on the ball.

Trend 7 – Google & the dicing of everything

This feeds into the Long Tail idea. It’s also given rise to businesses which only deal with the long tail. Think companies that sell single plates so consumers can replace the specific pieces of their fine china that they’ve broken.

Trend 8 – Infinite Channels of Communication

This trend is about very targeted messaging. Think AdWords – putting your product / service right in front of the people who are searching for it right now. It’s infinitely cheaper than running TV ads which hit lots of people somewhat indiscriminately, right?

Trend 9 – Direct communication & commerce between consumers

Online has opened up new, peer-to-peer business models. Think betting exchanges like BetFair, e-commerce sites like eBay and Etsy.

Trend 10 – The shift in scarcity & abundance

This is about exploiting scarcity and having the flexibility to move and change your organisation if what was once scarce becomes abundant.

Think bricks and mortar music shops versus iTunes… But what’s next? Could cloud subscription services like Spotify be the future?

Trend 11 – The Triumph of Big Ideas

In a noisy marketplace you need big ideas that make people sit up and take notice – think Oyster disrupting the crowded hotel booking marketplace. This is the trend which I feel is probably most important.

Trend 12 – The shift from how many? To who?

Mass is no longer desirable or (perhaps) achievable. Here Seth highlights that media like AdWords is more cost-effective than say TV or print advertising.

It is of course difficult to argue with a statement like that, but the marketer in me can’t help but feel that it’s a little simplistic. More on this later

Trend 13 – The Wealthy are like us

I don’t feel like the title of this trend really encapsulates the key point – essentially Seth says the bell curve on price is reversing so -

“The middle (which would have been mass-market previously) is now over-priced and under-exclusive.”

I think he’s highlighting general consumer fatigue with the mediocre. Stuff either needs to be dirt cheap (because we still love cheap if we don’t care too much about the product) or amazeballs and exclusive – in which case we’ll part with our hard-earned (because if we care about it we’ll happily pay extra for it).

Right now too many brands are in the mediocre middle. They lack differentiation. Consumers don’t care about them. These are the guys which are probably struggling to rank. (NB this is my spin on it).

Trend 14 – New Gatekeepers / No Gatekeepers

I did like this as a trend, I’m just not quite convinced it’s 100% true. Seth says that thanks to YouTube we don’t need the old boy network anymore. He claims that you don’t need to get your face on TV or in magazines… And that’s almost true. I think that it’s just that there are more gatekeepers.

For example, if you’re a singer you need to go viral on YouTube, then hopefully Ellen Degeneres will have you on her show and sign you. Old media’s still influential. Also virality is an imprecise science  with far more misses than hits

Nevertheless I think it stands that if your idea isn’t good enough to go viral then you’ll have big problems.

Ok – so this post is turning into a monster. What do I think? I think it is a good book. It is something which I think you should probably read (no, reading this blog post doesn’t count).

However I do think that traditional marketing tactics are still valid and important today. Yep – I’m going to say it. Out loud. On an SEO blog:

“TV is still an important part of the Marketing Mix”

~Hannah Smith

There are still companies out there who have managed to differentiate themselves based largely on successful TV campaigns, rather than making material changes to their products or services:

Old Spice

Here’s a brand who managed to re-position themselves based on some fantastic TV ad creative, plus some lovely online engagement in the form of bespoke videos created specifically for influencers.

Compare the Meerkat

Insurance aggregators are all essentially the same so Compare the Market got creative with meerkats – but the product hasn’t changed.

Wonga

Nice re-positioning of pay day loans.

What do each of these companies owe a large chunk of their success to? TV advertising. Sure, it isn’t the cure-all it once was, but I think it’s fair to say that none of the brands above would have seen the success they’ve seen without it. Do all companies need TV advertising budgets? No, but I think they play a larger part than Seth seems to indicate.

What’s good about the book?

It encourages you to think bigger – a beautiful, interactive infographic executed well and with sufficient promotion will get you links, but it won’t stop your product / service / website / customer service from sucking. You’ll need to fix that too and that’s much harder than creating something pretty.

What’s missing?

I love the idea of encouraging companies to think bigger, be better etc. However I feel that the process of  influencing people to make these sweeping changes is glossed over…

“…understand that the challenge isn’t to persuade the CEO to get his act together; it’s to start doing the right stuff in the trenches… and watch it filter up.” ~ Seth Godin.

Is this really the best idea? Just go and do stuff? That might not go down so well in some organisations. I might be reading this wrong, but I think the process ought to include getting buy in from senior Execs and some guidance as to how to go about this would’ve been a welcome addition.

Did you read this whole post? Even after I said that thing about TV still being important?

Wow. You deserve this picture of a kitten:

But seriously, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Meatball Sundae and what I’ve written here. I’d also really appreciate recommendations of other books I should read.

Image credits – Meatballs & Kitten

While it’s not strictly on-topic for all of our audience, the regularity with which I’m asked about this stuff definitely qualifies for FAQ status among owners of agencies and consultancies. I hope you find it useful.

Planning

Plans are nothing; planning is everything — Dwight D. Eisenhower

I thought I hated planning. I realised, though, that what I really hate are plans. It’s so constrictive to be forced to do things the way you said you were going to, isn’t it?

Planning, though, when done right is pretty exciting. I’m talking here about strategic planning – working out what you can do differently to achieve your over-arching objectives. If you are getting down and dirty with the gantt charts, you’re not planning – you’re project managing (see below).

At the beginning of every project and as often as you need to keep things on track, you should be clarifying objectives, identifying opportunities and creating the plan of attack to achieve those objectives.

Planning is a time for realistic optimism. You want people excited about the opportunities, but believing they are achievable. You should have a fierce eye on the true business objectives.

Project management

The first thing to realise is that you can be engaging in project management even when there is no obvious project. When you find yourself in that situation, your top priority is to identify the project clearly (along with who cares about it, what you’re trying to get done, and by when you need it done). I find myself in that situation frequently – managing things that aren’t part of a well-defined project. I am working hard to get better at sharing my views of what we’re trying to get done by when.

My definition of project management is probably different to that of anyone who specialises in this area full time:

Ensuring and helping everyone involved get done the things they’ve already promised to do — me

I don’t subscribe to the view of project manager as slave-driver. In knowledge businesses, the actors are (hopefully!) smart, well-motivated and self-directed. They tend not to respond well to diktats or ultimatums. Unless you have the power to fire someone (and are prepared actually to do so if they don’t do this little thing exactly your way) then in my opinion, you are onto a loser trying to be the drill sergeant anywhere outside the military.

I read an article from Joel Spolsky on AVC today about management teams.

Management is a support function — Joel Spolsky

If you manage people, I encourage you to read it carefully and think about how you are supporting the team you work for (it’s certainly making me think). Note that I think there is an important part of the story Joel has missed out – which is that leadership != management. It is easy to confuse the functions because they are often performed by the same people, but while I like Joel’s article wearing my “manager” hat, I would strongly argue that if he thinks that’s all CXX roles (should) do then he’s either misguided or overpaying. I talk more about leadership below.

Getting back to the management side of things, if you are managed (which applies to almost everyone in the business world) you need to shoulder the responsibility for all the things that you previously thought were “management’s job”. If management is there to support you in being awesome, are you putting your effort into being awesome? Don’t get stuck waiting for management to fix things.

This is why I believe that project management is all about ensuring and helping people do the things they’ve already promised. Ideally those promises come from them (they’re the ones at the coal-face, perfectly placed to make those decisions) – but life gets in the way. When managing a project, you need to hear about changing realities or changing assumptions and let everyone who needs to hear them know.

When wearing my project management hat, I’m trying more and more to focus on two core functions:

1. check in regularly to hear how things are going and what’s changed
2. communicate status back to the rest of the world that needs to know about it

Buried in the second task is a hidden subtlety. “Needs to know”. I personally don’t propose Apple-esque secrecy and CIA-style “need to know”, but we need to realise that the opposite (pro-actively tell everyone everything) can result in drowning in information. Cultivate the art of the status update. Put the punchline in the subject line of the email where you can. Clearly flag FYI vs. action emails. Summarise. Shorten.

A framework I was taught by one of our board members is RACI – for every project consider:

• Who is Responsible for day to day progress on this project
• Who is Accountable if it all goes wrong
• Who needs Consulting to extract valuable insight or opinions
• Who needs Informing of progress

Line management

It’s easy to blur the lines between line management and project management (and into micro-management). I’ve been guilty in the past of conflating the concept of being a line manager with being “someone’s boss”. Line management as we (try to) practice it at Distilled should be about personal happiness, productivity and progress. Of course, this overlaps into projects where they impact directly on one of those things, but we should realise who has the power to fix what. Line managers typically aren’t project managers on all their direct reports’ projects.

For me, line management is all about removing road-blocks to self-improvement. I am a strong believer in “learning, not training”. I will happily share my accumulated knowledge, thoughts and prejudices (some would say too readily) – but I’d rather do it in response to demand from curious people than as a broadcast to yes-men who are forced to listen because I’m “in charge”.

Line management should largely happen in private, should be a place where tough feedback can be given (and collected) and should focus on the individual.

Leadership

The most mythical of them all.

Like many people who have started businesses, I’m intrigued by leadership. I don’t think of myself as a leader in any kind of traditional sense – yet my role involves steering ever-increasing numbers of people. Given the option to force them there or to lead them there, I’ll choose leadership please.

We aren’t going to train you, we’re going to try to kill you — SAS training manual

Wherever you are in the organisation, remember that the more you subscribe to Joel’s upside-down hierarchy above, you don’t get to lead by authority. You need to lead people to support your projects, your ideas and your direction. You can do any of this without it saying “leader” on your business card.

Here’s how I’d like to be led (I still fall short of many of these). My ideal leader would be:

• Logical. I have little patience for illogical arguments (though see “passionate” below)
• Coherent. Able to express their views and defend them against robust criticism
• Passionate. Logic and data only get you so far. Emotion is important, but try not to delude yourself. Take a position but be…
• Wrong (sometimes). If you aren’t ever wrong / don’t ever allow yourself to admit to being wrong, you’re either only taking safe bets or you’re not being intellectually honest.
• Visionary. In the sense of talking about the future. Describe how you expect the future to be – right or wrong, you can bring with you those who agree
• (the right kind of) detail-oriented. I don’t think you need to be naturally inclined to dot every i and cross every t (I hope you don’t!). I do think you need to be great at remembering the existence of tiny details. It’s rare in my experience for great leaders to be blind-sided by a forgotten detail
• Heads-up. If you want to lead, you have to resign yourself to living in a world of knock-on effects. When you get it right, you’ll have anticipated the impacts on all the diverse areas of the business. I want to write more about this soon – particularly prompted by Wil Reynolds’ amazingly open post recently on the unintended side-effects of bonus scheme structures

I would say I score relatively well on being logical, coherent, the right kind of detail-oriented and heads-up. I score myself less well on (communicating) passion, vision and admitting when I’m wrong.

What do you think? Are those the right things to strive for? Who would you say epitomises the different traits? Anyone got them all?

Image credit: Shutterstock – concert conductor hands.

Why companies struggle with content marketing

Two of the common problems that many companies have with content production are -

• Resource to create content – many do not have time or specialist writers in-house
• They lack ideas of what content they can create or their industry is “boring”

There are more, but these are probably the consistent ones that I hear.

I am hoping that the rest of this post helps solve these problems.  I’ve given the following examples for a few reasons -

• Most of them can be used across most industries – boring or not
• They don’t all require hours and hours of resource to get done
• They will help you get traffic or links or both

Getting Inspiration

Before diving into examples, I wanted to give some pointers and tools for how to get inspiration for your clients content. It can be difficult at times, particularly if you have a client in an industry that doesn’t seem particularly interesting at first glance.

Brainstorming internally and with the client

First step should be a bit of a no brainer. But remember some key points to running a good brainstorm session and don’t overlook the opportunity to brainstorm with your client if that is an option. This can have lots of advantages, one of which being that the client can veto or approve edgy ideas straight away. So the outcome will be a list of ideas which you know you can get sign off for which makes the time you send researching more focused.

Non-competitor analysis

You all know to look at what competitors are doing, again thats a no brainer. But make sure you look outside your vertical too and see what cool stuff other people are doing, sometimes you’ll come across an idea that can be easily applied to your own niche or a concept that can be applied to your own content.  For example, with the right data, could you become the Ok Cupid of your industry?

Spezify

I’ve mentioned this before but its worth mentioning again. I love Spezify. If you are ever in a jam and have a bit of brain freeze, plug a keyword or two into it and leave it for a few minutes. It will go off and aggregate loads of tweets, images and all sorts of other results to give you an idea of what is being talked about right now.

For some extra fun, plug a friend or colleagues name into it and see what it finds

So what here we go with seven types of content you can produce for traffic and link building.

Video Content

This is something which is getting bigger and bigger within Google SERPs at the moment and I think that websites that get on board with this now can dominate in the future. For me, there are two ways you can leverage video content to help your website.

As a link building tool – I’ve written before about getting links using your YouTube videos which is something I’d highly recommend. The other way you can leverage videos is to create your own and use them as link bait – but this is hard. If you have the resources, then go for it and create your own videos.  Just take a look at Zappos who have over 50,000 product videos!

This leads me onto the second way you can leverage video content.

To increase click-throughs from SERPs - Take a look at this result from Zappos:

This puts them a step ahead (see what I did there) of their competitors.  If they can get to a point where their product pages are ranking well and have these snippets showing, then they will most likely see an increase in click through rate from search results because they stand out so much.

We’ve been doing some testing lately on a client site where we are trying to get a video showing in SERPs which when clicked, go straight to the client site rather than somewhere like Vimeo or YouTube.  So far its been working well and I’d recommend using something like Wistia to help you with this.

Infographics

I’ll say it, I don’t really like them that much.  The reason being that I see so many terrible ones that can’t even be classed as infographics.  I also think there are sometimes easier and more efficient ways to get links.  That being said, they can (and do) get links.  If you have the time and resource to do them well, then infographics can be a good way of getting links.

I’ve stolen a few principles from Mark which I’m going to put here.  Really, infographics should do the following if they are to be successful -

• Answer a question or solve someones problem
• Be based on real data that can be backed up
• Make data or facts easier to digest than written content
• Show the user something they didn’t already know

If you do have a good infographic to promote, there are loads of sites out there which are dedicated to just infographics, I published a list here of the ones which I know of.

I know what some of you are thinking, infographics are mega expensive to produce.  Yes they can be, but they do not have to be.  Take a look at this one which Mark did on his personal site which attracted 115 linking root domains.  All he used was a camera and some nice cake mix!

Interactive Content

This excites me a lot more than static infographics.  For me, the companies who find a way of bridging the gap between their product and interactive content will win in the long term.  Lets take a look at an example.

I love this World Cup planner by Marca.  Imagine if you were a retailer of tickets for the World Cup and you produced this.  Imagine you could click through and purchase tickets for the game of your choice, but rather than the standard way of finding them, you use this interactive selector?

This is a perfect use of interactive content because it attracts people to your website for being genuinely useful, but it doesn’t end there, you can convert these people into buyers with the right integration and calls to action.

The next step of link building and content marketing is the integration of this interactive content onto product and category pages – solving the age old problem of getting links to ecommerce pages.  Do this and you’ll win the internet – its hard though!

Q&A Content

If you are tight on budget, this can be a great one to use.  Chances are that whatever product or service you sell, you get common questions about it.  If you have email support staff, they probably have standard copy and paste answers that go into emails – is that content on your website and indexable?  If not, get it on there.

The beauty of this type of content is that it has the ability to attract traffic as well as links, in particular in technical fields.  Also, it is obvious that Google are moving towards becoming a better place to get direct answers to questions, searches such as this prove it -

The trend for users searching using a question rather than a keyword is growing too, look at the insight data for “how can” and “does the” -

If you can position yourself as a site where you provide direct answers, you will not only get good long tail traffic, but you will also move towards becoming an authority in your field.

Make sure you take a look at the Wordtracker Question Tool which can give you some ideas of what people ask related to your keywords.  Also look at your keyword data in Google Analytics and filter for keywords which include things like “how” “what” and “can” etc.

Bonus for ecommerce sites – if you can tie Q&A content into your product pages, you have a massively scalable way of getting good quality, relevant content onto your product pages.  Here is an example of how Jessops are doing this -

I don’t believe this content is currently crawlable, but if it were, long tail traffic would most likely increase.

User Generated Content

You’ve all read about customer reviews as user generated content, but what about other forms of content such as images or videos?  Amazon have been doing this for a long time now but smaller retailers are doing this too, even this retailer that sells garden sheds -

You may need to add an incentive to get customers to go to the effort of this, but even if its just a 10% off voucher, some will do it and you have another sale.

Pro tip – make sure you are asking these customers if they have a blog, Facebook or Twitter accounts.  If they do, send them appropriate calls to action to get them to share the images once they are live on your site.

Guest Blogging

I bet most of us have spent time guest blogging to get links for clients, but how many of you have invited guest bloggers onto your blog to write for you?  It has two main advantages -

• Allows you to get good content if your own resource or time is short
• The writers will naturally share it and link to their article

You will need to dedicate some time to quality control, but this will not be anywhere near as much as you writing the content yourself.

Taking things a step further, you can also use a few principles of gamification to motivate your guest bloggers.  For example you can reward bloggers who get the most traffic, most links or social shares with a random prize.  The key is to make this reward publicly visible and be super transparent about how bloggers can win these prizes.

Competitions

Don’t dismiss this one.  If you can get creative enough, this can not only be a content win but also a link building one.

If you can find a way of coming up with a competition which involves people producing content in order to win, you are onto a winner.  Here is an example of this on PostGrad which involved getting entrants to visualise a piece of data.  The best visualisation won the competition and was featured on the blog.  This not only got links but provided great content for their site -

You can be pretty flexible on the type of content you ask for -

• Written content such as a blog post
• Images – e.g. baiting photographers for their best photos
• Videos – e.g. record a video of yourself singing a song

Some thought it needed to make sure the barrier to entry is low but the quality of the output is high, but this is definitely possible across most industries.

To wrap up, I know that producing great content is not easy.  But you need to at least make a start on the path to getting it right, online brands who are not investing in content are going to get left behind.

Why SEOs Should Care About Content Marketing

We demand budgets and resources from our clients in order to produce content. We are hungry for and passionate about content. And not just content that will rank for keywords, but content that will be remarkable- content that will earn links and content that will convert users into customers. We should care about content marketing. We should understand how it works, how brands produce content, and what innovation looks like. There is rumbling within the SEO industry towards more cross-disciplinary inbound marketing and as we make this shift and become involved in these projects, it will become crucial to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

To be crystal clear, content marketing is not article marketing or spun press releases. We’re talking about editorial remarkable content that a brand can be proud of.

Content Marketing is Hot Right Now

Content marketing is undergoing massive growth right now and we’re seeing a revolution take place across all aspects of online marketing. One of the most widely shared and high profile examples is Coke’s recent 2020 content strategy. These videos are long, but essential watching if you want to understand how brands are going to be spending their marketing budgets in the coming years:

Props to Joe Pulizzi for covering this originally.

Brands Are Becoming Publishers

As hinted at in the above videos, brands are starting to wake up to the fact that generating unique and compelling content is the key to winning online. As some are lamenting the death of the publishing industry, publishing for brands is undergoing a revolution. Brands like Redbull are leading the charge:

Red Bull, the popular energy drink, supports its content strategy with just that foundation, though, owning its very own Red Bull Media House. [...] RedBull.com covers all of its digital bases, with an offering of web TV, web radio, online games, newsfeeds and digital databases. [...] And to date, nearly 300 million YouTube views have been generated from Red Bull content, making Red Bull Media House one of the top five sports content producers on YouTube globally – source

Props to Erica at Contently for writing the post about Red Bull’s content strategy

But Smart Publishers Are Doing Just Fine, Thanks

Let’s not count the old school publishers as down and out just yet though. Those that get the web and embrace the new world of content consumption and marketing are thriving:

The Atlantic, the intellectual’s monthly that always seemed more comfortable as an academic exercise than a business, is on track to turn a tidy profit of $1.8 million this year. That would be the first time in at least a decade that it had not lost money – source

You should read the whole NYT piece on the profile of The Atlantic, it’s a fascinating #longread.

The Observer is profitable by a thin margin for the first time in its 24-year history. This is a big, big deal. – source

This is a quote from Elizabeth Spiers, Editor in Chief for the Observer, and is part of a fascinating look at the Observer one year in.

Everyone Is Producing Original Content

There’s a real macro trend here for companies to start producing original content. UGC-driven communities are doing it:

The popular social blogging site Tumblr is hiring writers and editors to cover the world of Tumblr. [...] “Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” Ms. Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.” – source

Content juggernauts like Netflix are doing it:

Up until now, Netflix has not had content in this first window. Instead, they’ve focused on the second or third or even fourth window. That is, they’ve shown content after it’s in theaters or on television for its initial run. And sometimes they don’t get content until after it’s been in theaters and then on television for quite some time. This catalog of content has been the service’s bread and butter.But with House of Cards, the game changes. For the first time, they’re going to get people signing up to Netflix to get first access to content. And if it’s as good as the talent behind it suggests, they might get a lot of people signing up for that very reason – source

A Focus On Engagement Is One Emergent Trend

Smart marketers have known this for a while: there’s real value in not only sucking users in with content, but also keeping them engaged once they hit the site.

in a front-page story in December, Donna St. George reported that black students in the D.C. area were suspended and expelled two to five times as often as whites. That story attracted 3,736 comments, more than 2,000 of those by 9 o’clock in the morning – source

Wow. By the way you should check out the full article where among other fascinating insights I learned that the Washington Post has 6 full time staff dedicated to comments.

From a technology perspective, I’m fascinated by features like Disqus Ranks that allows anyone to better reward and engage with commenters on their site.

Bold Content Plays Is Another Emergent Trend

Fortune favors the bold. There have been some bold redesigns and rethinking of the traditional blog format in recent times. I love the FastCo redesign:

Read more about the redesign here

And it’s worth noting that the Gawker redesign actually worked.

Disruptive Business Models Are Another

As the old-school traditional ad model starts to die out, we’ll see more innovative and disruptive revenue models for content. Retargeting is just the start of this revolution and we’ll see all kinds of crazy approaches. In particular I was struck by how Buzzfeed monetizes their site:

Its business model, in part, capitalizes on the mix of high and low content; instead of banner ads, BuzzFeed works with companies like Pillsbury to create content ideal for sharing, including “10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do With a Crescent Roll.” – source

What Can We Learn From All This?

I’m a fan of actionable insights and I think there are a few key takeaways that I can see:

1) Being Remarkable Produces Outsized Rewards

In the connected world in which we live, the difference between average content and bad content is hardly noticeable. In fact, the difference between good content and bad content is not that big. Truly, the only thing that really gets rewarded is remarkable content. If you’re investing in content production, always invest in the most amazing, ballsy, exceptional content that you can get your hands on because if you build it, they won’t come. This quote sums things up for me:

We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic – source

This is a quote from a fascinating article about the growth of Salon.com – check the whole thing out

2) Hire a Chief Content Officer

I spoke about the need for a Chief Content Officer in my SearchLove presentation in NYC and this is a trend that businesses of all size need to follow. The key point here is that this role needs to be senior enough to oversee all kinds of content production. David Edelman agrees with me:

Our research shows that in companies where the marketing function takes on the role of publisher in chief—rationalizing the creation and flow of product related content— consumers develop a clearer sense of the brand and are better able to articulate the attributes of specific products. These marketers also become more agile with their content, readily adapting it to sales training videos and other new uses that ultimately enhance consumers’ decision journey – source

This is a quote from the full version of this article (which you’ll need to register to be able to read) and the whole thing is well worth a read.

3) Invest in Page Types

As Sonia points out at Copyblogger, every page is now a landing page and it’s important for both social and SEO to invest in crafting excellent page types. I always point to Oyster.com as the gold standard here with their large imagery and massively detailed content, but really more sites are starting to get this. If you’re not investing in making your content pages be excellent pages with thick content, then you’re going to get left behind by those that are investing in their page types:

4) SEOs Are Perfectly Placed To Engage In Content Marketing

Smart SEOs are already doing content marketing as part of their online marketing strategies and have been for some time. Our skillset matches extremely well with what it takes to win at content marketing. In particular, we understand the whole process. In summary, producing content looks like this for us here at Distilled:

1. Researching & identifying influencers and communities
2. Keyword research & analysis
3. Competitive content research
4. Creative content generation
5. Outreach and promotion
6. Analytics, measurement and tracking

I’ll end this post by highlighting an in-depth analysis of what content promotion looks like and how a simple guest post can be more powerful than many other mainstream content channels:

In previous times, before the Internet, this was called the Oprah Effect. And don’t get me wrong, I’d still leap at the opportunity to share my message on cable with arguably the most persuasive person who ever walked the planet. (Producers—you can reach me via my website!)But as more of our attention (and our book buying) shifts online, its only natural that the mantle Oprah held for a quarter of a century in introducing readers to new books, shifts to a digital native.And in my opinion, the digital native who has taken up that mantle in the book world, is Tim Ferriss – source

Go read the whole piece, it’s fascinating and detailed.

We do an awful lot of guest posting as SEOs, and we’re already valuing the benefits of this above and beyond a simple link. Now is the time to understand content marketing.

Image Credit:  Movable Type www via Bigstock

Tom Critchlow Tom Critchlow is VP Operations for the NYC office, living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan. Fiercely curious about most things and passionate about everything.

Follow @tomcritchlow

Tom Critchlow

You may recognize me from Twitter or other SEO communities around the web like SEOmoz. If not, nice to meet you! I run Evolving SEO in Massachusetts. Just like to thank Tom Critchlow for offering me the opportunity to guest post on the Distilled site. This is my first guest post ever. I hope I fulfill your expectations!

Tom Suggested I Write About This Google Search For “Fave”

It all started on a recent Wednesday. I went down to NYC for the Distilled SEO for E-Commerce Meetup. Tom and I were chatting. He had recently read my post on some weird IMDB results in Bing and thought I’d be gullible (ummm… I mean excited) enough to write about this strange Google search for “fave”:

What we both found strange about it was:

• The page had no page authority
• Google did not suggest a spell correction
• The amount of search volume for “fave” (you’ll have to view the slideshow for that)

I had a lot of questions:

• Did the result have something to do with “fave” being the beginning of a misspelling for “facebook”?
• Was there something else that SHOULD rank for “fave” that wasn’t?
• How COULD something else rank for “fave” if you wanted it to?
• And importantly, what can we LEARN from this and apply in practice?

I love these sorts of indexation mysteries, so naturally I thought it was a fantastic idea, thanks for letting me take the wheel on this one Tom!

Like my post on IMDB, this seemed to present best via slideshow – so get your forward and back buttons ready, and check out what I found! Its a nail biter! I’ve included some extra info and resources below:

Three Step Approach

I break my approach into a three step hierarchy:

1. Does this matter? – If there’s not many searches for “fave” or search intent is too generalized across users, than it doesn’t matter so much we’re getting weird search results.
2. WHY do things rank like this? – Once we know it matters, I want to know what’s causing it to rank like that? There must be something beneath the surface.
3. What can we learn from this? – Finally, it a cause is identified, how can we learn from this? What can we learn about the SEO research/diagnostic process? And are there any takeaways for leveraging the findings to apply to real life situations?

Links To Resources Used

Where Can You Find Me Next…?

Conferences

March 19 – 23 – SES NYC. I will be part of a sponsored session doing a live site review and a case study. Exact day/time TBD.

April 2nd, 2012 – I will be at LinkLove Boston / Atlantic as an attendee. You should come!!!

The ‘Net

I’ll be branching out to YouMoz! Starting with an update to this post Rand did a while back on more weird Google results. Didn’t ask him, so hopefully he won’t mind

Do I got straight into the code? Do I navigate around? Should I go straight into their backlink profile. I JUST DON’T KNOW!

Although these are all important, they may not give you a high-level understanding of the site and a clear picture of how the project should proceed. To tackle the “deer-in-the-headlights” approach I’ve put together 5 simple steps that will help you identify some common and crucial problems that are made. These steps are especially useful when you being speaking with a potential client and they want to know how you can help.

So away we go…

1) Duplicate Content

Why does it matter? Duplicate Content can be any site’s downfall. When there is more than one piece of the same content, it can make it difficult for search engines to distinguish between the original source and mere copies. This will then cause the search engines to present less relevant information, and more importantly to the site, lower rankings and traffic metrics.

How to check?

- Copy a snippet of text
- Paste the text in Google (or your search engine of choice )

- Analyze results!
If you want to be sure there isn’t duplicate content on your domain (which you should definitely do!) combine the above method with a site search. By doing this, your query will only return instances of duplicate text from said site.

2) Check Robots.txt

Why does it matter? Utilizing robots.txt can be super helpful when you’re trying to block the search engines from crawling certain pages or folders. However, this function can be just as detrimental if you do not implement it correctly. To be certain that a site isn’t blocking themselves (I’ve seen this..a few times!) or any of their own important content or pages; check the robots.txt file of the website.

How to check? Super easy! Taking Distilled as an example:

3) View the Cache Version of the page

Why does it matter? You’ve heard of cloaking right?! Don’t do it. By showing different content or URLs to Google you’re asking for a world of pain to be brought down upon your rankings and traffic. My advice, don’t wake a sleeping bear (that’s a saying right?!)

This check is also useful because you can see the last time Google crawled a specific page. This is important because you want your site to be crawled as frequently as possible, while a long lapse in time can indicate a possible penalty or crawling issues.

How to check? Again, super easy!

4) Canonicalization

Why does it matter? Just like duplicate content, having multiple versions of the same content across multiple locations can decrease your rankings, spread out your link equity, or more simply devalue your site.

How to check? Easy as pie. Check all the common versions of the site are redirecting to the canonical version:

http://www.example.com

http://example.com

http://www.example.com/index.html

http://example.com/index.html

http://www.example.com/INDEX.html

https://www.example.com/index.html

If the page loads the same content without redirecting then you’ve got some canonical issues, my friend. Don’t get too panicked though, this is a basic mistake that can be easily rectified.

5) Top Page Report

Why does it matter? You can often find missed opportunities by looking at the top pages report in Open Site Explorer(OSE). By doing this, you can see which pages have the most links pointing to them, as well as the response codes. For a site’s top pages, you want to ensure that they are in fact the site’s “top pages” (AKA most important) that return the right response code. If the page returns anything but a 200 or 301 that page might not be passing valuable link juice.

How to check? Input the site into OSE and analyze the top pages, linking root domains, and HTTP status codes.

Get to it!

So get to it! Hope this helps and remember, it’s as simple as pie. Specifically, pecan pie. mmmm

Julianne Staino is an SEO Analyst at Distilled NYC. She loves learning new SEO techniques and creative approaches to link building.

Follow @JulianneStaino

Julianne Staino

Recorded in crystal clear HD format at our leading industry conferences, we have over 50 hours of some of the brightest SEOs out there (Rand Fishkin, Will Critchlow, Wil Reynolds, Richard Baxter, Michael Gray, Rhea Drysdale and Bob Rains to name but a few) giving away their best tips, tricks and research.

Check out the trailer below for a taster of what these videos contain:

So all you need to do is register your details below and you’ll get 3 videos in the first month, and then we’ll send you a fresh new one every month from then on. Nice!

To that end, today we have announced DistilledU.

(logo possibly in progress)

You can sign up here to know when we launch it to the public. But let me tell you a bit more about DistilledU.

The Vision

DistilledU has been the brainchild of numerous people at Distilled, including Will, Tom, and myself. We love teaching people, as is evidenced by our SEO Events and SEO blog, both internally and externally.

We originally dreamed up DistilledU for our own internal purposes as we grow and train new hires, but we decided to be as transparent and helpful as possible, so therefore we are going to release it to the public.

As many as you know, we partnered with SEOmoz a few years ago. We see DistilledU as being complimentary to SEOmoz’s tools and resources. SEOmoz helps you to do SEO on your site or your client sites, though some SEO knowledge is required to use these tools to their full advantage. DistilledU is being created to help you learn SEO so that you can make better use of the tools and other resources available to you.

What’s in DistilledU?

I’m so glad you asked! The TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) version is that DistilledU will be a place for everyone to learn something new about SEO, or to learn SEO for the first time.

We’re creating checklists, videos, guides, linking to external resources, and generally trying to provide as much value as possible to everyone enrolled in DistilledU. We’ll also have different levels of achievements for you to attain as you move through the lessons and modules.

What Topics Are There?

Today is the first day that we have worked hardcore on it, and we’ve built out the following modules in their version 1, possibly beta-ready form. They are:

• Keyword Research
• Information Architecture
• Onsite Optimization
• Technical

We’ll be building out more materials, guides, spreadsheets, templates, and more as we go and as you tell us what would be useful!

Here are a few shots of what you will see once we open up the private beta:

A module, this one about Information Architecture. Many will include videos.

Tick off your accomplishments as you work through the modules

Test your new knowledge with flipcards (notecards for the web, essentially)

The Launch Plan

We need a few more weeks to build out more content so that DistilledU is as useful as possible to you. Then we plan to open it in private beta to work out remaining bugs and gather user feedback. Then as soon as we feel DistilledU is war-ready, we’ll launch!

Watch this space for updates. We’ll be in touch

Sign up for DistilledU now!

John Doherty is an SEO Consultant in the Distilled New York City office. John's work time is filled with data consumption and strategic awesomeness, while his free time consists of extreme sports, travel, and bad reality TV.

Follow @dohertyjf

John Doherty