How to filter like a power user to surface SEO problems from crawl data

Columnist Glenn Gabe shares various ways of filtering crawl data to obtain actionable insights. The post How to filter like a power user to surface SEO problems from crawl data appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://ift.tt/2pCycFV

If You're Attending MozCon 2017, You Should Definitely Pitch to be an Ignite Speaker

Posted by ronell-smith

Are you a good storyteller, able to hold a crowd at rapt attention for minutes at a time? Do you have a story you're bursting at the seams to share?

Well, ye olde yarn-spinner, a MozCon Ignite talk sounds like just the thing for you.

The five-minute talks have become quite a hit since being introduced in 2015, with talks leaving folks with belly aches from laughter or tears from personal heartache — and everything in between.

If you have an enticing story in you just waiting for an outlet, we'll supply the audience.

The MozCon 2017 Ignite talks — one of the signature networking events — take place Tuesday, July 18.

Buy your MozCon 2017 ticket!

---

Why should you care about Ignite talks?

Often called "lightning talks" for their emphasis on brevity, Ignite-style talks are five minutes in length and feature slides that automatically advance.

The short stories can pack a powerful punch, however, as anyone who saw Michael Cottam's 2016 Ignite talk can attest:

One attendee penned a heartfelt account of how Michael's talk helped him reprioritize his life — it's well-worth a good read. Make sure you have a tissue handy.

---

You can share your story, too, in 2017. There will be 10 speaking slots.

The only rule we have governing stories told during an Ignite talk is that they cannot relate to online marketing or feature anything resembling career advice.

This is your chance to show some personality.

Take a look at the topics covered from 2016:

• Help! I Can't Stop Sweating – Hyperhidrosis, by Adam Melson
• Life Lessons Learned as a Special Needs Parent, by Adrian Vender
• How Pieces of Paper Can Change Lives, by Anneke Kurt Godlewski
• Prison and a Girl that Loves Puppies, by Caitlin Boroden
• Embracing Fear, Potential Failure, and Plain Ol' Discomfort, by Daisy Quaker
• A Plane Hacker's Guide to Cheap *Luxury* Travel, by Ed Fry
• Embracing Awkward: The Tale of a 5' 10" 6th Grader, by Hannah Cooley
• Hornets, Soba, & Friends: A Race in Japan, by Kevin Smythe
• Wooly Bits: Exploring the Binary of Yarn, by Lindsay Dayton LaShell
• Finding Myself in Fiction: LGBTQUIA Stories, by Lisa Hunt
• Is Your Family Time for Sale? by Michael Cottam
• How to Start an Underground Restaurant in Your Home, by Nadya Khoja
• Flood Survival: Lessons from the Streets of ATL, by Sarah Lively
• How a Cartoon Saved My Life, by Steve Hammer

And, lucky for us all, Geraldine DeRuiter, aka the Everywhereist, will be back as emcee for the third time in as many years.

---

The deets: How to pitch for an Ignite talk

• Simply fill out the form below — you're limited to one submission
• Talks cannot be about online marketing or career-focused
• Current MozCon speakers are not able to pitch
• Previous MozCon Ignite presenters are not eligible
• Submissions close on Sunday, May 14 at 5pm PDT
• Selections will be made by early June
• All presentations are expected to follow the MozCon Code of Conduct
• You must attend MozCon, July 17–19, and be present Tuesday night in person

If selected, you'll receive...

• Five minutes onstage, Tuesday night at McCaw Hall. (The event lasts from 7–10pm.)
• $300 off the regular-priced ticket to MozCon (If you've already purchased a ticket, we'll refund you $300 for a regular-priced ticket or $100 for an early-bird ticket. Discounts are not offered for super-early-bird tickets.)
• Help crafting a winning talk
• Stage tour of the event space between 5–7pm Tuesday night in advance of the event

Unfortunately, we do not cover travel and/or lodging for MozCon Ignite speaking slots.

What makes a great pitch?

• A story that's compelling and that can be told in the allotted timeframe
• Sharing a topic you're passionate about and able to succinctly share what makes it so great.
• Follow the guidelines. Yes, the word counts are limited on purpose. (Do not submit links to Google Docs or other resources. Multiple submissions will result in immediate disqualification.)

****Include links to any videos of you speaking publicly.

If you'd like to see what an Ignite-style talk looks like, check out these videos from Ignite Seattle 30.

Most importantly, get to work on submitting that pitch to grace the stage yourself at MozCon 2017.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2qvSdPU

Share Your Opinion on Https

from Google SEO News and Discussion WebmasterWorld http://ift.tt/2pc03dj

Mashed Up Featured Snippet w/ Links to 2 Different Sites

from Google SEO News and Discussion WebmasterWorld http://ift.tt/2pAc2Bw

How Small Digital Publishers Can Grow Their Network and Save Time

Posted by lydiagilbertson

Being a small or startup publishing company is hard. The digital advertising industry is broken. Larger companies like Vox and Buzzfeed are some of the only online publications that can hope to monetize their content effectively. Smaller niche publications often have an even harder time attracting return visitors or getting people outside of their current active users to see their content at all. Already at a disadvantage, most small publications are also understaffed and underfunded. These publications can use content marketing and search marketing concepts within their online distribution strategy to better reach their audiences and to compete with bigger publications.

Platforms as distributors

Somehow, platforms have long been both the saviors and the destroyers of the digital publishing industry. Regardless, they've become a necessary evil for the content distribution strategy of almost all online publishing companies. There's no real harm in trying out different ways to reach your audience, but don’t waste your time on a platform that isn’t growing your audience or enhancing its engagement. The usual contenders being Facebook and Twitter, there are a few more platforms that can be easily utilized towards helping you to reach your audience.

1. AMP

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) project is a complex attempt by Google to make pages load faster on mobile devices, keep users on their platform, and to better engage with the publishing community. Many larger sites report a lot of success using AMP. Smaller publishers may be wary of trying out AMP on their sites, out of fear that it will further overwork their staff or that it requires an intense amount of web development knowledge. However, Google AMP is fairly simple to implement (more on how further down the page) if you're using WordPress or another common content management system.

Companies using WordPress will have an especially easy time adding AMP to the list of ways they distribute their content. Both WordPress and Yoast have plugins available to put (and manage) your content into the AMP format. Medium is also in the process of allowing its users an easy way to designate AMP content. Here are a few things to keep in mind before publishing your content via AMP:

1. Make sure it’s in article format. AMP is meant for blog posts and news articles, so don't try to publish products or landing pages using Google AMP.
2. Be conscious of the audience you're publishing for when using AMP. Articles that appear in the Google AMP carousel in the SERP are usually topical and considered “news.”
3. If your site is struggling with speed issues, AMP could be a part (but not all) of the solution, as it will help your articles load more quickly on mobile devices.
4. If your site doesn't use WordPress, implementing AMP might be a little bit harder than just downloading a plugin for your CMS. Find more out about that process here.
5. Analytics tracking should be included in your overall traffic and segmented to show how much traffic comes from AMP. Find out more about AMP and Google Analytics here.

2. Medium

Medium is another platform that can help more users to see your content and stay on the page long enough to read it. Like any platform, hosting your entire site on Medium comes with the risk of giving your content to another entity rather than your own website. This is a concern because hosting all of your content somewhere like Medium means it could make changes to the platform that you may not like, or in severe situations shut down entirely (and take your content with it). It also has limited capabilities with on-page ads. However, there are some larger publishers that have been adopting Medium as their main source of content distribution. There are several benefits to doing this:

1. Medium has a built-in audience of millions of engaged readers.
2. Most of the content on Medium is high quality.
3. Migrating your entire site to the Medium platform is actually relatively easy for both WordPress and non-WordPress sites. Be sure to keep in mind that hosting all of your content on a platform can be risky.

Another way to utilize Medium’s built-in audience is to republish your content onto the platform. Medium allows for its users to write content on their platform and then canonicalize to their own website (that's not on Medium). This allows small publishers to pick which content goes on Medium (much like a social media platform) in order to make sure it's targeted to Medium’s user-base.

3. Google News

Google News is a section of the search engine results page that focuses entirely on timely news content. In order for many websites to be featured in this specialized SERP, they have to go through the application process and get accepted into the Google News program. After acceptance, the site has to follow and keep a specific set of meta tags up-to-date, only posting timely content designated for the platform. Find out more about how to get accepted into Google News here.

Utilize content marketing tools

Outside of monetization, the number-one hurdle that most small publishing companies face is being understaffed and overworked. One way to remedy this is using tools that help diminish the workload involved in managing content-heavy sites. Here are a list of tools that can help small publishers cut down on their tasks:

1. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is editorial calendar software that minimizes time spent keeping track of all of the posts you want/need to do on any given day. It’s designed for both small and enterprise companies, but is better suited for smaller ones due to its all-in-one approach. CoSchedule allows you to plan your posts in advance and set a time for when to post them on social media platforms, all in a single tool.

2. BuzzSumo

Ideating different pieces of content for your site takes a significant amount of time. Utilizing a tool like BuzzSumo could help you to come up with a ton of different article concepts based on what’s trending on different social media platforms.

3. Canva

Having a small team usually means that your graphic designer is extremely busy (or nonexistent). Making quick graphics and supplementary images for your posts can totally be done utilizing Canva, without bogging down your graphics team with more work than it can handle (plus, there’s a free version).

Focus on your niche

Find your niche and build your audience. Obviously, this is easier said than done. But, it’s extremely important as a small publisher to be filling a void or taking a different perspective in the already overflowing content funnel of the Internet. Find your unique voice and the people that want to hear it. Sticking to your publication's brand or niche will in turn build you a specialized audience. This allows prospective advertisers to better target and then convert using your content.

Don’t always focus on quantity, but quality

Similar to the last point, in addition to not overstretching your genre, don’t overstretch your posting frequency. Rather than posting more times per day just to meet an imaginary quota, it’s better to create fewer posts of higher quality. Moz did a publishing experiment that illustrates the complexity of publishing frequency and content quality. Pay more attention to what your users want rather than what you assume Google does.

Summary

Being a small publishing company is hard. Most small publications find themselves understaffed and overworked trying to catch up with much larger companies.The best way to try to compete with larger publishing companies is to keep your focus small and to use external applications. They'll help you save time and make creating easier. Utilize all of the platforms that work for your audience — not just all of the platforms available.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2pI6WEs

21,000 image hits per day and almost no traffic

from Google SEO News and Discussion WebmasterWorld http://ift.tt/2paiP4P

Using call and SMS data to drive new customers

Voice search now accounts for 20% of queries on Google’s mobile app and Android devices. Inbound call volume is continuing to increase even as messaging apps and chatbots become more popular. Facebook expects 37 billion call conversions by 2019, as social media’s share of mobile calls to...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://ift.tt/2pyxtWw