Danner's Thoughts

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

SEO techniques are not nearly as important as this one thing

Pop quiz, hotshot:

Experience is to a resume as _____ is to an SEO effort.

If you guessed "content", pat yourself on the back! You can toy with all of the frivolous technicalities of SEO as much as you want, but if you're missing compelling content, don't be surprised if your efforts are wasted.

Or as my great uncle Clayton used to say: "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it still stinks."

Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager of Webmaster Outreach at Bing, released the following video in cooperation with Stukent.com to provide novices like myself the quick-and-dirty of how SEO works, and why, at the end of the day, good content should be your foremost concern. If you have the time, watch it! If not, continue to my highlights below.

Why is content so important?

Let's take a step back and think about SEO holistically: the entire point is to improve your website to make it more relevant to searchers. To quote Duane, "Everything a search engine does is guided by what the searcher responds to." In short, websites are a customer driven effort.

So - what happens when you create lackluster content but have manhandled all of the code on the back-end to get amazing click-through? You'll probably end up with an equally amazing bounce rate. Which, in turn, will have today's top search engines degrade your site's ranking.

Alternatively, if you make great content but lack the sophistication of an Alexa-top-100-site webmaster, then sure, you won't grow as fast or by as much as you could. BUT - you will get an audience, you will create buzz, and you will get shares. You'll create enough momentum to give yourself time to get to the technicalities.

Content is what provides value to visitors to your site. Search engines are designed to gauge that value and reward it with high rankings.

Where should I begin?

"Write what you know" has never been truer than in this age of information overload. If you've been tempted to simply use syndicated content or spin other content with your own flair, know that you are unlikely to build any type of following or community. Search engines punish these practices because searchers don't seem to care for it.

You need a niche. Per Duane:

Owning a niche is like putting a crow bar in a small crack. Over time that crack opens up and you can see more of the world ahead of you. That's the power of owning your niche.

Pick a topic that you have unique experience in. Share that experience and knowledge often and freely. Where startups need a unique selling proposition, you need a unique follower proposition.

Again from Duane, here's a short list of things you can do to be your audience's subject authority:

Know the topic inside and out
Engage your community
Share useful content freely
Be consistent and useful
Market your strengths
Be a go-to resource
Learn to spot trends in data

Oh, and don't forget to be humble. You're not an authority until other people say you are.

Lastly, don't be afraid to add a little personality to your writing. Try the different "voices" that make you you and see what resonates with your audience.

What should I write?

This is where technique comes into play. Sure, you could listen to your heart, but wouldn't you rather listen to your audience, make educated guesses, and see results?

Both Bing and Google have keyword tools available that will key you in on what your readers are searching for when they find you. This information is gold and should inform your content decisions. It can help you uncover new niches and refine your site's focus. It can provide inspiration when writer's block comes-a-knockin'.

Speaking of writer's block, you should write frequently (horrible segue, I know). If you're strapped for time, once a week should be your bare minimum. Information has a shelf life and search engines know it.

How can I get an audience other than searchers from search engines?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Or for you, humble reader: if a person writes an article and no one is around to read it, does it even matter? You will probably feel like it doesn't when it happens to you.

Never fear - there are more tools than ever to get your content out. While search engines are the best, using your personal and professional network through social media is a great option. And in so doing, you will likely impact the success of your SEO efforts as well.

Search engines like shared content for the following reasons (italicized items are per Duane):

Signals topical authority
Real-time - engines want fresh content, fast
Integrated social signals influence click actions of searchers
Social signals are becoming more prevalent relevance indicators for search engine rankings

You may think "I don't have time to measure and manage a bunch of accounts on various social media websites!" Congratulations, you're not the first to think this and the market has provided many, many solutions. Per Duane, here are some of the best:

In Summation

Discover your unique follower proposition by finding the niche that only you can speak to. Create quality content that engenders a loyal audience, and listen to that audience with a search engine keyword tool to create more targeted content. Share your content on social media to build an audience that ultimately creates a virtuous cycle of more audience data and better content targeting.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

The Digital Marketing Pros at Entrata Give the Top 3 SEO Trends

The new meaning of "brand", savvy social strategy, and targeting locally

Branding isn't just for digital artists

Alright, so you ARE going to need a digital artist to create your logos and the look and feel of your website. But that is far from the entirety of what "brand" is. During my internship at Dell over the summer, I had the chance to participate in a discussion led by Karen Quintos, the CMO, and she stated:

A brand is a promise you make and keep to your customers.

The pros at Entrata agree: a brand comprises not only the flashy signage for your company but also how people experience the company overall. Google describes it like this:

The new era of branding is spilling out onto the web. Reviews about company interactions are everywhere, from Amazon to Yelp. Great companies like Autozone are teaching their customers how to use them as a trusted adviser to their car problems, while others like "Rockauto.com" are behind the times in only offering products at low prices. In the 21st century, branding is measured by engagement and participation, not by sales alone.

Social matters, and maybe not in the way you think

Rand Fiskin, SEO expert extraordinaire, recently ran a series of online tests and found something pretty odd:

Even when participation is low, the outlier businesses are more active on at least one social channel than their peers.

In English: websites performing better relative to their peers seem to have an abundance of posts on social media. It doesn't even matter if participation (like reviews, user dialog, etc.) are greater on another site, search engines view activity as the most important ranking criteria when weighing social factors.

This doesn't negate the need for branding, however. If two sites are social-media-workhorses and are always posting new content, the one that interacts with its customers will win out. Especially if the site is creating content about real customers and their experiences with their products or services. Google rewards human-ness! So be human!

Google My Business: The Best Free Tool You've Never Heard Of

Have a website? Own a business? Not heard of "Google My Business"? Cancel your plans for the next 15 minutes and follow these steps; they'll make a world of difference to your professional endeavors:

Go to https://www.google.com/business/
Verify your business location (search to see if it already exists first: Google hates duplicates)
Populate your listing with details, like the appropriate business categories
Add professional pictures. The more the merrier! Don't forget to add:

A caption
A URL
A phone number
An address
A geo tag
Enabled location sharing
Detailed file name

Create a YouTube channel and add it to your business
???
PROFIT!!!

In A Nutshell

Think about your business as a whole and what you want customers to say about you. Get online to see what they are saying, and bridge the gap in service or product quality to get to your ideal state.

Get active on social. Make a goal to post things frequently. Involve your customers in the conversation.

Start using Google My Business. Take a boatload of pictures of your company, its product, and its location. Create a YouTube channel and make a goal to create content frequently there as well.

Friday, September 11, 2015

The unspoken interview questions that you are probably fumbling abysmally

Have you ever been in an interview and felt a lingering, uncomfortable thickness in the air? As if there were something left unsaid? As if you had been "weighed, measured, and found wanting"?

We've all been there. And only afterward did we realize that we were responding to some unspoken interview questions, and doing a rather poor job of it.

At Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Business, alumni are called upon to form boards to help current students prepare for their entrance in to the job market and excel in their chosen fields. I recently had the opportunity to hear from alumni in our Marketing Board, including Scott Overson of Intel, Scott Pulsipher of Needle, David Hunt of Illusive Networks, Jordan Archibald of Qualtrics, and Whitney Seamons (formerly of Microsoft and J&J). They were invaluable in helping demystify those hidden job interview questions and taught how to approach them with grace and confidence.

In no particular order, here are the hidden questions you need to nail to put you ahead of other candidates:

How do you analyze a problem?

There are two traps when discussing our past experience. One is to simply address the duties that we performed. This is easily the most egregious mistake as well as the most boring for the interviewer to endure.

The second is talking about accomplishments without context. While it may be wonderful that you increased market penetration 17% through a customer acquisition strategy, that doesn't spell out to the listener what actions you took to get there and how those actions make you special.

So do the interviewer a favor: set up the problem for them in a sentence. Why was this problem important? What did it mean for the company? Give your story some drama! Then talk about the one or two things you did to really understand and address the problem. Sure, you may have done a lot more, but they don't want your autobiography. The interviewer wants the highlights. And third, make sure to include those results. Again, the most meaningful, and only the most meaningful.

Are you willing to work past 5:00 PM?

For obvious reasons, no interviewer is going to ask this outright. Just like you're not going to ask about work-life balance (really: don't). But the interviewer will WANT to ask about it. And they'll do everything in their means to tease it out of you without being utterly direct.

Emphasize the incredible level of effort you applied to the impossible feat you accomplished. Be specific about timelines and how you achieved them. For example, "I worked well into the night weeks on end, but seeing our PageRank increase from tens of pages in Google's search engine results to the second page made it all worth it."

Scott Pulsipher's background included working at Amazon, and while he didn't 100% endorse the working conditions (see the New York Times article "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace") , he understood that to do unique, market-changing things required a superhuman level of effort, which Amazon has a knack for consistently applying. He even confided that, on average, since business school he has worked 50 hours per week.

Why are you here?

No, we're not getting philosophical (although if you're interested, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does have a great answer to this called "God's Plan of Salvation"). Interviewers constantly meet folks who have boring reasons for sitting in front of them, like:

"I want to work here because this area is close to my extended family."
"I'm here because I saw the job posting on Indeed.com and thought the responsibilities sounded interesting."
"I'm interested in this job because I heard it pays well, and the hours aren't bad."
"I want to work here because I've used your products or services and I like them."

These aren't bad reasons, but most people have a slew of these for any given job, and they aren't particularly interesting. Nor do they say anything about you, since 99.9% of the population cares about the same thing.

You should be sitting in front of an interviewer because their company stimulates your intellect on many levels. They do something no one else does, and it resonates with you because you've done something similarly heroic in the past. Or maybe they do something that you believe is incredibly valuable for the economy, for nature, or for the world at large and you find yourself pursuing similar goals.

Whatever your reason, be authentic, and speak to how you and the company "are one". When interviewers talk about "fit", it's not an exercise of the interviewer trying to weigh your attributes and place you in the right spot within a company. It's an exercise of you explaining your spot in the company and them visualizing it without effort.

What questions do you have for me (that really say something about you)?

Alright, so this one does get asked in interviews, but it's so commonly bungled it is worth discussing. Some questions are just no-no's:

How much does the job pay?
How much time off do I get?
What are the benefits like?

These can be answered later after the bigger questions are addressed, or they can be answered more discreetly through a friendly alumnus or alumna who is willing to get real with you in a private conversation.

Other questions are too revealing that you haven't done your homework:

What's your day to day job look like?
What group in the company holds the most power when making strategic decisions?
What products or services make up your offering?

The first two are better suited towards an informational interview with an alumnus or alumna (the second will require a degree of candor that you may not find in the interview and could be a deal breaker before even interviewing), and the third is easily searchable.

So what do good questions look like? Good questions are current, show your insight into the company, and are relevant to the position you want to obtain. If you're pursuing a digital marketing career, a good question for a company like eBay might be "I know as eBay turns 20 this year that mobile is a huge focus. What are your digital marketing teams doing to leverage traditional customer data from the website to improve mobile platform conversion?" Alright, maybe not the best, but you get the idea.

Public relations and investor relations pages are a great place to get company news and should be leveraged for these types of questions. For the question above, I used a story from eBay's investor relations page, titled "Introducing eBay 4.0".

Practice, practice, practice

Now that you know the unspoken questions, the best way to nail them to the ground is practicing answering traditional questions while flavoring your answers with some of the elements we've discussed above. Get your mentor, your good friend, or your significant other to ask you a series of questions and see if they can pick up on some of the subtle hints you are trying to drop.

Now go forth and interview successfully!

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Mike Tyson

Even a guy with a checkered past can have good wisdom to impart:

"You have to be humble in life, and if you are not humble, life will make you humble."

- Mike Tyson

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Movie Quotes

Two little mice fell into a bucket of cream. The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned, but the second mouse, he struggled so hard that he eventually churned that cream into butter and he walked out.

- Catch Me If You Can

A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can't. Either way a sale is made, the only question is who is gonna close?

- Boiler Room

Smile. It enhances your face value.

- Steel Magnolias

The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room.

- American Gangster

You think you can win on talent alone? Gentlemen, you don't have enough talent to win on talent alone.

- Miracle

You got a dream you gotta protect it. People can't do something themselves, they wanna tell you that you can't do it.

- The Pursuit of Happyness

Everywhere I've been today there's always been something wrong--too young, too old, too short, too tall. Whatever the exception is, I can fix it. I can be older, I can be taller, I can be anything.

- The Secret of My Success

No intensity, no victory.

- Any Given Sunday

Motivators

At work, there are really only 5 motivators:

Paid Time Off
Advancement
Recognition
Training
Money

Forwards from Grandma

I found this here:

http://www.marcandangel.com/2011/04/18/18-things-my-dad-was-right-about/

But on the off chance they remove the post, I'd like to archive it here. And put it in the order I find most relevant.

18 Things My Dad Was Right About

Big results come when you narrow your focus. Concentrate your efforts on smaller and smaller areas. When your efforts are diffused over a wide area they won’t have much of an impact. So – focus on smaller areas and your efforts will be felt more fully. It could take time for change to happen, but keep that focus narrow.

Keep it simple. There is a world of magnificence hidden in simplicity. Pick the five most important things in your life now and focus on those things. Let the other stuff go. Stop the busyness and really enjoy what’s important to you.

Love yourself. Become your own priority. Strive to be the ‘you’ you want to be. Nourish your mind and body. Educate yourself every day until you die.

Sometimes you just have to go for it. Put your uncertainty and fears aside for a second and ask yourself this: “If I try and I don’t get it right the first time, what will I have lost and what will I have gained?” The answer is: You will have lost nothing but a little bit of your time while gaining an important lesson that will help you get it right the second or third time. People rarely get it right the first time. In fact, usually the only people who ever get it right are those who continue going for it even when they’ve come up short numerous times.

Dreams will remain dreams forever if you don’t take action. Don’t dream about it anymore. Start doing it. In 40 years from now what is it that you will regret not having accomplished, appreciated or attempted? Do it, appreciate it and attempt it NOW!

Keep having fun. Fun is way underrated. With all of life’s responsibilities, fun will sometimes seem like an indulgence. It shouldn’t be. It should be a requirement. Make time for fun.

Manage your time. Your situation and environment is ever changing, so be careful not to confuse things that are urgent with things that are important.

Manage your money. Don’t buy stuff you don’t need. Don’t spend more than you make. Don’t let your money manage you.

Everyone can make a huge difference. Making one person smile can change the world. Maybe not the whole world, but their world. So start small and start now.

In order to get, you have to give. Supporting, guiding and making contributions to other people are life’s greatest rewards. Everything you do comes back around.

Not much is worth fighting about. If you can avoid it, don’t fight. Step back from arguments with your spouse, family members or neighbors. When you feel anger surging up and you want to yell that vulgar remark on tip of your tongue, just close your mouth and walk away. Let yourself calm down. You don’t have to be right or win an argument. It doesn’t matter.

Little things stick with you. So pay attention to them. Things like: watching your child sleep, preparing a meal with your family, or sharing a great laugh with an old friend. This is the real stuff life is made of.

Less advice is often the best advice. People don’t need lots of advice, they need to live. I’ve seen young, rocky relationships develop into wonderful marriages and fleeting inspirations ignite a lifetime of passion and happiness. Our life stories, like the answers we give to long essay questions, are uniquely ours. What people want to know is already somewhere inside of them. We all just need time to think, be and breathe, and continue to explore the undirected journeys that will eventually help us find our direction.

Your 30’s, 40’s and 50’s won’t feel like your 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. Adults are just older children. When you get older you won’t feel as old as you imagine you will. For the most part, you still feel exactly the way you feel right now, just a little wiser and more confident. You’ve had time to establish your place in the world and figure out what’s important to you. Don’t fear growing up. Look forward to it. It’s awesome.

Bad things will happen to you and your friends. Part of living and growing up is experiencing unexpected troubles in life. People lose jobs, get in car accidents and sometimes die. When you are younger, and things are going pretty well, this harsh reality can be hard to visualize. The smartest, and oftentimes hardest, thing we can do in these kinds of situations is to be tempered in our reactions. To want to scream obscenities, but to wiser and more disciplined than that. To remember that emotional rage only makes matters worse. And to remember that tragedies are rarely as bad as they seem, and even when they are, they give us an opportunity to grow stronger.

First impressions aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Everyone and everything seems normal from a distance, or at a glance. The 10th, 20th, or even the 50th impression is when you start to truly understand someone else for who they truly are.

Don’t try to impress everyone. Purposely impressing people is an act that brings nothing but a momentary ego boost. Be real with people instead. Connect with fewer people on a level that is deeper and more profound.

What you learn in school does matter. While you may not use the specifics of every classroom lesson, every lesson does expand the core thought process of your mind. Over time you will develop problem solving skills that are universally applicable. No single classroom lesson can teach this, and no single classroom lesson is more important.