Our company have been providing SEO professional services to customers since the birth of the internet. While our approaches have developed over time, our overall aim hasn't and that's to get our customers web pages to rank on the 1st page for appropriate keywords along with only using ethical and long-lasting techniques.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Flying Scotsman: See the historic steam train in Surrey today
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/flying-scotsman-see-historic-steam-11410405
Locked up in Surrey: See the county's criminals sent down during May 2016
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/locked-up-surrey-see-countys-11408560
Flying Scotsman: See the historic steam train in Surrey today
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/flying-scotsman-see-historic-steam-11410405
Cranleigh crash: Community honoured for rescue efforts after "harrowing" High Street fatal collision
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/cranleigh-crash-community-honoured-rescue-11408448
Watch Guildford woman take to the skies in charity wing walk for British Heart Foundation
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/watch-guildford-woman-take-skies-11391363
Windlesham Woodlands Lane M3 bridge demolition works postponed for further safety and utility works
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/windlesham-woodlands-lane-m3-bridge-11410334
Missing man found dead outside hospital was suffering from 'acute alcohol withdrawal'
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/missing-man-found-dead-outside-11409728
Life-size dinosaur to parade though Redhill this half-term
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/life-size-dinosaur-parade-though-11409404
Cheryl James inquest: MP calls for dossier of sexual and physical abuse allegations to be re-examined
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/cheryl-james-inquest-mp-calls-11409975
South West Trains employee suspended after 'Vote Out' Brexit message appears on side of train
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/south-west-trains-employee-suspended-11409421
South East Coast Ambulance Service chief resigns months after report slams leadership
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/south-east-coast-ambulance-service-11408715
Great British Menu 2016 will see Pennyhill Park chef Matt Worswick compete
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/great-british-menu-2016-see-11407231
Battle of Jutland remembered on 100th anniversary
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/battle-jutland-remembered-100th-anniversary-11407353
Joanna Lumley at Heathrow Airport to mark its 70th birthday
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/local-news/joanna-lumley-heathrow-airport-mark-11407561
Weather forecast: Heavy rain causes M25 flooding and Peacock Centre springs another leak
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/weather-forecast-heavy-rain-causes-11407461
Coming soon: SEO copywriting training
Writing quality content is of great importance for your SEO strategy. At Yoast, we’re strong believers in the importance of nicely written and easy-to-read articles. Such content, however, requires strong writing skills. In order to help you write quality content, we’ve set up a SEO copywriting training.
As of June 7, you’ll be able to purchase our SEO copywriting training. It will available at an introductory price of $249 (later on, it will cost $299). The SEO copywriting training contains 6 modules with lots of training videos and some screencasts. On top of that, you’ll get tons of challenging questions and exercises in which we’ll test your (knowledge about) writing skills.
Assignments and feedback
As this is a course in which we’ll teach you how to write, you’ll have to do some genuine writing yourself. You’ll receive feedback on your writing assignment from one of the members of the Yoast team. The course also contains an assignment in which we ask you to set up your own keyword research. Again, you’ll receive feedback on your work from one of the members of the Yoast team.
What do you learn in the SEO copywriting training?
In this course, we’ll take you through the entire process of SEO copywriting. We’ll start by doing keyword research and teach you how to prepare your text. You’ll receive many tips to improve your actual writing and we’ll help you to correct and optimize your text. Finally, we’ll teach you all about publishing the article. Our course will follow the same steps that we take in SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide.
About the SEO copywriting training
The SEO copywriting training contains 6 modules, 13 training video’s and 13 texts. You’ll have to answer lots of challenging questions and do 3 assignments. You’ll also receive a PDF of our Blog SEO eBook. If you finish the course, you’ll get a certificate and a badge to put on your site.
The course is developed by a team of experts. Joost de Valk, SEO expert, and Marieke van de Rakt, expert on copywriting, teamed up with Jaro Ekstijn, our educational specialist here at Yoast. Jaro is responsible for the many questions, exercises, assignments and the didactics of this course. For this specific writing course, we also had help from our linguist, Irene Strikkers. Irene’s expertise in the field of linguistics really helped in developing this course. Her expertise was especially important for the module about readability.
Read more: ‘SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide’ »
from Yoast • The art & science of website optimization https://yoast.com/coming-soon-seo-copywriting-course/
Surrey County Show: Dame Penelope Keith discusses this year's event AND take a look at the best parts caught on camera
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/surrey-county-show-dame-penelope-11404567
Guildford Society bid to put brakes on £150m railway station scheme
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/guildford-society-bid-put-brakes-11401143
Miss Woking 1977 remembers the Woking Whirl with celebrities including Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart and Bernard Cribbins
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/nostalgia/miss-woking-1977-remembers-woking-11319005
Title Tag Length Guidelines: 2016 Edition
Posted by Dr-Pete
For the past couple of weeks, Google has been testing a major change to the width of the left-hand column, expanding containers from 512 pixels to 600 (a 17% increase). Along with this change, Google has increased the available length of result titles:
This naturally begs the question — how many characters can we fit into a display title now? When Google redesigned SERPs in 2014, I recommended a limit of 55 characters. Does a 17% bigger container mean we’ve got 9 more characters to work with?
Not so fast, my friend…
This is where things get messy. It’d be great if we could just count the characters and be done with it, but things are never quite that easy. We’ve got three complications to consider:
(1) Character widths vary
Google uses the Arial font for result titles, and Arial is proportional. In other words, different characters occupy different amounts of space. A lower- case ‘l’ is going to occupy much less space than an upper-case ‘W’. The total width is measured in pixels, not characters, and the maximum amount you can fit in that space depends on what you’re trying to say.
In our 10,000-keyword tracking set, the title below is the longest cut or uncut display title we measured, clocking in at 77 characters:
This title has 14 i's and lowercase l's, 10 lowercase t's, and 3 narrow punctuation marks, creating a character count bonanza. To count this title and say that yours can be 77 characters would be dangerously misleading.
(2) Titles break at whole words
Prior to this change, Google was breaking words at whatever point the cut-off happened. Now, they seem to be breaking titles at whole words. If the cut happens in the middle of a long word, the remaining length might be considerably shorter. For example, here's a word that's just not going to fit into your display title twice, and so the cut comes well short of the full width:
(3) Google is appending brands
In some cases, Google is cutting off titles and then appending the brand to the end. Unfortunately, this auto-appended brand text still occupies space and counts against your total allowance. This was the shortest truncated display title in our data set, measuring only 34 words pre-cut:
The brand text "- The Homestead" was appended by Google and is not part of the sites <TITLE> tag. The next word in the title was "Accommodations", so the combination of the brand add-on and long word made for a very truncated title.
Data from 10,000 searches
Examples can be misleading, so we wanted to take a deeper dive. We pulled all of the page-1 display titles from the 10,000-keyword MozCast tracking set, which ends up being just shy of 90,000 titles. Uncut titles don't tell us much, since they can be very short in some cases. So, let's focus on the titles that got cut. Here are the character lengths (not counting " ...") of the cut titles:
We've got a fairly normal distribution (skewed a little to the right) with both a mean and median right around 63. So, is 63 our magic number? Not quite. Roughly half the cut titles in our data set had less than 63 characters, so that's still a fairly risky length.
The trick is to pick a number where we feel fairly confident that the title won't be cut off, on average (a guaranteed safe zone for all titles would be far too restrictive). Here are a few select percentages of truncated titles that were above a certain character length:
- 55% of cut titles >= 63 (+2) characters
- 91% of cut titles >= 57 (+2) characters
- 95% of cut titles >= 55 (+2) characters
- 99% of cut titles >= 48 (+2) characters
In research, we might stick to a 95% or 99% confidence level (note: this isn't technically a confidence interval, but the rationale is similar), but I think 90% confidence is a decent practical level. If we factor in the " ...", that gives us about +2 characters. So, my recommendation is to keep your titles under 60 characters (57+2 = 59).
Keep in mind, of course, that cut-offs aren't always bad. A well placed "..." might actually increase click-through rates on some titles. A fortuitous cut-off could create suspense, if you trust your fortunes to Google:
Now that titles are cut at whole words, we also don't have to worry about text getting cut off at confusing or unfortunate spots. Take, for example, the dangerous predicament of The International Association of Assemblages of Assassin Assets:
Prior to the redesign, their titles were a minefield. Yes, that contributed nothing to this post, but once I had started down that road, it was already too late.
So, that's it then, right?
Well, no. As Google evolves and adapts to a wider range of devices, we can expect them to continue to adjust and test display titles. In fact, they're currently test a new, card-style format for desktop SERPs where each result is boxed and looks like this:
We're not even entirely sure that the current change is permanent. The narrower format is still appearing for some people under some conditions. If this design sticks, then I'm comfortable saying that keeping your title length under 60 characters will prevent the majority of cut-offs.
Note: People have been asking when we'll update our title tag tool. We're waiting to make sure that this design change is permanent, but will try to provide an update ASAP. Updates and a link to that tool will appear in this post when we make a final decision.
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!
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Godalming butcher's creation crowned UK Speciality Burger champion
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/godalming-butchers-creation-crowned-uk-11403090
Used needles and crack pipe found during alleyway clean-up
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/used-needles-crack-pipe-found-11399252
Monday, May 30, 2016
Guildford Society bids to put a brake on £150 million railway station scheme
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/guildford-society-bids-put-brake-11401143
Watch emotional video of patient having hearing implant switched on for the first time
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/watch-emotional-video-patient-having-11385472
Surrey County Show: Crowds descend on Stoke Park for annual agricultural show
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/surrey-county-show-crowds-descend-11404675
Surrey County Show: Dame Penelope Keith discusses this year's event AND take a look at the best parts caught on camera
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/surrey-county-show-dame-penelope-11404567
Surrey County Show: 31 of the best pictures from the annual event in Guildford
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/surrey-county-show-31-best-11404425
Woking roundabout branded 'boy racer heaven' after car takes out entire brick wall
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/woking-roundabout-branded-boy-racer-11403890
Top Gear returns to Dunsfold Park as new-look BBC show completes first road test
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/top-gear-returns-dunsfold-park-11403587
New Co-op plan for former Chertsey pub less than a year after branch closure in town
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/new-co-op-plan-former-11402311
Missing Walton man Jack Barker 'back home safe and sound'
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/missing-walton-man-jack-barker-11403000
Weather forecast: Heavy, thundery, 'torrential' rain bulletin sparks Met Office flash flood warning
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/weather-forecast-heavy-thundery-torrential-11402788
Man dies after car crashes into tree in Merstham
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-dies-after-car-crashes-11402222
BMW drink-driver 'smashed through wall and hid from police in bush' in Egham
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/bmw-drink-driver-smashed-through-11401990
Teenage motorcyclist suffers 'life-threatening' injuries after Frimley crash
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/teenage-motorcyclist-suffers-life-threatening-11401838
Will Intelligent Personal Assistants Replace Websites?
Posted by Tom-Anthony
[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]
Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are capable of radically disrupting the way we search for and consume information on the Internet. The convergence of several trends and technologies has resulted in a new interface through which people will be able to interact with your business. This will have a dramatic impact — if your long-term marketing/business plan doesn't account for IPAs, you may be in the same boat as those people who said they didn't need a website in the early 2000s.
Your website is an API to your business
If we look to pre/early Internet, then the primary interface to most businesses was the humble phone. Over the phone you could speak to a business and find out what they had in stock, when they'd be open, whether they had space for your reservation, etc., and then you could go on to order products, ask for directions, or place reservations. The phone was an interface to your business, and your phone line and receptionist were your "API" — the way people interacted with your business.
As the Internet matured and the web gained more traction, it increasingly became the case that your website empowered users to do lots of those same things that they previously did via the phone. They could get information and give you money, and your website became the new "API" for your business, allowing users to interact with it. Notice this didn't necessitate the death of the phone, but lots of the requests that previously came via phone now came via the web, and there was also a reduction in friction for people wanting to interact with your business (they didn't have to wait for the phone line to be free, or speak to an actual human!).
Since then, the web has improved as technologies and availability have improved, but fundamentally the concept has stayed the same. Until now.
The 5 tech giants have all built an intelligent personal assistant
Intelligent Personal Assistants apps such as Google Now, Siri, Cortana, and Facebook M — as well as the newer appliances such as Amazon Echo, the new Google Home, and the rumored Apple Siri hardware — are going to have a profound effect on the way people search, the types of search they do, and the way they consume and act upon the results of those searches.
New entries, such as Hound and Viv, show that intelligent personal assistants are growing beyond just something phone makers are adding as a feature, and are becoming a core focus.
In the last couple of years we've discussed a variety of new technologies and their impact on search; a number of these are all feeding into the rise of these personal assistants.
Trend 1: More complex searches
The days of searches just being a keyword are long since over. The great improvements of natural language processing, driven by improvements in machine learning, have meant that conversational search has become a thing and we have seen Hummingbird and RankBrain becoming building blocks of how Google understands and handles queries.
Furthermore, implicit signals have also seen the rise of anticipatory queries with Google Now leading the way in delivering you search results based off of your context without you needing to ask.
Contributing technologies & trends:
- Implicit Signals
- Natural Language
- Conversational Search
- Hummingbird & RankBrain
Watch this video of Will Critchlow speak about these trends to hear more.
Trend 2: More complex results
Search results have moved on from 10 blue links to include the Knowledge Graph, with entities and direct answers being a familiar part of any search result. This has also meant that, since the original Siri, we've seen a search interface that doesn't even do a web search for many queries but instead gives data-driven answers right there in the app. The earliest examples were queries for things like weather, which would turn up a card right there in the app.
Finally, the rise of conversational search has made possible complex compound queries, where queries can be revised and extended to allow the sorting, filtering, and refining of searches in a back and forth fashion. This phase of searching used to be something you did by reviewing the search results manually and sifting through them, but now search engines understand (rather than just index) the content they discover and can do this step for you.
Contributing technologies & trends:
- Entities / Direct Answers
- Faceted search
- Data driven answers
You may like Distilled's Searchscape which has information and videos on these various trends.
Trend 3: Bots, conversational UI, and on-demand UIs
More recently, with the increased interest in bots (especially since Facebook's F8 announcement), we can see a rise in the number of companies investing in various forms of conversational UI (see this article and this one).
Bots and conversational UI provide a new interface which lends itself to all of the benefits provided by natural language processing and ways of presenting data-driven answers.
Note that a conversational UI isn't limited to purely a spoken or natural language interface, but can also provide an "on demand" UI for certain situations (see this example screenshot from Facebook, or the Siri/Fandango cinema ticket example below).
Contributing technologies & trends:
- Conversational UI
- Bots
- On-demand UIs within the IPA interface
Trend 4: 3rd-party integration
Going back to the first versions of Siri or Google Now, there were no options for 3rd-party developers to integrate. They could only do a limited set of actions based on what Apple or Google had explicitly programmed in.
However, over time, the platforms have opened up more and more, such that apps can now provide functionality within the intelligent personal assistant on the same app.
Google Now, Amazon Echo, Cortana, and Siri (not quite — but rumored to be coming in June) all provide SDKs (software development kits), allowing 3rd-party developers to integrate into these platforms.
This is an opportunity for all of us integrate directly into the next generation search interface.
What's the impact of all this?
More searches as friction reduces
Google published an (under-reported) paper on some of the research and work that went into Google Now, which when combined with their daily information needs study indicates how hard they're trying to encourage and enable users to do searches that previously have not been possible.
The ability of intelligent personal assistants to fulfil more complex search queries (and of "always listening" search appliances like Amazon Echo and Google Home) to remove the friction of doing searches that were previously "too much work" means we'll see a rise in search queries that simply wouldn't have happened previously. So rather than cannibalizing web-based searches that came before, a large segment of the queries to IPAs will be wholly new types of searches.
Web rankings get bypassed, go straight to the top
As more and more people search via personal assistants, and with personal assistants trying to deliver answers directly in their interface, we'll see an increasing number of searches that completely bypass web search rankings. As 3rd-party integration becomes more widespread, there will be an increasing number of dynamic queries that personal assistants can handle directly (e.g. "where can I buy The Martian?," "flights to Berlin," or "order a pepperoni pizza").
This is a massive opportunity — it does not matter how many links and how much great content your competitor has to help them in "classical SEO" if you've integrated straight into the search interface and no web search is ever shown to the user. You can be the only search result shown.
The classic funnel gets compressed; checking out via IPAs
This part is probably the most exciting, from my perspective, and I believe is the most important from the impact it'll have on users and businesses. People have modeled "the funnel" in a variety of different ways over time, but one common way to look at it is:
The search is separate to the browsing/checkout process, and that checkout process happens via a website. Apps have had some impact on this classic picture, but so far it hasn't been a big part.
However, conversational search/UI combined with the ability for developers to integrate directly into IPAs opens up a huge opportunity to merge the interfaces for the search step and the steps previously fulfilled by the website (browsing and checking out). There are already examples of the funnel being compressed:
In this example, using Siri, you can see I was able to search for movies playing nearby, pick a particular movie and cinema, then pick a particular showing and, finally, I can click to buy, which takes me to the Fandango app. I am most of the way through the checkout process before I leave the intelligent personal assistant app interface. How long until I can do that final step and actually check out inside the personal assistant?
Integrating with intelligent personal assistant apps currently normally happens via the app model (i.e. you build an app that provides some functionality to the assistant), but how long until we see the possibility to integrate without needing to build an app yourself — the intelligent personal assistant will provide the framework and primary interface.
Summary
Intelligent Personal Assistants bring together all the recent developments in search technology, and as integration options improve, we will see an increasing number of queries/transactions go end-to-end entirely inside the personal assistant itself.
People will conduct searches, review data, and make purchases entirely inside that one interface, completely bypassing web search (already happening) and even checking out inside the personal assistant (within the next 12 months) and thus bypassing websites.
IPAs represent an absolutely massive opportunity, and it would be easy to underestimate the impact they will have (in the same way many people underestimated mobile initially). If you've been on the fence about building an app, you should re-evaluate that decision, with a focus on apps being the way they can integrate into intelligent personal assistants.
What do you think? I'd love to have a discussion in the comments about how everyone thinks this will play out and how it might change the landscape of search.
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!
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Man thrown from car in Chertsey fatal crash was twice drink-drive limit and not wearing seatbelt, inquest told
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-thrown-car-chertsey-fatal-11391386
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Flight Sergeant's war memorial 'will be retained and enhanced' under 200-home plan at Walton Birds Eye HQ site
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/flight-sergeants-war-memorial-will-11401155
Giant white elephant tours Westminster as campaigners highlight risks of Gatwick Airport expansion
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/giant-white-elephant-tours-westminster-11401000
Surrey's new police and crime commissioner launches consultation on his six point policing plan
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/surreys-new-police-crime-commissioner-11400906
Walton sports hub: judicial review granted by judge as campaigners challenge Elmbridge Borough Council
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/walton-sports-hub-judicial-review-11400563
£1.5 million upgrade to Godalming and Milford electricity supply set to begin
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/15-million-upgrade-godalming-milford-11400165
£1.5 million upgrade to Goldaming and Milford electricity supply set to begin
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/15-million-upgrade-goldaming-milford-11400165
Dormansland princess party company lost battle with rival over 'misleading' web address
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/dormansland-princess-party-company-lost-11399928
Frenchies Dessert Parlour owners 'upset' after lack of trade forces business to fold
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/frenchies-dessert-parlour-owners-upset-11397355
Meet the Surrey firefighter retiring after 41 years of 'helping the community'
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/meet-surrey-firefighter-retiring-after-11395227
Saturday, May 28, 2016
May half term events and activity listings for Surrey and Hampshire
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/half-term-events-activity-listings-11374490
17 garden centre cafés around Surrey serving delicious food and drink
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/17-garden-centre-cafs-around-11311135
Swan captured by police after flying into lorry on M25
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/swan-captured-police-after-flying-11399327
Shop until you drop at Surrey County Show
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/shop-until-you-drop-surrey-11395385
Rugby player Jack Clifford named as patron of cardiac charity in memory of team mate
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/rugby-player-jack-clifford-named-11399043
A history of Michel Harper - Guildford's nightclub entrepreneur
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/history-michel-harper-guildfords-nightclub-11393607
South East Coast Ambulance Service hopes co-responding trial 'will be made permanent'
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/south-east-coast-ambulance-service-11387020
Irate mum slams 'disgusting' condition of children's play area at Spelthorne Leisure Centre
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/irate-mum-slams-disgusting-condition-11383293
Zara Home set to move into Guildford as store signs agreement with The Friary Centre
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/lifestyle/zara-home-set-move-guildford-11384453
Chesney Hawkes returns to Chertsey to film ITV's Who's Doing the Dishes? alongside Brian McFadden
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/chesney-hawkes-returns-chertsey-film-11397288
Brooklands Radio all set for 24-hour broadcast in aid of Woking & Sam Beare Hospices
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/brooklands-radio-set-24-hour-11396624
Ash landlord to swim 77 lengths in celebration of birthday
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/ash-landlord-swim-77-lengths-11397210
Motorcyclist in his 60s dies following collision in Chertsey
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/motorcyclist-60s-dies-following-collision-11397825
Family suing council after girl lost part of finger on 'dangerous' fencing at Pyrford school
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/family-suing-council-after-girl-11397019
Friday, May 27, 2016
Brightwells regeneration scheme voted through for Farnham
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/brightwells-regeneration-scheme-voted-through-11391704
Woking Park flour and eggs fight 'not condoned' by school
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/woking-park-flour-eggs-fight-11391209
Chertsey 'serious collision' involving motorbike and car
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/chertsey-serious-collision-involving-motorbike-11397164
Radio 2 500 Words silver award won by Woking schoolgirl
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/radio-2-500-words-silver-11396355
Chertsey accident involving motorcyclist shuts London Street
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/chertsey-accident-involving-motorcyclist-shuts-11397164
Cyclist's leg 'punctured by own bike' after falling onto pavement
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/cyclists-leg-punctured-bike-after-11395853
Surrey County Show: Travel directions and where to park
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/surrey-county-show-travel-directions-9161914
Guildford school evacuation as 'bomb threats' made across country again
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/guildford-school-evacuation-bomb-threats-11395542
Police investigation after pupil 'grabbed by unknown man' while walking to school in Chertsey
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/police-investigation-after-pupil-grabbed-11395522
21 places around Surrey for a top bacon butty
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/21-places-around-surrey-top-11322812
Husband of Sonita Nijhawan fails to appear for first crown court appearance after being charged with her murder
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/husband-sonita-nijhawan-fails-appear-11394875
Ask Yoast: can backlinks from one site hurt my rankings?
Backlinks to your website usually contribute to your rankings. So generally you’d be happy to get lots links to your posts and pages. But what if you get lots of links from one site? Would Google consider that as suspicious, and could you therefore be penalized?
In this Ask Yoast we’ll take a question from Gabriel Heffes of Alberta Home Services:
“I recently had a post on Tumblr that was reblogged and resulted in 9000 links to my page, making Tumblr and that post the most link sending post. Will these thousands of links cause a Penguin penalty and hurt my rankings?”
In the video below we’ll explain whether all those links could result in a penalty or not!
Are backlinks from Tumblr dangerous?
Not able to watch the video? You can read the transcript here:
“The honest answer is: no. This is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. Google knows how Tumblr works. It can see that these links are not bought or in any other way bad. So don’t worry about them. Celebrate the fact that you’ve got so many links on Tumblr! And make sure you’ll create another post like this, because it will actually help in your ranking. Good luck!”
Got stuck optimizing your site? We love to help you out! In the series Ask Yoast we’ll answer your SEO question. Don’t hesitate and send us your question!
Read more: ‘6 tips to a successful link building strategy’ »
from Yoast • The art & science of website optimization https://yoast.com/ask-yoast-backlinks-hurt-site/
Date set for Guildford elected mayor referendum
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/date-set-guildford-elected-mayor-11394150
Two similar parking tickets - but which one is easier to fight and why?
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/two-similar-parking-tickets-one-11394149
M25 crash causes nine-mile delays due to 'critical' barrier repairs
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/m25-crash-causes-nine-mile-11394108
Watch brave punk musicians save Guildford from evil space alien
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/watch-brave-punk-musicians-save-11391098
Petrol prices soar by more than 8p a litre in just THREE months
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/petrol-prices-soar-more-8p-11392786
Guildford Lido opening times and prices - everything you need to know
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/guildford-lido-opening-times-prices-11371928
G Live Fisherman's Friends deaths: Boss of door supplier pleads not guilty to manslaughter charges
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/g-live-fishermans-friends-deaths-11392698
Child 'grabbed by unknown male' near school in Chertsey in latest Surrey 'stranger danger' incident
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/child-grabbed-unknown-male-near-11392853
How to Research the Path to Customer Purchase - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
Moving your customers down the funnel from awareness to conversion can make for a winding and treacherous road. Until you fully research and understand the buying process inside and out, it's far too easy to make a misstep. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand steps back to take a higher-level look at the path to customer purchase, recommending workflows and tools to help you forge your own way.
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about the path to customer purchase and how to research that path. The reason this is so critical is because we have to understand a few things like our content and conversion strategy around where do we need to be, what content we need to create, how to position ourselves, our product, our brand, and how to convert people. We can't know this stuff until we truly understand the buying process.
We've done a lot of Whiteboard Fridays that involve very, very tactically specific items in one of the steps in these, like: how to understand the awareness funnel and how to build your social media audience; or how to get into the consideration process and understand how you compare against your competition; or how to convert people at the very end of the buying cycle on a landing page.
But I want to take a step back because, as I've talked to a lot of you out there and heard comments from you, I think that this bigger picture of, "How do I understand this research process," is something we need to address.
Buyers: Who are they?
So let's start with: How do we understand who our buyers actually are, and what's the research process we can use for that? My general sense is that we need to start with interviews with a few people, with salespeople if you're working with a team that has sales, with customer service, especially if you're working with a team that has customer service folks who talk to lots of their audience, and potentially with your target demographic and psychographic audience. Demographic audience would be like: Where are they, what gender are they, and what age group are they? Psychographics would be things around their interest levels in certain things and what they consume and how they behave, all of that type of stuff.
For example, let's say we're going to go target Scotch whisky drinkers. Now, I am personally among that set of Scotch whisky drinkers. I'm big fan of a number of scotches, as are many Mozzers. In fact, I have a bottle of Ardbeg — I think it's the Uigeadail — in my office here at Moz.
So I might go, "Well, let's see. Let's talk to the people who sell whisky at stores. Let's talk to the people who sell it online. Let's talk to the customer service folks. Let's do interviews with people who are likely Scotch buyers, which are both male and female, perhaps slightly more demographically skewed male, tend to be in a slightly wealthier, maybe middle income and up income bracket, tend to be people who live in cities more than people who live in urban and rural areas, tend to also have interests around things like fashion and maybe automobiles and maybe beer and other forms of alcohol." So we can figure out all that stuff and then we can do those interviews.
What we're trying to get to is a customer profile or several customer profiles.
A lot of folks call this a "customer persona," and they'll name the persona. I think that's a fine approach, but you can have a more abstract customer profile as well.
Then once you have that, you can use a tool like Facebook, through their advertising audience system, to research the quantity of people who have the particular attributes or affiliations that you're seeking out. From there, you can expand again by using Facebook and Twitter. You could use Followerwonk, for example in Twitter specifically, to figure out: What are these people following? Who are their influencers? What are the brands they pay attention to? What are the media outlets? What are the individuals? What are the blogs or content creators that they follow?
You can also do this with a few other tools. For example, if you're searching out just content in general, you might use Google Search. You could do this on Instagram or Pinterest or LinkedIn for additional networks.
There's a very cool tool called FullContact, which has an API that essentially let's you plug in let's say you have a set of email addresses from your interview process. You can plug that into FullContact and you can see the profiles that all of those email addresses have across all these social networks.
Now I can start to do this type of work, and I can go plug things into Followerwonk. I can go plug them into Facebook, and I can actually see specifically who those groups follow. Now I can start to build a true idea of who these people are and who they follow.
What needs do they have?
Now that I've researched that, I need to know what needs those folks actually have. I understand my audience at least a little bit, but now I need to understand what they want. Again, I go back to that interview process. It's very, very powerful. It is time-intensive. It will not be a time-saving activity. Interviews take a long time and a lot of effort and require a tremendous amount of resources, but you also get deep, deep empathy and understanding from an interview process.
Surveys are another good way to go, but you get much less deep information from them. You can however get good broad information, and I've really enjoyed those. If you don't already have an audience, you can start with something like SurveyMonkey Audience or Google Surveys, which let you target a broad group, and both of those are reasonable if you're targeting the right sorts of broad enough demographics or psychographics.
The other thing I want to do here is some awareness stage keyword research. I want to understand that this awareness phase. As people are just understanding they have a problem, what do they search for? Keyword research on this can start from the highest level.
So if I'm targeting Scotch, I might search for just Scotch by itself. If I plug that into a tool like Keyword Explorer or Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io, I can see suggestions like, "What's the best Scotch under $50?" When I see that, I start to gain an understanding of, "Oh, wait a minute. People are looking for quality. They also care about price." Then I might see other things like, "Gosh, a lot of people search for 'Islay versus Speyside.' Oh, that's interesting. They want to know which regions are different." Or they search for "Japanese whisky versus Scotch whisky." Aha, another interesting point at the awareness stage.
From there, I can determine the search terms that are getting used at awareness stage. I can go to consideration. I can go to comparison. I can go to conversion points. That really helps me understand the journey that searchers are taking down this path.
It's not just search, though. Any time I have a search term or phase, I want to go plug that into places like Facebook. I want to plug it into something like Twitter search. I want to understand the influencers on the networks that I know my audience is in. That could be Instagram. It could be Pinterest. It could be LinkedIn. It could be any variety of networks. It could be Google News, maybe, if I'm seeing that they pay attention to a lot of media.
Then once I have these search terms and awareness through the funnel, now I've got to understand: How do they get to that conversation point?
Once I get there, what I'm really seeking out is: What are the reasons people bought? What are the things they considered? What are the objections that kept some of them from buying?
Creating a content & conversion strategy.
If I have this, what I essentially have now is the who and the what they're seeking out at each phase of this journey. That's an incredibly powerful thing that I can then go apply to...
Where do I need to be?
"Where do I need to be" means things like: What keywords do I need to target? What social platforms do I need to be on? Where do I need to be in media? Who do I need to influence who's influencing my audience?
It tells me what content I need to create.
I know what articles or videos or visuals or podcasts or data my audience is interested in and what helps compel them further and further down that funnel.
It tells me a little bit about how to position myself in terms of things like style and UI/UX.
It also tells me about benefits versus features and some of the prototypical users. Who are the prototypical users? Who should I showcase? What kinds of testimonials are going to be valuable because people say, "Ah, this person, who is like me, liked this product and uses it. Therefore it must be a good product for me."
Lastly, it tells me about how we can convert our target audience.
Then it also tells us lastly, finally, through those objections and the reasons people bought, the landing page content, the testimonials to feature and what should be in those. It tells me about the conversion path and how I should expect people to flow through that: whether they have to come back many times or they make the purchase right away. Who they're going to compare me against in terms of competitors. And finally the purchase dynamics: How do I want to sell? Do I need a refund policy? Do I need to have things like free shipping? Should this be on a subscription basis? Should I have a high upfront payment or a low upfront payment with ballooning costs over time, and all that type of stuff?
This research process is not super simple. I certainly haven't dived deep on every one of these aspects. But you can use this as a fundamental architecture to shape how you answer these questions in all of the web marketing channels you might pursue. Before you go pursue any one given channel, you might want to try and identify some of the holes you have in this.
If you have questions about how to do this, go through and do this research first. You'll have far better results at the end.
All right, everyone. Thanks for watching. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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from The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/3452933
Guildford Monopoly: Board ballot set to close as neighbour Woking FC receives vote
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/guildford-monopoly-board-ballot-set-11391991
Alfold A281 crash sees car end up on its roof
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Guildford Shakespeare Company finds temporary home but search for permanent base continues
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Thursday, May 26, 2016
Claygate couple 'gobsmacked' by encounter with 'vulture'
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Addlestone One site £1.50 parking fee is 'act of betrayal'
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Surrey County Show parking measures after cars blocked pavement in 2015
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/surrey-county-show-parking-measures-11391535
Weather forecast for bank holiday weekend: It's going to be a case of sunshine on a rainy day
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Tom Cruise's Mummy movie van found in woodland by scouts
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Chelsea FC Foundation and Project Aspire team up for youth football sessions
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/chelsea-fc-foundation-project-aspire-11386375
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from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/teachers-phone-call-kidnap-threat-11390404
Preview the MozCon 2016 Agenda (and Other Exciting News!)
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
Like the talking mice to Cinderella, we're already working hard on MozCon and crafting Roger one heck of a ball gown. (And letting our metaphors get out of control in the meantime.) Which means I'm here to share with all of you the current MozCon 2016 Agenda and a ton of other preview goodies.
If you're suddenly like "Oh snap, I haven't bought my ticket(s)!", I'll pause while you:
New emcees: we're mixing it up!
As some of you know, Cyrus won't be emceeing MozCon this year. (We still adore him, and I'm sure his face will make it into a few slide decks.) So we decided to take this opportunity to shake it up.
Emceeing MozCon is a hard job. We want each and every speaker to feel supported by our stage and have the emcee warm up the audience for their talk. Instead of having one emcee for three days, we're having three different emcees, one each day.
Please congratulate them!
Jen Sable Lopez
Sr. Director of Community and Audience Development at Moz
@jennita
Leading our community and audience development efforts here at Moz, Jen Sable Lopez's the biggest fan of you: our community. She's deeply invested in being TAGFEE and bringing educational content and community love to you. Jen also does a great Grumpy Cat impression, serves as Moz gif maker, and loves traveling and her family.
Ronell Smith
Strategist at RS Consulting
@ronellsmith
Ronell Smith is a business strategist with a passion for helping brands create a user experience their customers will recognize, appreciate, and reward them for with their business.
Zeph Snapp
CEO at Altura Interactive
@zephsnapp
A bilingual, bicultural marketer, Zeph Snapp helps international companies reach Spanish speakers in the US and Latin America. If you want him to go on a rant, ask him about machine learning as it relates to translation and content.
The sneak peek MozCon 2016 Agenda
Because we're releasing this earlier than ever, there's still a few TBD spots and topics. I can't thank our speakers enough for being so gracious and super hard-working to settle on their topics.
You'll also notice that community speakers are still forthcoming. That's right — they're coming soon (keep an eye out for the submission post!), and we wanted to give you a head start to noodle on your potential topic.
Monday
08:00–09:00am
Breakfast
09:00–09:20am
Welcome to MozCon 2016! with Rand Fishkin
Wizard of Moz
@randfish
Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an unsaveable addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.
09:25–10:10am
Uplevel Your A/B Testing Skills with Cara Harshman
Content Marketing Manager at Optimizely
@caraharshman
A/B testing is bread and butter for anyone who aspires to be a data-driven marketer. Cara will share stories about how testers, from one-person agencies to dedicated testing teams, are doing it, and how you can develop your own A/B testing expertise.
Cara Harshman just celebrated her four-year anniversary at Optimizely. Besides managing content strategy, customer case studies, and the blog, she has been known to spend a lot of time writing parody songs for company all-hands meetings.
10:10–10:30am
AM Break
10:35–11:05am
TBD with Lauren Vaccarello
VP of Marketing at Box
@laurenv
Lauren Vaccarello is a best-selling author and currently runs corporate and field marketing at Box.
11:05–11:35am
TBD
11:35am–12:05pm
TBD
12:05–01:35pm
Lunch
01:40–02:10pm
Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing with Joe Hall
SEO Consultant at Hall Analysis LLC
@joehall
Information Architecture (IA) shapes the way we organize data, think about complex ideas, and build web sites. Joe will provide a new approach to IA for SEO and Content Marketing, based on actionable insights, that SEOs can extract from their own data sets.
Joe Hall is an executive SEO consultant focused on analyzing and informing the digital marketing strategies of select clients through high-level data analysis and SEO audits.
02:10–02:40pm
Breaking Patterns: How to Rewrite the CRO Playbook with Mobile Optimization with Talia Wolf
CMO at Banana Splash
@Taliagw
Best practices lie. Talia shares how to build a mobile conversion optimization strategy and how to turn more mobile visitors into customers based on A/B testing their emotions, decision making process, and behavior.
As CMO at Banana-Splash and Founder of Conversioner, Talia Wolf helps businesses optimize their sites using emotional targeting, consumer psychology, and real-time data to generate more revenues, leads, and sales. Talia is a keynote speaker, author, and Harry Potter fan.
02:40–03:10pm
TBD
03:10–03:30pm
PM Break
03:35–04:05pm
TBD with Ross Simmonds
Founder at Foundation Marketing
@TheCoolestCool
04:05–4:50pm
TBD with Dana DiTomaso
Partner at Kick Point
@danaditomaso
Dana DiTomaso is a partner at Kick Point, where she applies marketing into strategies to grow clients' businesses, in particular to ensure that digital and traditional play well together — separating real solutions from wastes of time (and budget).
Tuesday
08:00–09:00am
Breakfast
09:05–09:50am
You Can't Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter with Dr. Pete Meyers
Marketing Scientist at Moz
@dr_pete
Google is getting better every day at understanding intent and natural language, and the path between typing a search and getting a result is getting more winding. How often are queries interpreted, and how do we do keyword research for search engines that are beginning to understand concepts?
Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with marketing and data science on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past four years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project.
09:50–10:20am
How to Be Specific: From-The-Trenches Lessons in High-Converting Copy with Joanna Wiebe
Creator and Copywriter at Wiebe Marketing Ltd
@copyhackers
Abstracted benefits, summarized value, and promise-free landing pages keep marketers safe — and conversion rates low. Joanna shares how and why your copy needs to get specific to move people to act.
The original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copy Hackers and Airstory. She's optimized copy for Wistia, Buffer, Crazy Egg, Bounce Exchange, and Rainmaker, among others, and spoken at CTA Conf, Business of Software... and now MozCon.
10:20–10:40am
AM Break
10:45am–12:05pm
Community Speakers
12:05–01:35pm
Lunch
01:40–02:25pm
Local Projects to Boost Your Company and Career with Mike Ramsey
President at Nifty Marketing
@mikeramsey
Mike will walk through the projects that his individual team members took on to improve how they handled local links, reviews, reports, and lots of areas in between.
Mike Ramsey is the President of Nifty Marketing, which works with big brands and small businesses on digital marketing. He talks about running agencies, local search, and Idaho a lot.
02:25–02:55pm
Reimagining Customer Retention and Evangelism with Kristen Craft
Director of Business Development at Wistia
@thecrafty
As Director of Business Development at Wistia, Kristen Craft loves working with Wistia's partner community, building connections with other companies that care about video marketing. Kristen holds degrees in business and education from MIT and Harvard.
02:55–03:15pm
PM Break
03:25–03:55pm
TBD with Rebekah Cancino
Co-Founder and Content Strategy Consultant at Onward
@rebekahcancino
Rebekah Cancino spent the last decade helping clients, like Aetna and United Way, overcome some of their toughest content problems. Her consultancy offers workshops and training for in-house teams that bridge the gap between content, design, and technical SEO.
03:55–04:40pm
TBD with Wil Reynolds
CEO/Founder at Seer Interactive
@wilreynolds
Wil Reynolds — Director of Strategy, Seer Interactive — founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site's traffic has on the company's bottom line has shaped the SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House.
Wednesday
09:00–10:00am
Breakfast
10:05–10:35am
The Irresistible Power of Strategic Storytelling with Kindra Hall
Strategic Storytelling Advisor at Kindra Hall
@kindramhall
Whoever tells the best story, wins. In marketing, in business, in life. Going beyond buzzwords, Kindra will reveal specific storytelling strategies to create great content and win customers without a fight.
Kindra Hall is a speaker, author, and storytelling advisor. She works with individuals and brands to help them capture attention by telling better stories.
10:35–11:20am
29 Advanced Google Tag Manager Tips Every Marketer Should Know with Mike Arnesen
Founder and CEO at UpBuild
@mike_arnesen
Google Tag Manager is an incredibly powerful tool and one you're likely not using to its full potential. Mike will deliver 29 rapid-fire tips that'll empower you to overcome the tracking challenges of dynamic web apps, build user segments based on website interactions, scale the implementation of structured data, analyze the consumption of rich media, and much more.
Mike Arnesen has been driven by his passion for technical SEO, semantic search, website optimization, and company culture for over a decade. He is the Founder and CEO of UpBuild, a technical marketing agency focusing on SEO, analytics, and CRO.
11:20–11:40am
AM Break
11:45am–12:15pm
Engineering-As-Marketing for Non-Engineers with Tara Reed
CEO at AppsWithoutCode.com
@TaraReed_
Tara shares how to build useful tools like calculators, widgets, and micro-apps to acquire millions of new users, without writing a single line of code.
Tara Reed is a Detroit-based entrepreneur and founder of AppsWithoutCode.com. As a non-technical founder, she builds her own apps, widgets, and algorithms without writing a single line of code.
12:15–12:45pm
TBD
12:45–02:15pm
Lunch
02:20–03:05pm
Indexing on Fire: Google Firebase Native and Web App Indexing with Cindy Krum
CEO and Founder at MobileMoxie, LLC
@suzzicks
In the future, app and web content will be indistinguishable, and Google’s new Firebase platform allows developers to use the same resources to build, market, and maintain apps on all devices, in one place. Cindy will outline how digital marketers can use Firebase to help drive indexing of native and web app content, including Deep Links, Dynamic Links, and Angular JS web apps.
Cindy Krum is the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.
03:05–03:35pm
Mind Games: Craft Killer Experiences with 7 Lessons from Cognitive Psychology with Sarah Weise
UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive
@weisesarah
Sarah Weise is UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive. She has crafted experiences for hundreds of websites, apps, and products. Over the past decade, she has specialized in creative, lean ways to connect with customers and build experiences that matter.
03:35–03:55pm
PM Break
04:00–04:45pm
Earning, Nudging, and (Indirectly) Buying the Links You Still Need to Rank with Rand Fishkin
Wizard of Moz
@randfish
Links still move the needle — on rankings, traffic, reputation, and referrals. Yet, some SEOs have come to believe that if we "create great content," links will just appear (and rankings will follow). Rand will dispel this myth and focus on how to build the architecture for a link strategy, alongside some hot new tools and tactics for link acquisition in 2016.
Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.
Don't worry, we've got your MozCon evenings covered!
After a day of learning and possibly discovering a brand-new city, I know I sometimes struggle with what to do after the conference closes for the day. At MozCon, we work to bring you three evening events where you can chill, network, make new friends, and grab some food and drinks. (We will also have a post in late August or early September with a ton of great recommendations for things to do and food to eat in Seattle!)
Monday's MozCrawl from 7–10pm
The best part of our MozCrawl is being able to explore a neighborhood in Seattle. Bring your walking shoes (or load your favorite rideshare app), and get to know a little about the flavor of Seattle. While the locations are still TBD, Moz and our MozCon partners will each host a bar with light appetizers and drinks.
To ensure you see as much of Seattle as possible, each bar will have a scavenger hunt element. Our sweet, bar-hosting partners:
(We also have two other partners, STAT and Wistia, who will be keeping a low profile that night.)
Tuesday's MozCon Ignite from 7–10pm
In my completely biased opinion, this is my favorite MozCon evening event. For those who've never been to an Ignite-style talk, they are 5 minute talks with auto-advancing slides. Because we're learning all day at MozCon about online marketing, our Ignite talks are 100% not about marketing or business. They are passion projects, hobbies, and interests.
Last year, our 16 talks ranged from a touching tale about helping a terminally ill child musician record an album, to how to love opera, to how to make frosting. You can sit back, relax, laugh, and cry. Plus, beforehand, there are networking opportunities to chat with your fellow attendees.
If this sounds like something you'd want to speak at, we'll be opening up pitches in early July. Our venue is currently TBD.
Wednesday's MozCon Bash at the Garage from 7pm–12am
Make sure to book your flight home the day after MozCon so you can join us at our annual MozCon Bash to celebrate another great year of learning. Put on your bowling shoes and see if you can out-turkey your new friends! Or play a round of pool, or sing your heart out with some karaoke. Food and drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, are on us. You'll take home even more memories and some photobooth mementos to look back on.
Grab your ticket today — we've sold out for the last 5 years.
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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 The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/3448494
Esher man jumped in front of train just hours after hospital mental health assessment, inquest hears
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/esher-man-jumped-front-train-11390781
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from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/teenager-appear-court-over-alfold-11391670
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from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/manhole-fire-cobham-hits-morning-11390206
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from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/khronos-agoria-hope-britains-talent-11391202
Khronos Agoria hoping for Britain's Got Talent 'wildcard' vote
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/khronos-agoria-hoping-britains-talent-11391202
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from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/husband-sonita-nijhawan-appears-court-11387881
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from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/a3-crash-near-san-domenico-11387785
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from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/top-gear-scriptwriter-lucky-work-11385716
Khronos Agoria praying for Britain's Got Talent 'wildcard' vote
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/khronos-agoria-praying-britains-talent-11391202
Legal highs ban: Everything you need to know about the ban on psychoactive substances
from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/legal-highs-ban-everything-you-11387405
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from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/shock-surprise-wetherspoons-decision-sell-11383416
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from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/three-arrested-after-fast-paced-11389758
SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide
SEO copywriting is both a key element and a challenge in every SEO strategy. As search engines spider texts, the content of your website should be fine-tuned to the (ever-changing) algorithms of search engines. On top of that, your text should be written in such a way that your audience enjoys and understands your writing.
In this complete guide to SEO copywriting, I’ll talk you through the process of keyword research and the 3 stages of the writing process. This guide should help you to write the SEO-friendly and readable articles you need on your website!
This guide to SEO copywriting covers:
- SEO copywriting and holistic SEO
- Before writing: always start with keyword research
- Three phases of writing an article
- Phase 1 of the writing process: preparing your text
- Phase 2 of the writing process: writing your text
- Phase 3 of the writing process: correcting your text
SEO copywriting and holistic SEO
At Yoast, we profess what we call ‘holistic SEO’. In our view, your primary goal should be to build and maintain THE BEST website. Ranking in Google will come automatically if your website is of extremely high quality.
Google wants to serve their customers. Their mission is: to index all the world’s information and make it universally accessible. Of course, Google also wants to make some money, but if they want to make the world’s information accessible, they’ll have to show people results that fit their wishes. People would otherwise stop wanting to use Google. So, let’s agree on Google’s willingness to show people the best results: if your website is the best in your niche market, Google wants to rank it high.
Holistic SEO is an interdisciplinary marketing strategy aimed at making the best website in a specific niche market. In order to do so, the technical design of your website should be excellent, the UX of your website flawless and all security aspects covered. Most importantly, the content of your website should be well written and aimed at the audience your website serves. Such an approach asks for rather advanced writing skills.
To make sure your website is the best in your niche market, the text on your websites should be nice and easy to read. Without making any concessions to the quality of your text, you should tweak and fine-tune your text to the specific demands of search engines. The process of SEO copywriting strongly resembles the process of writing any other text. It’s hard work and some of us have more writing talent than others. We can’t all be Hemingway, but with some training, anyone should be able to write a decent article.
Read more: ‘5 tips to write readable blog posts!’ »
Before writing: always start with keyword research
The very first step of SEO copywriting has little to do with writing. You’ll have to decide what you’re going to write about. What topics do you want to be found for? You’ll need to use the keywords you want to rank for. Therefore, the first step of SEO copywriting is keyword research. Keyword research can be defined as the activities you undertake in order to compile an extensive list of keywords and keyphrases which you would like to rank for.
Proper keyword research consists of the following three steps:
Step 1: Formulate a mission
Before starting the actual keyword research, you should think about your mission. Your mission is the thing that makes you stand out from all the other blogs. While formulating your mission you should answer questions like: who are you and what is your blog about? What makes it special? Take the time and literally write down your mission. If you want to know more about formulating your mission, make sure to read our post about the mission of your website.
Step 2: Make a list of relevant keywords
Once you have formulated a clear mission, you can start making a list of all the search terms (keywords) you want your website to be found for. If your mission is clear, you should have little trouble coming up with search terms that apply to your niche market and your unique selling points. Those will be keywords you want to be found for.
In order to come up with good terms you really have to get inside the heads of your audience. How are they most likely to find you? What would they search for on Google? At the end of your keyword research, you should have a list of all the relevant search terms people could use. Also, think of combinations and nuances within these terms.
There are a few tools which can make keyword research a lot easier. Read our post about keyword research tools and the post about how to choose your perfect focus keyword if you need more hands-on tips.
Eventually, you should make a useful overview. Creating a table can help with this. Try to come up with combinations of keywords as well. And order the keywords by some kind of priority – which of the keywords are especially important to rank for (very close to your mission) and which ones are less important? When choosing which keywords to tackle first, you should also consider how likely it is that your pages will rank for that specific keyword. In many cases, focusing on less popular and less competitive keywords can be a good strategy at first. Read our posts about why you should focus on long-tail keywords and befriend the long tail if you would like to know more about the importance of less competitive keywords.
Step 3: Construct landing pages
The final step of keyword research is to create awesome landing pages for the keywords you want to be found for. A landing page is a page that is tailored to draw in visitors who reached your blog through a specific keyword. This could be a dedicated page or a blog post optimized for a specific keyword. Do make sure your visitors can find their way through your blog from every landing page. And make sure you make a landing page for every relevant keyword you come up with.
Your keyword research will give you much direction on what to blog about. You’ll have to unlock content around a specific word. A word is not a topic though. Next to a keyword (or keyphrase), you will need an angle, a specific story around that keyword. Read our tips on how to come up with ideas for your blog if you would like to know more about that.
Three phases of writing an article
Once you’ve decided upon a topic or a story you want to write, the writing process begins. In our view, the writing process consists of three stages: preparing, writing and correcting.
Phase 1 of the writing process: preparing your text
The first phase of the writing process is preparing your text. Before you put your pen to paper, or your fingers on the keyboard, take some time and think about what you’re going to write. You probably have a topic in mind, but before you start writing, you should have clear answers to the following questions:
- What is the purpose of your piece? Why are you writing? What do you want to achieve?
- What will be the main message of your post? What is the central question you want to answer?
- Who are your readers?
- What information do you need to write your piece?
- In what order will you present your information? What will be the structure of your article?
In our post about preparing a blog post, you can read all about how to come up with proper and clear answers to the first 4 questions phrased above.
Text structure
The most important element of preparing your text is setting up the structure of your text. The structure of the text on your site is important for SEO. If your content is clearly structured, your chance to rank well in Google will be higher.
It really pays off to think about the structure of your piece before you actually start writing. The structure is the skeleton of your text: it will help the reader grasp the main idea of your text.
Posts or pages with a clear structure will also result in higher conversions on your website. If your message is properly understood by your audience, chances are higher that they’ll buy your products or return to your website. If you want practical tips on how to set up the structure of a piece of writing, you should read creating a clear blogpost structure.
Phase 2 of the writing process: writing your text
After the initial preparation you can start the actual writing process. This will take about 20 % of the total time you spend on your article.
Just write!
The most important tip for this phase is: just write. People often have trouble coming up with the first sentence (or the first paragraph for that matter). You can skip writing that first paragraph altogether. Just put down a couple of words referring to the content that first paragraph should have and start writing the second paragraph. Beginnings and endings are easier to write once you’ve fleshed out the body of your post.
If a sentence isn’t grammatically correct or sounds awkward, just keep going and don’t worry about it just yet. You can rewrite these things in the next phase, which is editing. In the writing phase, it is important to stay in the flow of writing.
Guard the structure of your text
While writing, use the structure you established in your preparation phase as an outline. Try to write the paragraphs according to that plan. Make sure you write clear paragraphs. We advise you to start each paragraph with the most important sentence. Then explain or elaborate on that sentence. A reader will be able to grasp the most important content from your article, just by reading the first sentences of your paragraphs.
Make sure your text is readable
Reading from a screen can be hard. If you want your readers to read your entire blog post, you should make sure it’s easy to read. Posts that are nice and easy to read will result in more returning visitors and a higher conversion rate. Most importantly, make sure your text isn’t too difficult for the audience you’re writing for.
Like to read more tips on writing readable texts? Please read our post with tips on how to make blog posts more readable and our post with tips on how to improve the typography of your blog.
Use some of our style tips
Some of us are natural writers. They are able to write an attractive, fun, readable text in a few minutes. Others lack that skill. Attractive writing is a matter of talent, but practice surely helps! If you want to develop an attractive writing style, you should read a lot. Reading (novels, blogs, magazines, whatever) will inspire you to write your own awesome articles. It will learn you how other people form their sentences and built their paragraphs. It teaches you how to use jokes and how to play with language. Finally, lots of reading allows you to create a gut feeling about what makes a nicely readable text. If you want more tips on how to make sure your text has a nice style, you should read our blog post about how to obtain an attractive writing style.
Take a break every now and then!
Writing can be an intense process. If you write for long periods of time, you’ll discover that concentrating will become harder. The exact time span will, of course, be different for every individual. If you notice that your mind starts to wander, that’ll be the time to take a break.
Speaking for myself, I’m not able to write for more than 20 minutes (but to be honest, my attention span is quite short). At that point I get up to take a walk, look at my Facebook timeline or make a cup of tea. Even a minute-long break can be enough to return to your writing with a fresh and renewed level of concentration and creativity.
Phase 3 of the writing process: correcting your text
Once you’ve concluded the actual writing process of your piece, you’ll have a first draft of your article. This first draft is the thing you will improve upon in the final phase of writing. The final step will still take much of your time.
The correcting phase is the phase in which you should ‘kill your darlings’. You should read and re-read and re-re-read your post and correct any awkward formulations, unclear phrasing and jumbled paragraph structure. Let’s look at five steps you should take in order to properly correct your article.
Use Yoast SEO
While correcting your text, you should definitely use our Yoast SEO plugin. Our plugin helps you optimizing your text for the search engines. At the same time it will help you to make your text more readable as well. In the next lesson of this module, we’ll tell you all about how to use our plugin. If you want a more detailed overview of how to use Yoast SEO, you should read our post about the content analysis of Yoast SEO.
Step 1: Read slowly (and out loud)
You can start this phase by reading your piece slowly (and maybe even out loud, this can really help). Each sentence should be grammatically correct and the spelling must be flawless. You should be very critical of your own work.
Step 2: Focus on sentences
Start by making sure each and every sentence is correct. Focus on the spelling of words and rephrase awkward formulations. Make sure sentences are grammatically correct. And check for readability: make sure your sentences aren’t too long.
Step 3: Focus on paragraphs
If all sentences in one paragraph are approved, look at the structure within a paragraph. Focus on that first sentence in every paragraph. Does that first core sentence really capture the thing you wanted to state in that specific paragraph? And are the sentences within a paragraph presented in a logical order. Do you use transition words in order to make clear what the connection between sentences is?
Step 4: Check text structure
Check whether the structure between paragraphs is clear. Are the topics in your text presented in a logical order? Or do you need to make some changes?
You should also check your headings and subheadings. Make sure your focus keyword is in one of those headings and subheadings. But equally important, make sure the headings help your readers to grasp the structure of your text.
Step 5: Ask for feedback
After editing your text, you should ask people for feedback. At Yoast all the posts we write are read by at least two of our colleagues before we publish them online. Feedback allows for the perspective of someone else than the writer and almost always leads to large improvements in the post.
It will be really useful to let someone from your audience proofread your post to test whether or not the message is communicated properly. Also, feedback from someone with proper writing and grammar skills will help you improve your blog post even further.
Keep reading: ‘10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blog post’ »
from Yoast • The art & science of website optimization https://yoast.com/complete-guide-seo-copywriting/