This
is a post that has been gnawing at the edges of my brain for years, and I think
the time has finally come to write it. Our recent Moz re-brand launched the
inevitable 4,789th wave (and that’s just this year) of “SEO Is Dead” posts.
This isn’t a post about our reasons for broadening our brand (Rand has talked extensively about that)
– it’s a post about why I think every declaration of SEO’s demise misses
something fundamental about our future. This is going to get philosophical, so
if you’d rather go make a sandwich, I won’t stop you.

The Essence of
Search

Let’s
start with a deceptively simple question – How big is the internet? I’ll
attempt to answer that by creating a graph that borders on being silly:

The
internet is so big that even Google got tired of counting,
and it’s growing exponentially. Five years have passed since they announced the trillion mark, and the article suggests that URL variations now make the
potential indexed page count theoretically infinite.

We
can’t just print out the internet and read it at our leisure. We need a filter –
a way to sift and sort our collected content – and that’s essentially all that
search is. However search evolves or whatever happens to Google, the expansion
of human knowledge is accelerating. Unless we suffer a technological cataclysm,
we will need search, in some form, for the rest of human history.

Searchers and
Searchees

As
long as search exists, it also stands to reason that there will be two groups
of people: (1) People who want to find things, and (2) People who want to be
found. On any given day, we may each be both (1) and (2), and the “people” who
want to be found could be businesses, governments, etc., but

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/56M5JYdNyW8/seo-tactics-die-but-seo-never-will

Today’s web search engines have sophisticated ways of measuring whether a web page is related to a given query, based on decades of research in Information Retrieval. Come join me as I explore the inner workings of a search engine’s relevance engine and explain what it means for SEOs.

Determining Relevance

When a user submits a query to a search engine, the first thing it must do is determine which pages in the index are related to the query and which are not. Throughout this post, I will refer this as the “relevance” problem. More formally, we can state it as follows:

Given a search query and a document, compute a relevance score that measures the similarity between the query and document.

The “document” in this context can also refer to things like the title tag, the meta description, incoming anchor text, or anything else that we think might help determine whether the query is related to the page. Practically, a search engine computes a number of relevance scores using different page elements and weights them all to arrive at one final score.

The relevance problem has been extremely well studied in the research community. The first papers go back several decades, and it is still an active area of research. In this post, I focus on the most influential approaches that have stood the test of time.

Relevance vs Ranking

Conceptually, we can separate relevance determination from ranking the relevant documents, even if they are implemented as a single step inside a search engine. In this mental framework, the relevance step first makes a binary (True/False) decision for each page, then the ranking step orders the documents to return to the user.

I’ll present some data later in this post that vividly illustrates this

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/gf7OAmqyb5g/determining-relevance-how-similarity-is-scored

Building a community around your brand isn’t just about the strength of your social media presence. It’s not about how you manage your social media outlets or whether you’re on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter. It’s not about how many blog posts you write or how often you use video or email marketing.

It’s about building a company.

A thriving community — one that brings visibility, targeted traffic, trust, credibility, conversions, customers, and ultimately revenue — is built upon a solid business that is investing tirelessly in its products, its services, and improving the experience it provides for its customers. 

If you want to build your business and a community around your brand, you’ve got to provide value. You’ve got to create the right content. You’ve got to effectively integrate SEO. And, most importantly, you’ve got to have the right team. 

And I’m not just talking about your marketing team.

 

Time to drop the silos

If you want your team to be successful at building your community and your business, you’ve got to think differently. And you’ve got to drop the silos.

 

 

Your team’s specific jobs and designations are important to the day-to-day running of your company’s business (otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post). But there is one big overarching truth for each and every person associated with the company: In the broad scope, it doesn’t matter what your job title is, what department you’re in, or what your job description is. Your role is to do whatever it takes to make the company thrive.

Everyone who works in your company is on the same team: the team that wants to accomplish the stuff that matters and will make your business a success.

So who’s gonna do the work?

As we’ve worked with companies (in many different industries and all with

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ecoZJKpQ-kU/meet-your-community-building-team

I roundly mocked voice search for such a long time.

I mocked it in public:

And I argued internally at Distilled against it being an important trend.

But I think I might have been wrong.

Before I explain why I think I might have been wrong, I want to give you a few of bits of information in my defence:

• I don’t drive much, and almost never on my own; I commute on the train and most of my driving is with my family.
• I work in an open-plan office without so much as a cubicle to shield my embarrassing experiments with voice search from the world.
• I actually don’t like using the phone much, so it may have passed me by that talking into that small device is a perfectly acceptable thing that normal people do.

My main arguments why voice search wasn’t an important trend were:

1. You look stupid talking into your phone

In hindsight, perhaps this was the most shortsighted of all my arguments. Of course we don’t always look entirely sensible holding a bit of technology up to our ears, but it seems like we have made it socially acceptable in most environments.

Image courtesy of travosaurus

More importantly, I think that I underestimated the speed with which things can become socially normal. I’m personally more up for trying this kind of new thing than most, and I think I underestimated everyone else’s willingness to try new things.

I increasingly make calls on my computer. Between Google+ Hangouts, Skype, and GoToMeeting, I probably average 2-3/day, so even in my cubicle-less existence it’s becoming more and more normal for me to talk to my computer.

2. You can’t edit things easily

Anyone who tried early voice dictation software is familiar with the process of trying to get it to recognise stop words and having

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/OBjmWzUHcEo/i-think-i-might-have-been-wrong-about-voice-search

Today, we’re happy to announce a partnership between Followerwonk and Buffer to help you optimize your tweeting. We’re really excited to be teaming up with such a great product and company, and the combination of our apps really does advance the cause of our customers.

Before I dig into specifics of that relationship, I want to lay some groundwork to explain why we formed this partnership.

It all comes down to this little pearl:

Tweets are delicate

Tweets have a half-life of a mere 18 minutes. Poof! and their utility to reach new customers, drive traffic, and extend your reach is pretty much gone.

But it gets worse for our little tweets.

First, most of us have a heck of a job consistently coming up with good content to tweet day after day. It’s kinda like going to the gym: we start out strong, but most of us quickly fade to where we spend the entire time in the sauna.

Second, even if we do come up with lots of good content, we risk undermining our own performance.

I want to talk with you about ways to squeeze the most out of the content we do come up with. How can we maximally schedule our tweets to perform?

Cultivate your current audience

Given the gossamer-like nature of tweets, a simple first step is to schedule most of your tweets when your followers are most active.

This is where our relationship with Buffer helps.

First, go to Followerwonk and complete an Analysis of your followers. Once you’re finished, we’ll present a chart of their most active hours. (Mouse over each hour to view your local time.)

By itself, this insight is extraordinarily useful. There is significant variation from one person to the next in terms of when their followers are most active, and we can now

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/rO2i2O66eyU/followerwonk-partners-with-buffer