Moz Blog

The Not-so-Short Shortlist of Moz's Top Seattle Restaurants, Bars, and Activities for MozCon 2013

Elizabeth_Crouch — 2013-06-19T03:23:00+01:00

The benefits of attending MozCon 2013 are invaluable: You'll go home with insightful tips from top marketers, actionable advice from data experts, connections to awesome people in your industry, new friends from the Moz Community, freshly honed inbound marketing skills—and your very own Roger toy. One of the biggest bonuses? It's a fantastic excuse to visit Seattle during the most beautiful time of year.

I polled the whole MozPlex to curate a list of our favorite places to dine, swill coffee, imbibe boozy beverages, play games, bust a move, hit the water, and take in the view. There are over 130 Mozzers now, so the list is long. From locally grown, organic eats and family fun on Lake Union to bocce ball and craft beer, Seattle's got a little something for everyone.

The Hipster • The Sophisticated Palate • The Sandwich Lover • The Coffee Fiend

The Beer Snob • The Cocktail Connoisseur • The Adventurer

The Hipster

Community Coordinator Megan drinks out of an ironic cup.

Recognizable by their tight jeans and plaid coloring, these gentle creatures can generally be found grazing the hill east of downtown. They might be slow to accept you into the herd, but once you're in, they'll share their abundant resources with you.

People's Choice: The Mozzers' top spot (and terminus to many a Wednesday beer night) is the Unicorn and its basement bar, the Narwhal (1118 East Pike Street). A kaleidoscope of circus décor, deep fried eats, and loud music, these bars are where Capitol Hill layabouts and techies alike unite in pursuit of good times and reasonably priced beverages.

The Seattle Institution: Grab a cold beer, tuck into a plate of nachos, and soak up some sun on the back patio at Linda's Tavern (707 East Pine Street). The original Seattle hipster bar, this place is best approached with a pack of pals to keep you company and help you drink beer or mimosas by the pitcher.

Break out the Chopsticks: Sleek, modern, and serene, Momiji (1522 12th Avenue) is where most Mozzers prefer to sup on sushi. You can't beat happy hour in the front bar—cheap Sapporo, sake, and decadently crunchy deep-fried Seattle rolls—but the back dining room is truly beautiful. If fish doesn't strike your fancy, roll down the hill a little bit to In The Bowl (1554 East Olive Way) for the tastiest vegetarian Thai on the Hill. The dining room: small. The menu: epic. The bathroom: magical (just trust me here). Their four-star spiciness level will scald even the most fireproof of tongues, and their noodles will transport you to a different plane of happiness.

Al Fresco: With hipster cred and a patio to rival Linda's, Captain Black's (129 Belmont Avenue East) is another crowd favorite here at Moz. After you're done stuffing yourself with fried Beecher's cheese curds, hush puppies, and tater tots, you can drink a little whiskey, then roll back down Capitol Hill to your hotel.

Sate the Sweet Tooth: While die-hard Seattle hipsters may head to a lesser-known creamery on Capitol Hill (that also happens to be the best dessert spot for beer lovers, so read on), Moz recommends you join the line at Molly Moon's (917 East Pine Street) for scoops of Fair Trade chocolate, salted caramel, or balsamic strawberry ice cream. Snag a waffle cone and chill on the astroturf at Volunteer Park (1247 15th Avenue East), the coolest place to be on a hot, sunny day.

Take in the View: Sure, you could wait in line at the Space Needle or climb to the top of Mount Rainier. But the Smith Tower (506 2nd Avenue) in Pioneer Square has been providing Seattleites with breathtaking views since before skyscrapers were even cool.

Fun and Games: Roll a few blocks north of Moz on Second Avenue to hit three of our favorite post-work stops: Rabbit Hole (2222 2nd Avenue) for skee-ball, highbrow cocktails, and outrageously good pub grub; Shorty's (2222 2nd Avenue) for cheap PBR, video games, and pinball; and Lava Lounge (2226 2nd Avenue) for whiskey, booths big enough for a whole crew, and many rounds of shuffleboard.

Bust a Move: If you're heading in on Sunday, hit up the Re-Bar (1114 Howell Street) for their FLAMMABLE! dance night. "A gay bar, only for everybody," the Re-Bar mixes the hippest of the hip and the funnest of the fun in a LGBTQ-friendly atmosphere with stiff drinks and a packed dance floor. Heads up: cash only!

Weekend Adventure: If you're staying the prior weekend and have a car handy, hit up Georgetown, a South Seattle neighborhood with plenty of art galleries, dive bars, tasty restaurants, and a cool trailer park flea market (5805 Airport Way) on the weekends.

The Sophisticated Palate

Engineers Martin and Doug give a toast to good taste.

Do you love the finer things in life? We do, too. We want our food stuffed with other, more obscure food and glazed in priceless ingredients. We want chefs who minored in alchemy at culinary school. We want nothing less than sheer artistry. These are some of Moz's top picks for exquisite eats paired with beautifully crafted cocktails and Washington's best wines. So comb your hair, put on your fanciest pair of sneakers, and hit the spots on this list.

People's Choice: Restaurant Zoe (1318 East Union) is part of the bustling restaurant scene around 12th and Union. Staffed by a kitchen full of vets from Canlis, Crush, and other Seattle standards, Zoe boasts an effortlessly cool atmosphere, and an approachable menu of artistic Pacific Northwest fare. Two blocks away, Cascina Spinasse (1535 14th Avenue) dishes up the most decadently delicious Northern Italian eats you can find outside of Piemonte—leg of rabbit, tajarin pasta glued together with butter and sage, precious lettuces dressed with Barolo vinegar and Ligurian olive oil. If you're in the mood for slightly lighter fare, hit their side bar, Artusi (1531 14th Avenue), for ingenius cocktails (including a slushy machine full of rotating frozen craft cocktails that will most certainly change your life) and a compact menu of mind-blowingly good food.

The Seattle Institution: An overwhelming number of Mozzers cited one of prolific restaurateur Ethan Stowell's restaurants as their personal favorites, so I'm going to just lump them all together. If you're sticking downtown, go for vino, fluffy gnocchi alla romagna, and perfectly al dente pasta at Tavolata (2323 2nd Avenue). If we've already convinced you that Capitol Hill is the place to be, head to Rione XIII (401 15th Avenue East) for Roman-style pizza and pasta, Anchovies & Olives (1550 15th Avenue) for ice-cold oysters and beautifully prepared seafood, or Bar Cotto (1546 15th Avenue) for mouth-watering charcuterie, veggies, and thin, crispy pizzas. Feeling adventurous? The tasting menu at Staple & Fancy (4739 Ballard Avenue Northwest) in Ballard is also worth the extra trip.

Pro tip: Arrive in luxurious style with our friends from Uber—it's either less expensive than or about the same price as taking a cab, depending on what kind of ride you fancy. MozCon attendees will also get hooked up with a little friends-of-friends discount!

Break out the Chopsticks: Round up at least two or three people to hit Monsoon (615 19th Avenue East) with you, because you will probably want to order every single thing on this exquisite Vietnamese-influenced menu. Especially the drunken chicken.

Al Fresco: What happens when two classically trained chefs fall in love, get married, and wed Korean cuisine with French technique and Northwest ingredients? Pure magic. One of the best meals of your life. Dumplings that will restore your faith in humanity. Hitch a ride to Fremont and try to snag a seat on the back deck at Revel (403 N 36th Street).

Sate the Sweet Tooth: What's that overpowering cocoa-brownie smell wafting toward you on the deck at Revel? It's Seattle's premier chocolate factory, organic and Fair Trade Theo (3400 Phinney Avenue North). Take a tour, and bring home chocolatey souvenirs for your loved ones—or yourself. We won't tell. If you take our other recommendations and end up on Capitol Hill for dinner, head to D'Ambrosio Gelato (1544 12th Avenue) for creamy, authentic Italian goodness from a certified Master Gelatiere.

Worth the Trip: Another Ballard stand-out, The Walrus and the Carpenter (4743 Ballard Avenue Northwest) shares a dining room window with the aforementioned Staple & Fancy. Go here for the freshest oysters, the most delectable menu, the most gorgeous kitchen, and the mustache-iest waitstaff north of the Shipping Canal.

Weekend Adventure: We highly recommend that you pay a visit to Woodinville for wine tasting. Much closer than the sun-drenched growing regions in Central Washington, Woodinville's tasting rooms bring some of the best wines within quick driving distance of the big city. A few of Moz's favorites: Mark Ryan (14475 Woodinville-Redmond Road, Woodinville, WA 98072), DeLille (14421 Woodinville-Redmond Road Northeast, Woodinville, WA 98072), Obelisco (19495 144th Avenue Northeast Woodinville, WA 98072), and Long Shadows (14450 Woodinville-Redmond Road, #105, Woodinville, WA 98072).

The Sandwich Lover

Customer Acquisition Manager Justin enjoys a Paseo sandwich and the gorgeous view from Gasworks Park.

If the Earl of Sandwich is your most cherished historical figure; if you daydream about what other letters you could add to your BLT; if you literally think there hasn't been a better thing since sliced bread—this list is for you, my friend.

People's Choice: The people have spoken, and they have chosen Paseo (4225 Fremont Avenue North and 6226 Seaview Avenue Northwest). These are, empirically, the best sandwiches in Seattle. They might be the best sandwiches anywhere, ever. Crispy baguette. Savory aioli. Tangy jalapeños. Grilled onions simmered in the same addictive sauce they use to marinate their meats. Crisp romaine lettuce. Cuban-style pork, chicken, tofu, or seafood. You might just decide to dump out your suitcase and refill it with Paseo sandwiches to take home. That might be a bad decision. Might.

Nice Buns: Lil Woody's (1211 Pine Street) is just a few blocks up the hill from the Convention Center. Their burgers come piled with exotic ingredients and paired with hand-cut fries and milkshakes made from Molly Moon's ice cream.

The Seattle Institution: Don't let the divey décor and weird name fool you—The Honey Hole (703 East Pike Street) on Capitol Hill makes some seriously delicious sandwiches, served up with zero pretention and a side of the crispiest fries you will ever eat.

Sate the Sweet Tooth: In addition to their eponymous treats and sweet scoops, Cupcake Royale also boasts a freezer full of ice cream sammies in flavors like red velvet cake and burnt caramel with sea salt. There are a few locations, but we're partial to the one across the street from Moz (108 Pine Street). You can admire our Post-it window murals from street level or pop in to say hi!

Fun and Games: Like a little nosh with your board or card games? Cafe Mox (5105 Leary Avenue Northwest) in Ballard is a sweet spot to grab a beer, eat a sandwich, and play some Settlers of Catan. Bonus: family-friendly!

The Coffee Fiend

Director of Community Jen savors a steamy latte.

It's no myth: Seattleites subsist on a steady diet of vitamin D pills, inky espresso, and velvety lattes. Here are some our favorite places to fuel up.

Downtown: Home to many a Moz 1:1 meeting, Fonté Café and Wine Bar (1321 1st Avenue) is a lovely place to grab perfectly brewed coffee and tame your inbox first thing in the morning. Is WFCS a thing where you live? We hope that it is.

Capitol Hill: Espresso Vivace is arguably the best coffee in Seattle. But we don't like arguments, so you should probably roll up the hill to Vivace's open-air sidewalk bar (321 Broadway Avenue East) or brick-and-mortar café (532 Broadway Avenue East) to find out for yourself.

Pioneer Square: If you find yourself in Seattle's oldest neighborhood, head to art-filled Zeitgeist Coffee (171 South Jackson Street) before you embark on the Seattle Underground Tour (608 1st Avenue). Not your typical tour, this fun crawl through the buried former ground-level of Old Seattle is a Moz favorite. You'll learn all about lusty prospectors and the women that fleeced them, Seattle's original wooden plumbing pipes, and how old-timey architects beat the mud by building streets ten feet in the air.

Beyond: Lighthouse Roasters (400 North 43rd Street) in Fremont is off the beaten path, but roasts such perfect coffee, you won't mind the hike through this residential neighborhood—a great stop on your way to Woodland Park Zoo (601 North 59th Street).

The Beer Snob

Ruby Programmer Ben appreciates the subtle hoppy notes of an IPA.

Here in Seattle, one does not simply crack open a cold one and call it a night. One sips from the cornucopia of locally brewed IPAs, pilsners, saisons, and stouts. One tours breweries to compare and contrast their offerings. In some cases, one even brings the kids.

Gotta Taste Them All: If you only make one dedicated beer stop, let it be at Brouwer's Cafe (400 North 35th Street) in Fremont. With 64 beers on tap, over 300 bottles, and 60 scotches, even the most jaded, world-weary connoisseur will find something new to sip on.

Fun for the Whole Family: Think beer and babies don't mix? Kid-friendly Fremont Brewing Company (3409 Woodland Park Ave North) will prove you wrong. Parents can kick back and have adult conversations while the little ones dig into never-ending bowls of pretzels and play with their contemporaries.

Sate the Sweet Tooth: The truly indie creamery on Capitol Hill, Bluebird (1205 East Pike Street) also brews some mighty fine beer. Home to the best vegan "ice cream" ever—a deceptively creamy horchata flavor—they also make beer floats with their stout. Frosty stout plus peanut butter ice cream equals mind, blown.

Fun and Games: Von Trapp's (912 12th Avenue) cavernous biergarten on Capitol Hill is basically a playground for grown-ups. Go for the epic German and Belgian beer list, indulge in some tasty pretzels and brats, and stay for many rounds of bocce ball.

The Tastiest Kind of Tourism: Ballard is home to some of our favorite breweries, all located within walking distance of the neighborhood's lively shopping and dining corridor. We recommend checking out Hilliard's Beer (1550 Northwest 49th Street) and Peddler Brewing Company (1514 Northwest Leary Way). If you don't mind mixing drinks with actual peddling, you can also hop aboard the Cycle Saloon (206-678-7211), a people-powered tour of Ballard's breweries.

The Cocktail Connoisseur

Help Desk Administrator Dave and Customer Success Strategist Renea sip martinis at The Zig Zag.

Can you blind-smell the difference between Scrappy's and Regan's orange bitters? Does seeing a bottle of Pappy van Winkle on a shelf make you absurdly happy? Do you get sad when people say they don't like gin? Cheers! These bars are for you.

The Seattle Institution: The Zig Zag Café (1501 Western Avenue #202) was one of the pioneering bars in the American craft cocktail movement. Nestled alongside the Pike Street Hill Climb between Pike Place Market and the waterfront, this dimly lit cocktail joint is the go-to spot for booze aficionados in Seattle. Their house cocktail list is inventive and extensive, their selection is carefully curated, and the 'tenders are some of the best in the biz.

The New Darling: Looking to try something rare and extraordinary? The Captain's List of spirits at Canon (928 12th Avenue) is so extensive that you need to scan a QR code to download it to your phone (which makes our nerd-hearts fill with glee). Beyond the floor-to-ceiling walls of precious booze, Canon wins us over with the little touches: stainless steel straws, slate coasters, cucumber-infused water, and copper mint julep cups.

The Hidden Gem: Tucked away in an alley between First and Second Avenues, Bathtub Gin & Co. (between Bell & Blanchard in "Gin Alley") staffs bartenders who are gifted with a sixth sense: Tell them what kind of spirit you like and what kind of mood you're in, and they'll make you something mind-blowing. If you can snag a seat at the upstairs bar, do it. If not, settle in on a leather couch in the library room downstairs.

The Grand Tour: Touring the city's distilleries is a fun way to sip local spirits and see Seattle while you're at it. If you don't have time for a full tour, head up to Sun Liquor Distillery (514 East Pike Street) and Oola Distillery (1314 East Union Street) on Capitol Hill. If you've got a bit more time, we recommend taking Local Craft Tours' (206-455-3740) chauffeured trip around town. You'll leave from downtown, then hit three or four distilleries (including some of our very favorites, Sound Spirits and Letterpress Distilling) to sample the wares.

The Adventurer

Social Community Manager Erica hits the high seas.

Are you coming to see the sights, absorb some art, and explore the area? After you're finished eating and drinking like a local, here are the the museums, vistas, and activities we love to share with out-of-town guests.

Hit the Water: Looking for the best views of downtown? Get on a boat. Taking the West Seattle Water Taxi (Pier 50, 801 Alaskan Way) or the Bainbridge Island Ferry (Pier 52, 801 Alaskan Way) will give you glittering city views, and you can explore the walking paths, restaurants, and more on the opposite shores. If you've got a little more free time, Moz recommends renting kayaks from Moss Bay (1001 Fairview Avenue North, #1900) or canoes from the University of Washington Waterfront Activities Center (3701 Montlake Boulevard Northeast). Don't forget to pack your flippy-floppies.

Drop the Mic: Seattle's karaoke scene runs the gamut from modern and glitzy to gloriously divey. Our top picks are Rock Box (1603 Nagle Place) for their communal main room and swanky private rooms and Bush Garden (614 Maynard Avenue South) for their cheap drinks, campy backdrop videos, and awesome emcees.

Do the Tourist Thing: There's nothing on earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail. The Seattle Monorail (in Westlake Center at 5th Avenue and Pine Street) is just a quick walk from the Convention Center. A relic of bygone times, this old beauty will deposit you directly at the Seattle Center (305 Harrison Street), where you can play around at the Pacific Science Center (200 2nd Avenue North) and check out some celebrated Northwest art glass at Chihuly Garden and Glass (305 Harrison Street). You can also go up in the Space Needle, if you reeeeeeally want to.

Get Your Culture Fix: Modern art and gorgeous views go hand in hand at the SAM Olympic Sculpture Park (2901 Western Avenue). Stroll the length of the waterfront to visit this picturesque outdoor museum, grab a bench, watch the sun sink behind the Olympic Mountains and the Puget Sound, and reflect upon what an awesome time you had at MozCon.

I hope this exhaustive list has gotten you pumped for MozCon! (With this many recommendations to try, you can even start planning your MozCon 2014 and 2015 agendas.) Haven't secured your ticket yet? Get on it!

Hope to see you in Seattle in July. Feel free to reach out in the comments with any questions, or if you'd like any custom recommendations!

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How to Completely Ruin (or Save) Your Website with Redirects

Cyrus Shepard — 2013-06-18T03:13:00+01:00

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down?

When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking power.

When done wrong, the results can be disastrous.

In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There's also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.

From Dr. Pete's post - An SEO's Guide to HTTP Status Codes

Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a "perfect" redirect

A perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.

When done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a 301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.

The new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity, but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link equity.

For example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about “tacos” does not.

A clue to this devaluation comes from the manner in which search engines deal with content that changes significantly over a period of time.

The famous Google patent, Information retrieval based on historical data, explains how older links might be ignored if the text of a page changes significantly or the anchor text pointing to a URL changes in a big way (I added the bold):

...the domain may show up in search results for queries that are no longer on topic. This is an undesirable result. One way to address this problem is to estimate the date that a domain changed its focus. This may be done by determining a date when the text of a document changes significantly or when the text of the anchor text changes significantly. All links and/or anchor text prior to that date may then be ignored or discounted.

If these same properties apply to 301 redirects, it goes a long way in explaining why non-relevant pages don't get a boost from redirecting off-topic pages.

301 redirecting everything to the home page

Savvy SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s, or soft 404s at best.

This means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity at all.

While it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.

Better alternative: When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.

If the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410 status code.

Danger: 301 redirects and bad backlinks

Before Penguin, SEOs widely believed that bad links couldn’t hurt you, and redirecting entire domains with bad links wasn’t likely to have much of an effect.

Then Google dropped the hammer on low-quality links.

If the Penguin update and developments of the past year have taught us anything, it’s this:

When you redirect a domain, its bad backlinks go with it.

Webmasters often roll up several older domains into a single website, not realizing that bad backlinks may harbor poison that sickens the entire effort. If you’ve been penalized or suffered from low-quality backlinks, it’s often easier and more effective to simply stop the redirect than to try and clean up individual links.

Individual URLs with bad links

The same concept works at the individual URL level. If you redirect a single URL with bad backlinks attached to it, those bad links will then point to your new URL.

In this case, it’s often better to simply drop the page with a 404 or 410, and let those links drop from the index.

Infinite loops and long chains

If you perform an SEO audit on a site, you’ll hopefully discover any potentially harmful redirect loops or crawling errors caused by overly-complex redirect patterns.

While it’s generally believed that Google will follow many, many redirects, each step has the potential to diminish link equity, dilute anchor text relevance, and lead to crawling and indexing errors.

One or two steps is generally the most you want out of any redirect chain.

New changes for 302s

SEOs typically hate 302s, but recent evidence suggests search engines may now be changing how they handle them — at least a little.

Google knows that webmasters make mistakes, and recent tests by Geoff Kenyon showed that 302 redirects have potential to pass link equity. The theory is that 302s (meant to be temporary) are so often implemented incorrectly, that Google treats them as “soft” 301s.

Duane Forrester of Bing addressed this in a recent tweet.

So, not only do search engines limit us when we try to get too clever, but they also help to keep us from shooting ourselves in the foot.

#MozCon Speaker Interview: Aleyda Solis

Lindsay — 2013-06-17T11:27:00+01:00

Posted by Lindsay

Today I’m pleased to bring you Aleyda Solis, Madrid-based International SEO at SEER Interactive, a Moz Associate, and State of Search blogger. We’re excited that she’s bringing her international perspective to MozCon, where she’ll lay out how to make the bold but lucrative move into the international market. You definitely don’t want to miss her talk, “International SEO and the Future of Your ROI,” if you’re interested in growing your online business.

Tell us about the presentation you have planned for MozCon.

It’s going to be an exciting adventure, guiding the audience to discover their international SEO potential and what could be the future of their ROI.

It will be beyond the "ccTLDs vs. subdirectories for country targeting" type of session (although best practices with examples and tactics will be also shared). It’s meant to answer frequent questions I get from strategic, operations, and business perspectives, like: “How do I connect with international audiences and develop an attractive offer and assets when I don’t even speak the language or know anything about the country?” Or, “How can I develop original, localized content for all of these non-English websites if I don’t have enough resources?”

If this is an issue for your business, then it’s highly likely that your international SEO strategy wasn't planned and established well enough from the beginning, allowing your investment to become cost-effective and scalable in foreign organic search markets.

I started to cover international SEO from this perspective in a SEER post I wrote about establishing an international SEO strategy.

Why would it be unwise for someone to miss your presentation?

Because I will be giving away delicious Iberian ham that I will be bringing from Spain to selected audience members in my session! :D (I’m kidding!)

I really wish I could do that, but unfortunately it is forbidden by US Customs. (Nonetheless, you might want to ask for a change in customs law to make it friendlier to Spanish gastronomy so I can do that in the future.)

Seriously, though, it would be really unwise to skip my session because I will be sharing what could be the next step to grow your online business. You definitely don’t want to miss that.

What types of businesses should be thinking about international SEO, and why?

All businesses that might have an audience in other countries or that speaks other languages should be thinking about it.

Sometimes people think that only huge businesses that already have a multinational physical presence should be thinking about an international web presence and search marketing activity. But this is far from true and is just myopic. For more, take a look at this Moz post I wrote about discovering your international online potential.

Regarding international SEO, what is the most unexpected thing you've learned along the way?

Maybe not unexpected, but unfortunately usually overlooked: The characteristics of audience behavior in each country.

Beyond language differences, there are many cultural, economic and sociological factors that can affect the success of many aspects of your SEO process, like the level of response from a link-building campaign, for example. At the end, beyond search engines that serve as a bridge, SEO is about the people.

You can have a better understanding of what I’m talking about in this post I published at State of Search about different aspects that drive an international SEO industry and audience research.

What do you do at SEER Interactive?

My activities at SEER are quite diverse: On one hand, I’m helping to grow the international SEO business, giving SEER more visibility by speaking at diverse events in Europe, identifying and validating leads, giving pre-sales support, and establishing and coordinating the best organization and processes for international SEO. On the other, I’m also developing and helping to implement international SEO processes for current clients.

Tell us about the places you've lived.

I’m from Nicaragua, a small, tropical country with a lot of volcanoes, lakes, and beaches on both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts in Central America. Nicaragua's natural landscape is breathtaking; here’s a photo of Momotombo Volcano (one of the 12 volcanoes on the Pacific coast of the country):

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/garrettziegler/7355295166/

I grew up, studied, and worked there until I left to study in Salamanca, Spain in 2006. It’s a beautiful student town full of history, with students from all over the world (a lot of people go there to learn Spanish). It’s also home to the University of Salamanca, the oldest university in Spain (where I went to study), which was founded in 1218. Its front building looks like this:

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/3855579280/

I ended up staying in Salamanca after finishing my studies, and got my first SEO job at an online marketing company. I lived in Salamanca for a bit more than 4 years — until I came to Madrid, the city where I live now.

I came to Madrid after accepting an SEO manager position at a company here at the end of 2010. Madrid is an amazing place, since it has the great alternatives that big cities offer, and at the same time allows you to have a good quality of life. Here’s a view of Gran Via, one of the main streets in Madrid:

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/nico_/6887000482/

What is it about Madrid that keeps you there?

Madrid (followed by Barcelona) is where most of the bigger types of business activity happen in Spain, from trade shows and professional networking events to a wide range of cultural activities. There’s also good weather (there’s always sun, although it might be a bit cold during winter) and great culinary offerings (delicious tapas everywhere!), so I’m happy here at the moment. Although, of course, I’m quite open to experiencing new places to live in the future. I love to travel and experience new cultures.

Are you doing what you thought you’d be doing when you were growing up?

I had the somewhat common “dreams” among children of being an astronaut (I really just wanted to go to space, it wasn't necessarily because I knew what an astronaut actually did). So that’s really a pending point in my life: going to space! I definitely need to start saving more for that.

What is the last thing that you have seen/heard/experienced that has inspired you?

I’ve recently had two experiences that have been inspiring in different ways.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to go to Israel to speak at KahenaCon and had the great opportunity to spend a Saturday walking around Jerusalem Old City. It was a truly inspiring experience, seeing places with such a rich historical and also religious background, like the Western Wall, the Holy Sepulchre and Dome of the Rock. Even if I’m not religious myself, it was a somewhat magical experience.

Photo from Instagram: http://instagram.com/p/Zucpg1N8yT/

Another (and totally different) inspiring moment happened a week ago when I had the chance to try Google Glass. I felt like I was already living in the future, interacting with that small, translucent movie theater-like interface in my glasses with just my voice. Truly amazing.

Photo from Instagram: http://instagram.com/p/Z8tuxJt8yd/

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

To ask myself “What’s the worst that could happen?” when I’m making an important or scary decision. This question allows me to get my risk-averse considerations under control, and gives me a great opportunity to start assessing a new situation with more balanced criteria. By asking this, I’ve been able to go out of my comfort zone more frequently and live new experiences.

Thank you, Aleyda! It was great to learn a bit about your background and how international SEO matters for all types of businesses, not just the big multinationals.

If, like us, you just can't get enough of Alyeda, you can find her as @aleyda on Twitter (where she juggles Spanish and English).

Still don't have your #MozCon ticket yet? Reserve your spot now!

How to Leverage Investment in Video to Build More Links

PhilNottingham — 2013-06-17T03:24:00+01:00

Posted by PhilNottingham

Video can be an expensive and time-consuming investment. For small businesses especially, the cost of producing video will always have to be weighed against other marketing investments, and the sad truth is that video can be a tough sell — especially when the ROI from its significant expense is hard to predict or quantify.

I think part of the problem is that most marketers (including SEOs) don’t have a very good understanding of the value that video can provide for them; they see virality, branding, and perhaps increasing conversion rates as the extent of it. Video as a media type, however, has potential on which few people capitalise: the ability to secure fantastic, high quality links back to your site.

In this post, I want to outline nine ways in which video can be used to augment and enhance link-building activity, with the goal of giving you more ammunition to secure an investment in video as part of a wider inbound marketing strategy.

1. Using video as a media type within interactive content

The kind of content you need:

Video is a media type — a form of content delivery — rather than a “type of content” as such. As the old adage goes, “form follows function,” and this is exactly the approach you should be taking when working out the best way to present a creative idea.

Pages where video is part of the overall sum of a multimedia interactive can be extremely engaging, and as such generate a lot of links.

For example...

http://cloudsovercuba.com/ is a fantastic microsite that uses mixed media to tell the story of the Cuban Missle Crisis. While this was not likely created with links in mind, the page has managed to secure 1,920 links from 266 link root domains (according to OSE).

Two guides from Simply Business, The Small Business Guide to WordPress and the Small Business Guide to YouTube were created with link buidling in mind and include embedded videos within each interactive flow chart. These are currently at 179 and 22 linking root domains respectively

The technical implementation required:

If you’re building a multimedia webpage that can’t realistically be viewed through an iframe on another site, where you choose to host your video ultimately doesn’t matter.

Your main focus should be making the content lightweight, quick to load, and mobile friendly. Therefore, either using the HTML5 <video> tag to display video or embedding all videos through iframes is normally the best way to go, though many other JavaScript-focused implementations are also fine.

JavaScript libraries such as popcorn.js can help you do some really cool things with embedded video, such as changing the way pages look based on playback time.

2. Using video as link bait

The kind of content you need:

Things that go viral socially don’t actually correlate all that well with things that get lots of high quality, equity-passing links. This is because there is a subtle difference between the kind of things you’re happy to share socially and the kind of things you’re happy to include on your own site through embeds/referring links. If someone embeds your video on their site — it has to be because they want their readers to stop looking at their own content and spend time watching yours instead.

If your explicit goal is to get people to embed and link to your video content, Dollar Shave Club or Old Spice should not be the standards you aspire to. Instead, you should be looking to create something that provides value for a specific target demographic and the content must be informative, entertaining and succinct.

In many instances, this ends up looking something like a video infographic. A great example of this done successfully of late is from CCN, who created an excellent piece on relative salaries which has accrued 43 linking root domains.

The technical implementation required:

When people embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or any other social video platforms, they don’t typically link to the domain of the creator in the process, but instead, the profile of the user on the YouTube/Vimeo domains. This is fantastic for the platforms themselves, but clearly sub-optimal for any business trying to do SEO and build links back to their site in order to improve rankings. While these social video platforms are a fantastic way to seed your content and get it in front of a wider audience, you don’t want the likes of YouTube taking your link equity.

Therefore, if you’re creating video link bait — you should (at least during your initial period of outreach) ensure the version of the video embedded on your site is seen as the de facto “canonical” by self-hosting or hosting with a paid third-party online video hosting provider.

I’ve been lucky enough to try out all of the providers below:

To save you the hassle of research, I’d estimate that in 90% of circumstances, Wistia is by far the best solution (unless you’re a large media house looking to serve advertising off your embedded videos, in which case you should look at Brightcove). Wistia has the best tool available for marketers and offers it at an extremely reasonable price. (Note: I’m not being paid or otherwise compensated by Wistia for saying that; I’m just saying it because right now it’s true. If any other online video platform starts outperforming Wistia in terms of their offering, I’ll be sure to let you know.)

After you’ve set up your hosting, you need to ensure that you embed your video in such a way that anyone who clicks an “embed this video” button is given an embed code which will feature a referring href attribution link to the appropriate page on your site where the video lives.

Unfortunately, no online video provider currently offers this as a standard feature (although I know this is in the pipeline for Wistia), so for now, this means you’ll need to manually customise the embed codes for videos you’re trying to use as link bait.

I have a built a tool which will automate this process for you. The “With textarea in textarea” option is what you should choose for the embed on your own site, while the “without double textarea” is the option you should choose when putting together an embed code to send to outreach prospects.

3. Build links off the back of your YouTube presence

The kind of content you need:

While marketers should think of YouTube primarily as a network for increasing brand awareness, if you have videos with a viral/social element that are also likely to generate a number of links, then YouTube can be a useful platform to generate leads for link building.

The technical implementation required:

Anyone who embeds a YouTube video of yours should be seen as a really solid link prospect, as they’ve essentially already linked to your content.

Oftentimes, a gracious and thankful outreach email to anyone who does embed your YouTube videos can be a great way to both build relationships and convert those YouTube embeds into links back to your own site rather than to youtube.com. One angle I particularly like to use when reaching out is suggesting that sites “swap the YouTube video embed for a high quality HD embed that doesn’t include ads,” and then providing them with an alternative, securely hosted video iframe embed which includes a followed attribution link underneath the video.

To work out who has previously embedded or linked to your YouTube videos, you can use a combination of YouTube Analytics and Open Site Explorer.

The video below runs through the process of finding out where your videos have been embedded:

From here, you should also put the following URL variations through Open Site Explorer to find out where your video has been linked to but not embedded (replace the ID string with your own):

Note — if your “link bait” videos have a social/viral element to them, you can put them on YouTube and follow the process above after your period of outreach with a securely hosted video (as detailed in the “using video as link bait” section).

If you have access to a significant budget for promotion and outreach, paying for viral seeding can be a useful way to generate further link prospects from your YouTube videos. I recommend using Unruly Media for such a service.

4. Advertise your content library and permission assets

Everyone hates YouTube ads. The meme above got 1597 upvotes on Reddit and hit the front page, which is more or less proof of objective fact in internet terms.

However, I think this opinion is so widely held not because YouTube ads necessarily suck, but because online video advertising is still a young industry that has yet to mature. The majority of larger companies place their TV adverts on YouTube and pay for seeding, rather than bothering to create content specifically for the platform and target a specific audience accordingly.

One way in which YouTube ads could be more effective is by advertising a free content library or permission asset — like an email list — rather than a specific product or service that costs money.

This way, you can improve visibility of the content in which you’ve already invested and hopefully build additional second-order links to it through this increased awareness.

The kind of content you need:

YouTube ads can be as long as you like, but users will always have the option of clicking away 5, 15, or 30 seconds into the playback (dependent on the specific ad placement). Therefore, you essentially need to grab the attention and interest of the audience within the first 5 seconds, and then effectively communicate the core message to entice clicks by the 15 and 30 second marks. Put simply, your videos will need to sell the virtues of your content quickly, efficiently, and in an entertaining way.

The technical implementation required:

Export your content with the appropriate settings and upload to YouTube. From there, you’ll need to tie your AdWords to your YouTube account and then begin defining the target audience to which you want to advertise.

5. Use video to improve and augment page types

There is some evidence to suggest that by simply using video to improve the quality of your commercially focused pages, you are likely to generate more natural links across the board.

Check out the screenshots from the Majestic Historic Index below for appliances online and Zappos — sites that have both invested heavily in product video to improve their page types:

Zappos.com:

appliancesonline.co.uk:

The kind of content you need:

To a greater or lesser extent, what we’re talking about here is product videos - i.e. videos created to provide information on a specific product or service.

Product videos are most effective when they take an audience member from a place of initial interest further down the path toward conversion by engaging on a personal level with the likely questions and concerns of the interested party. These videos should be mostly informational rather than promotional, more “shopping channel” than “TV ad.”

The technical implementation required:

If you’re creating videos to improve and augment specific pages on your site — e.g. videos for specific products — then these videos should always be either self-hosted or securely hosted using a third-party provider (e.g. Wistia) as mentioned previously.

This is because these videos will likely only make sense within the context of the pages for which they’re created, and therefore won’t provide much value for an audience finding your content through YouTube search or recommendations. Additionally, by hosting such content on YouTube, you can risk your site being outranked by the instance of the video on youtube.com for branded queries relating to the specific product or service covered in the video. For more information on this problem, check out my post on building a video SEO strategy.

For this kind of content, you should also be trying to get video rich snippets in order to drive more clicks from the search results pages. This can be achieved either through implementing schema.org mark-up, or by submitting a video XML sitemap. See here for more information on implementation.

6. Support your blogging strategy

The kind of content you need:

Video for blogs should be primarily informational with reasonably soft branding. “Talking head” videos are perfect for this and if you have the resources, supplementing the footage with screencasts and/or animated graphics is often a nice way to break up the flow and provide interest.

In order to make it scalable and require minimal editing, I’d normally recommend trying to do these videos in one take with minimal scripting prior to recording the content. Watch the video from Wistia feat. MC Fishkin which explains exactly how Moz manages its creative process to scale the creation of Whiteboard Friday videos with minimal effort.

The technical implementation required:

The hosting for your blogging videos should be determined by the answers to a couple of questions.

1. Which is more important to you - greatest possible exposure to your content or individuals only viewing the content in the context of your own site?

The two are fundamentally dichotomous. If you want maximum exposure, your content should be hosted on YouTube, where it will rank well in the search results (normally those for youtube.com, not for your site) and also be visible throughout the YouTube platform. If you want users to only add comments on your site, within your community framework as opposed to YouTube’s; or are keen to re-target visitors with PPC, then self hosting will be the more appropriate option for you.

2. Is there any search volume on YouTube for the topics you are covering?

This can be worked out using the YouTube Keyword Tool. Be advised that data from the YouTube keyword tool is fairly inaccurate, but the relative indicators of search volume should give you a pretty good feel for whether there is any demand for the content you will be creating.

If there is search volume, that’s fantastic and your videos will likely get some good traction on the YouTube platform should you wish to host there. If there’s no search volume, then having your videos on YouTube likely won’t provide much additional value for you. If the latter is true, you’ll always be better off self-hosting your videos (or using a secure third-party solution as explained previously), since this way you can drive all traffic to your own site rather than to youtube.com.

You generally shouldn’t think about doing both. If you decide to self-host your content and also put it on YouTube, this strategy just gives individuals the option of viewing and linking to content on YouTube rather than your own site, while failing to undertake the primary activity that will help boost your YouTube rankings — namely, embedding your YouTube videos and driving views through those embeds. Rather than giving you best of both worlds, it can actually give you the worst of both worlds.

7. Create video content for other sites

Video content can get you top-tier guest posts and linking opportunities. If you’re able to show a proven history of creating valuable and interesting video content for your own site and others, pitching for guest-post opportunities on top sites becomes so much easier than the standard cold approach.

The kind of content you need:

In many ways, the kind of content you’d use to guest post will have a very similar form factor to the kind of video you’d normally include on your own blog — mostly “talking head" focused.

Interviews of your customers/authorities in your industry often work really well here, because the videos can also act as ego bait. If you can make an individual look really professional on camera in a way they would be unable to do themselves, it can be really easy to get some great links from them for doing so.

If you have the resources or skills, you can also create product videos for commercial partners or build ads for content created by others (someone did this for Distilled, for free, and you can bet I gave them a few links).

The technical implementation required:

Ultimately, as long as you get a link, the way in which a video is embedded on someone else's site shouldn’t matter to you.

However, if the target in question is not particularly amenable to linking out to you, one of the best ways to encourage them is to only provide the webmaster with an embed code for the content, rather than the raw video file. This means securely hosting the content with a platform like Wistia, enabling domain restrictions and then including a text link back to your site at the end of the embed code (as covered above in Idea 2, using video as link bait).

In the vast majority of instances, webmasters won’t bother to tweak the embed code and remove the link, whereas if they take the embed code themselves from the instance of the video on a social platform (YouTube/ Vimeo etc.), the embed code will not include an attribution link back to your site with it as standard.

8. Build a content series for social video platforms

Blip.tv and dailymotion.com will give you really high authority (DA93 and DA97), followed profile links if you can a get content series accepted onto the platform and with the relevant user status.

The kind of content you need:

For both of these sites, you will need regularly publish content covering a specific theme that is completely non-branded or commercial in nature. You’ll also need to create different videos for each platform. There is a stringent editorial process to get accepted to either site, and unless your content is relevant to their target audiences, you won’t be granted the Dailymotion motionmaker status (which includes a followed link) or a blip.tv channel profile.

Creating a content series specifically for a single link is obviously a huge investment in time and money, but remember that the benefit here will be brand awareness and hopefully referring traffic, too. If you’re in a particularly “tricky” niche to which it's difficult to build links, but you have a lot of expert knowledge within your company, this might be a useful technique for you to leverage.

The technical implementation required:

None. You just need to ensure your content is exported in 16:9 at a decent frame size (I normally recommend 1280x720 HD) and uploaded to the respective platform.

9. Boost PR efforts with video news releases

The kind of content you need:

The purpose of a video news release is to support a press release with ancillary information that gives further context around the story in question.

Video news releases are a particularly useful asset for any PR campaign, since they allow your story to make it to the top of a journalist's pile. Reporters don’t always have the time to write up articles for every interesting pitch, but with a video release you’re essentially doing half the work for them. All editors need to do with a VNR is put together a supporting paragraph, embed the video and then click publish.

The technical implementation required:

Video news releases should always be hosted on YouTube, since the majority of sites are comfortable with embedding YouTube videos on their site and know how to get an embed code from a video on youtube.com

The best practice is just to include a link to the YouTube instance of the video within your initial outreach email. If your contact gets back to you in a positive way regarding the story, you can ask for a “credit link” for the video pointing back to your site.

That's my nine!

I hope you found this post useful! Do you have any other good ways to build links with video? If so, please do hit me up in the comments! I’d love to hear about any new ideas.

How Processing Fluency Impacts Web Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

randfish — 2013-06-13T21:48:00+01:00

Posted by randfish

As marketers, we're trained to think that our audiences consider the rational inputs we display, and through them, come to rational conclusions. But what about cognitive biases that might influence processing and decision making?

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand dives into how processing fluency impacts web marketing, and explains why things which are easier for us to digest are more likely to induce action.

For reference, here is a still of Rand's whiteboard.

Video Transcription

"Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to start with a conundrum. In fact, it's a conundrum from a research project that is based on a fluency bias. Fluency bias being one of the many cognitive biases in the field of psychology.
Let me start by asking you a question. Do you believe the statement, "What alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks"? So a large number of participants in a research study were asked whether they believed this, and a second group, another group of participants in the same study were asked separately whether they believed the statement, "What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals." What do you think were the results? Take a minute to guess.
People believed this one massively more by a shocking margin. And you would think to yourself, "Well, I am not nearly so foolish a person as to think that my belief in a statement like this would be biased by rhyme, conceals/reveals," and yet that is exactly what happened time and time again. This study can be reproduced with success. Far more people believe "What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals," rather than the alternate use of the word "unmasks."
This is called, one of my favorite cognitive biases in the world, the "rhyme as reason" bias. Rhyme as reason. Let me give you another famous example that some of you have probably already jumped to. Do you remember Johnny Cochran in the famous O.J. Simpson trial, declaring to the jury, "If the gloves does not fit, you must acquit. If the glove does not fit, you must acquit."
So human beings, especially in the marketing and technology world, are trained, we are trained to think that people are logical, that people consider the rational outcomes, the rational inputs, and they come to a rational decision based on those inputs. And yet a cognitive bias, like rhyme as reason, would suggest that's not really the case at all. We are biased by all sorts of things.
Rhyme as reason is one of many fluency biases. The fluency bias or the fluency processing bias essentially suggests that things which are more easy for us to comprehend, which are more simple for us to digest, lots of good examples here. Attractive people on magazine covers are more likely to draw our eyes. Concepts that are simple for us to understand, phrases that we've heard many times, things that relate to things in our memory, all of these are simpler for us to understand and therefore more credible, more believable, and more likely, in the marketing world, to induce action.
Let's take this over to web marketing for a second and think about things where this happens. Page speed load time. When something loads more quickly, not only are we more likely to stay on the page, we're more likely to trust the brand more. We're more likely to recommend it to others. We're more likely to use it ourselves.
In fact, when Microsoft did a famous research study where they increased the amount of time before search results were returned by a mere 250 milliseconds, which is undetectable to the human eye, right? If you were shown a film strip and then there was a 250 millisecond cut, your eye could not detect it. Your brain would not know that you had been shown that image, and yet what they found was that abandonment rates went up. People searched less, and they searched less often, and they were less likely to return to the site.
This is fluency bias at work. The aesthetic attractiveness of a website's or a web page's layout is likely to drive us to take more action or to take less action, to recommend something, to tweet it, to share it, to link to it. No wonder, right?
The pronounceability of a brand name. One of my favorite, favorite examples is that a study looked at the pronounceability of stock market ticker symbols during their IPO, at a public market offering. And you would think to yourself, "Now, wait a minute. These are some of the smartest human beings in the world, who are working at hedge funds, who are working at large investment portfolios. There is no way that they are going to be taken in by the pronounceability of a stock ticker symbol." Why does it even matter whether a stock ticker symbol is pronounceable or not? And yet pronounceability has a high correlation with more successful IPOs in their first two weeks after offering.
Insanity. Insanity. We are all subject to this. No matter how smart you believe yourself or you audience to be, fluency biases, processing fluency, and cognitive biases as a whole are undoubtedly having an effect on your audience.
The familiarity of user experience. Some of you have seen some of the screen shots from Moz Analytics and probably maybe a few of you have gotten access to the private beta, and over the next couple of months more people will. Inside that product you'll notice that it looks very similar to another product. Right? There's sort of a, "Oh, look at that. There's the navigation on the left-hand side. There's a little graph up here, and the time frame is over here, and then there's a chart of data down here." That reminds me a lot of Google Analytics, which many people who are watching this Whiteboard Friday and might be using Moz Analytics are almost certainly familiar with. And that is no error. That familiarity of user experience, that, "Oh, yes. I have been here before. Oh, yes. I am familiar with how to use a web analytics product or a search engine or an e-commerce site."
There's a reason that these follow into patterns and why these patterns are successful when they are repeated and deviation from those patterns can actually be dangerous. The legibility of font and text in a blog post, in a piece of content can influence whether it's shared more or less.
The ease of discovery and shareability of something. If something is very easy to copy and paste inside my browser so that I can easily tweet it, or if I am sent a link by somebody in an email that just says, "Hey, if you would retweet this that would be great," and it goes directly to their tweet, wow, this is very easy. It's very easy for me to share it, and therefore I am more likely to do so. Processing fluency dictates it is thus.
I would urge you, whenever you're thinking about your marketing campaigns, whether those be in the SEO world with things like your domain name, your title, your URL. Your URL, in a study by Bing, domain name and URL, the little part in the search results that's green, actually had a significant biasing effect on where clicks went. Almost as significant, in fact, a little more significant than whether there was a rel=author profile picture, according to Google. These are separate studies, but the data should match up.
The readability of that content. Social, the sharing time. When was it shared? Was it shared at a time when I'm going to see it? Was it shared at a time when I'm likely to be on a device where I'm more likely to share? Maybe that's mobile if it's a retweet. Maybe that's desktop if it's something where I actually want someone to take action, or a laptop, or a tablet.
The length of the content. Length is very much a part of processing fluency because very long articles, depends on the subject matter, but we have a tendency not to read or to comprehend and process all of that information.
In advertising, your copy, your layout, your design, this is classic ad agency world stuff that people have been doing for decades. And in content, the style, the UX, the complexity of that content.
Again, another really good example, Moz's own search ranking factors, which are produced every two years, and this summer we're coming out with a new version. It will be first presented at MozCon and then appear on the web. But the complexity of the new UI, that we launched in 2011, made it such that engagement on those pages was far less because you had to click over to different tabs to actually see the numbers, as opposed to seeing it all on one page. It reduced the shareability, the number of links it got, as compared to when it was done in 2005, 2007, and 2009. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
If you were investing in web marketing channels, in content marketing and SEO, in social, and advertising of any kind, I would urge you to think about the fluency of the work that you're producing and whether people can really consume it as effectively as you're hoping they can. This can have a big impact on the effectiveness of the work that you do.
All right everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

SEO Tactics Die, But SEO Never Will

Dr-Pete — 2013-06-13T04:00:00+01:00

Posted by Dr-Pete

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 for every search there will be some entity who wants to have a prominent position in that search result.

The desire to be found isn't new or unique to online search – just ask Melvil Dewey or call up "AAA Aardvark Plumbing" in the Yellow Pages. What's unique to online search is that the system has become so complex that automated technology governs who gets found, and as the scope of information grows, that's not about to change. Ultimately, whenever a system controls who will be found, then there will be a need for people who understand that system well enough to help entities end up on the short list.

This goes beyond manipulative, "black hat" practices – data needs to be structured, rules complied with, and many pieces put into place to make sure that the information we put out there is generally friendly with the systems that catalog and filter it. Over time, these systems will get more sophisticated, but they will never be perfect. As long as search exists, there will be a need for experts who can optimize information so that it can be easily found.

SEO Is Not One Tactic

When we say "SEO Is Dead!", we’re usually reacting to the latest tactical fad or announcement from Google. Ultimately, though, SEO is not one tactic and even though Google currently dominates the market, SEO doesn't live and die with Google. I'm 42 years old, and the public internet as we know it now hasn't existed for even half of my life. Google is a teenager, and I strongly suspect I'll outlive them (or at least their dominance).

There's no doubt that search is changing, and our industry is barely out of its infancy. In the broad sense, though, the need for people who can help construct findable information and attract people to that information will outlive any single tactic, any individual SEO expert, and even any search engine.

The Construct: Search in 2063

Sergei had spent his entire adult life learning how to manipulate The Construct. Fifteen years earlier, the unthinkable had happened – the collected knowledge of humanity had grown so quickly that there was no longer enough space in the accessible universe to store it in. The internet became The Construct, and it now spanned both space and time.

Since no human could adequately comprehend 4-dimensional data (early attempts at neural interfaces drove a few pioneers to insanity), The Construct had to be projected onto a 3-dimensional orb suspended in a vacuum, affectionately known as the “space egg.” With more than a decade of practice, Sergei manipulated the egg like an omelette chef at a 5-star brunch, and what his clients paid him made their $37 mimosas look reasonable.

This morning was worse than most. The Construct’s AI had detected an unacceptable level of manipulation and was adjusting the Core Algo. Sergei could already see the surface of the egg being rewritten, and the change was costing his clients millions with every passing minute. Luckily, his defensive bots were already at work, rewriting semantic data to conform to the ripples in the Algo. One thing was certain: the life of a Space Egg Optimizer was never dull.

Inside YouMoz: How To Guest Blog for Moz

KeriMorgret — 2013-06-12T09:28:13+01:00

Posted by KeriMorgret

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at YouMoz? Here's an explanation of what we're looking for, how to put together a good post, and some frequently asked questions.

I've had the privilege of being at the helm of the YouMoz editorial team for almost two years now, and have been amazed and awed by the content that you all have shared. On an average weekday, we get 5-10 submissions, and we publish about 10% of our submissions. I wanted to share more about who we are, what makes for a good YouMoz post, and how to get in that top 10%.

Who Reviews Posts?

Miriam Ellis is a Moz Associate specializing in copywriting and Local SEO. She provides the initial review of your post.
Melissa Fach is a Moz Associate with extensive editorial experience in the industry. She is one of the people who will closely review your post and provide you with feedback.
Keri Morgret (that's me!) I'm a Moz employee on the community team. I also will closely review posts and give you feedback, as well as do a final check of your post before publishing it on the YouMoz blog.
Erica McGillivray, Jen Lopez, Ashley Tate, and Trevor Klein also help with the review process as needed.

What is the Review Process?

All posts are reviewed for obvious spam and if the post has already been published. In these cases, we decline the submission and leave a note for the author.
Miriam makes an initial review of the post and leaves internal notes for the team. The post status changes from "Pending Review By Editor" to "Pending - Reviewed By Editor". This doesn't mean it's going to get published, but please know that only about half of the submissions even make it this far. To check the post status, go to Manage Posts (visible when looking at the Moz Blog), click the Posts tab, and then look for the status and any notes from the editor.
Melissa or I do an in-depth review of the post, with other people from Moz giving additional opinion or reviewing posts as needed. We'll make a decision to decline the post, return the post to the author for edits, or to publish the post. We will either leave a note in the editor comments field of the post, or (usually) email the author at the email address on their profile with our decision.

Don't panic if your post was returned to you! Many of the posts on the YouMoz blog (and even those that have been promoted to the main blog) have gone through the revision process. This means we think your post has potential, and there are some things that could be improved to make it a great post for YouMoz.
When a post is approved for publishing, I do one final check for spelling, grammar, valid links, image attribution, and several other details. We try to notify the author of publication at least several hours to a few days before we publish. It is beneficial for the author to be able to respond to any comments by our readers, and to promote their post (Roger will also share the post on Twitter).

What Content is a Good Fit for YouMoz?

Actionable, detailed content with references tends to do the best on YouMoz, and case studies or examples are particularly popular. Think about the readers of this post, and try to make it so this is something that the reader could take to their boss and say, "Let's give this a try. Here's a post where this person tried it, they got good results, and they explain how to implement it." This post is from a security company, but a wide variety of people could follow their tutorial using Google Analytics to develop an FAQ strategy. This post used screenshots of GA to explain step-by-step what they did complete with an example to cut and paste, and provided information about how it impacted their company.

We want to publish original content that has not been published elsewhere. By original, we mean both "don't submit an exact copy of a post that is already online" and "don't take the outline of a post and change word order enough to pass Copyscape". YouMoz readers are looking for new information that they haven't already read on another site.

Include enough details so others can replicate your actions or your processes. Try to anticipate the questions someone might ask or alternative explanations and address that in your post. Here are two examples:

If you're discussing a tactic that increased your traffic, include additional information that might be relevant. For example, if you've been revising content about pumpkin carving and state the increase in traffic is due to the authorship you implemented, yet the traffic comparison is the month of October (the end of October is Halloween in the US and when people carve pumpkins) to the month of September, readers are likely to comment that it was increased search queries that led to the traffic rise, not the inclusion of authorship. Instead, in this case you could compare October this year to the previous October, and compare pages with authorship implemented to pages without authorship implemented.
If you're examining a search engine result page, include information about which search engine you were using (google.com? google.co.uk?), your location, if you were logged out (generally, it's best to use an incognito window in a browser to help minimize personalization based on your search history and cookies), what query you ran, if you modified any parameters in the URL, if other people saw the same results, and any other relevant information.

Back up the "what to do" statements with information about "how to do". References are often key to a good YouMoz post. You don't need to explain how to do every single step, but give enough context and a brief explanation, then link to where there is authoritative information. A good example is this post about spring cleaning your website. If this same post with no links had been submitted, it would not have been approved. Instead, the post did well and was promoted to the main blog.

I want to write a case study, but am not able to share sales figures or visitor data. What can I do?

Find out what data you can share. Perhaps you can't share the exact number of visits the site received or the raw dollar figure of the sales, but you can share that traffic increased by 10% compared to the previous year, or that the time on site increased. This post about opening up content on their website doesn't have exact visitor information, but does include enough information to show that their experiment had a positive impact.

If you don't have any data you can share as an example, consider sharing something that you've built to help you learn something or be more efficient. This post breaks down how the author reviewed job descriptions to build a list of topics to learn more about, and how he prioritized that list.

Google just announced that they are doing XYZ, and I'd like to write about it for YouMoz!

We usually don't cover general industry news on YouMoz. There are a number of other blogs that are quite good at covering the latest announcements from the search engines, including Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable. What works for YouMoz is a post talking about what Google is doing, and how it impacts the business, what you can do to take advantage of or mitigate the latest development, or other actionable information. An example is determining how the shutdown of Google Reader might impact your bottom line, example spreadsheets, and how to explain this to your C-level executives.

How many words should I write?

We don't have a minimum or maximum word count. Generally posts run from 1000-3000 words, but we have published posts that were fewer than 500 words and posts that were over 10,000 words.

What about links?

Relevant links are encouraged in posts. The previously mentioned post about spring cleaning your website had a considerable number of links to resources. You can link to your own site or a client's site in your post, if it is relevant and on-topic. In this post about lessons from a 100k pageview post, the author links to content from his company's blog. The YouMoz is all about how that post got over 100,000 pageviews, and is a very appropriate example.

Unfortunately, we often see posts that start out "My coworkers at our Springfield SEO agency were having coffee the other day" with a link to the SEO services page of their agency and a post that has no inherit need for that link. If your post only links to your own properties, that's going to be viewed by many users as a bit too promotional for your own site. There is a Blog Bio section of your profile where you can have a link back to your company in your bio that will show at the bottom of the post (it's not displaying at the moment, but it will be fixed shortly).

Affiliate links are not allowed.

Do I need to have a degree in writing to write for YouMoz? What if English is not my first language?

You don't need to have perfect spelling and grammar to have a post published on YouMoz, nor does English need to be your native language. However, we are not a college writing lab. We will give you feedback about what could make your post work better for our readers, and we will check for spelling and obvious grammar mistakes, but we are not able to go through a post line-by-line and help you rewrite it.

Give yourself plenty of time to research the post (including finding the examples, references, and images), write the post, have others review what you've written, then come back and look at your writing anew after you've had a break from it. Take in the feedback other people have given, and do one last review in a word processor for spelling and grammar mistakes. This post about Author Rank needed only two typos fixed out of 2600+ words, and needed very little work from the editors. The author later revealed that four coworkers had reviewed his post and given feedback. The post has 166 thumbs up, only one thumb down, and from the first comment had requests to promote it to the main blog.

Be aware that people from all over the world read YouMoz, and may not understand references that are regional in nature or specific figures of speech. It can be helpful to avoid some idioms, and add additional information for context.

Technical Details

Finding Images

Images are great to have in a post! If you're not making screenshots of your own material (info on that below), please be sure that you have the right to use the images you are submitting. Here's one post on finding photos for your blog post, including using stock photos, Creative Commons pictures, and commissioning your own photos. Including a note at the end of your post about your image sources would be really helpful! We will erase before publishing, but this saves us from having to email you asking about the image source.

Adding Images

Here are some tips that will help your image look good in the post, and minimize the amount of back-and-forth needed with the editorial staff.

Our biggest request is that you resize your browser or your spreadsheet before taking screenshots. Often a computer screen is set at 1200 pixels wide, and the site (or application) adjusts to fill that whole space. When you take a screenshot and that width and then need to reduce it to the 730 pixels wide for the blog, the image can be hard to read.

If you adjust column headings to remove extra horizontal space (wrapping the text can help), or adjust the width of your browser before taking a screenshot, it can make a big difference. The two images below are before and after examples of removing extra space in a spreadsheet. Both are the exact same width, but one is much more readable.

You don't need Photoshop or fancy image editing tools. I'm on a PC, and use a combination of Paint and Irfanview (free) to resize images, automatically crop extra white space, and with the RIOT plugin you can "save for web" and have a reasonable file size for your image.

To insert an image in your post, you'll first need it hosted somewhere (your own site, or a free hosting site like imgur.com (if your post is published, we'll automatically copy your images to our CDN). In the post, click the Insert Image icon, then paste in your image URL. Your image will now appear in the post.

Formatting your post

Using headings is a great way to help organize your post! If you're using our editor to compost your post, headings can be found when you click the paragraph icon. Text alignment is adjusted when you click the icon shown below.

If you're accustomed to our old editor and resistant to change, you might give this editor a try. We have no relation to and do not support it, but it may be a more familiar interface for you. You can paste the source code from that editor into the source code view of our editor (click the </> button in the toolbar for that view).

Spelling and grammar checking

After you've finished your post and had it reviewed by some trusted people, do one last check for spelling and grammar. One method that works well to catch many mistakes is to paste your post as plain text into Word, then select the language as your local language, and make sure that "do not check spelling or grammar" is unchecked. I've often found that Word decides that part of the text is a different language, or that you somehow don't want it to check all of your document. Here's a handy page on setting your language in Word that will help you find this semi-hidden setting.

FAQs

How does a post get promoted to the main blog?

This is the most common question! There is no exact formula, but instead we look for how the community has felt about the post. Some indicators of this are the number of thumbs, the number and type of comments, reaction on social media, and post analytics. If you wrote an awesome post that got on Hacker News but didn't get a ton of thumbs or comments on the post itself (because it was discussed on HN and those users didn't sign up here just to thumb), we're going to notice that and take it into consideration.

Did you know that we have post analytics that are available on every post? Take a look!

We generally promote posts within a week or two of them going up on YouMoz. We're considering looking back a couple of months and evaluating posts that were slower to catch on with the audience but did well and were not time-sensitive. Please give us your feedback about this in the comments!

Why do some posts go straight to the main blog?

The technical infrastructure we have is responsible for some "YouMoz" posts going straight to the main blog. For our regular main blog authors, we have special permissions for them to be able to post directly to the main blog. For authors doing just a single post on the main blog, having them submit to YouMoz and promote it right away is the easiest technical way to do things.

Why is the review period so long?

We strive to be TAGFEE in our reviews, and give quality feedback to all legitimate posts, even the ones we decline. Sometimes it takes a while to read through the post and get into the author's head and understand where they are coming from, what they are trying to say, and compose an email back to the author explaining how their post could be improved.

The editing team has a wide variety of knowledge, but we sometimes need to send a technical post off to another Moz employee or associate for them to review. We don't want to publish a post that has incorrect information that could do harm to a site, for example.

Various things can interfere with author communication. The email address in the profile might be sales@somecompany.com and the email doesn't get passed along to the author, or the email goes into a spam bucket. Sometimes we have posts that are 90% there and just need a couple of small tweaks, and we never hear back from the author for whatever reason.

Sometimes we'll be short an employee because of a vacation, we'll launch a new product, migrate domains, or need to email every single Moz user and answer their questions. Sometimes, it all happens in the same week. The awesome thing about this team is that we're cross-trained and can pitch in to help each other. At times, it means we'll have a bunch of people tackle YouMoz and the review period is nice and short, and at other times it means that we need to devote our energies to other tasks and the YouMoz queue grows again.

We Want You to Write for YouMoz!

Are you ready to write a post? We hope you can take what you've learned here and decide to Submit a YouMoz Post!

Determining Relevance: How Similarity Is Scored

Matt Peters — 2013-06-12T03:48:00+01:00

Posted by Matt Peters

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 split and how it relates to different ranking signals.

Query and Document Models

Translating the query and document from raw strings into something we can do computation with is the first hurdle in computing a similarity score. To do so, we make use of "query models" and "document models." The "models" here are just a fancy way of saying that the strings are represented in some other way that makes computation possible.

The above image illustrates this process for the query "philadelphia phillies" and the Wikipedia page about the Phillies. The final step in computing the similarity score runs the query and document representations through a scoring function.

Query Models

The following image illustrates some different types of query models:

The building blocks at the bottom include things like tokenization (splitting the string into words), word normalization (such as stemming where common word endings are removed), and spelling correction (if a query contains a misspelled word, the search engine corrects it and returns results for the corrected word).

Built on top of these building blocks are things like query classification and intent. If the search engine determines that a particular query is time sensitive it will return news results, or if it thinks the query intent is transactional it will display shopping results.

Finally, at the top of the pyramid are more abstract representations of the query such as entity extraction or latent topic representations (LDA). Indeed, Google knows that the "philadelphia phillies" are a major league baseball team and since it is baseball season returns last night's score at the top of the search results (in addition to the knowledge graph on the right).

Document Models

Like query models, there are several different types of document models commonly used in search.

TF-IDF is one of the oldest and most well known approaches that represents each query and document as a vector and uses some variant of the cosine similarity as the scoring function. A language model encodes some information about the statistics of a language and includes knowledge such as the phrase "search engine optimization" is much more common then "search engine walking." Language models are used heavily in machine translation and speech recognition, among other applications. They are also extremely useful in information retrieval. Yet another class of models uses the probability ranking principle, which directly models the probability of relevance given the query and document. Of these, Okapi BM25 has been shown to be particularly effective.

Correlation study

By now, you are probably wondering if search engines actually use any of these things, and if so, which ones are the most important. To explore this, we designed a correlation study similar to ones we have run in the past (see this for some background on the general approach). In this case, we collected the top 50 results from Google-US for about 14,000 keywords. This resulted in about 600,000 pages that we then crawled and used to compute a number of different similarity scores.

As you can see, the language model approach performed the best with a mean Spearman correlation of 0.10, consistent with results published in the research literature.

If we do some stemming of both the query and document first and recompute, the correlations increase slightly across the board:

This suggests that Google is indeed doing some type of word normalization or stemming in their relevance calculation.

Relevance vs Ranking revisited

Comparing these correlations vs Page Authority (an aggregate in-link metric in our Mozscape index) on the same data set, we see a substantial difference:

This begs the question: if these sophisticated similarity scores are so useful, why aren't the correlations higher? The answer lies in the conceptual relevance vs ranking split I discussed earlier.

To convince myself, I constructed an experiment as illustrated below:

To run the experiment, I first took 450 random pages from our dataset stratified across the top 50 results (so that they include nine #1 ranked pages, nine #2 ranked pages, etc.). Then I added the 450 random pages to the top 50 pages in each search result to make one group of 500 pages for each keyword. Since 50 of these pages are in the search result, and 450 are not, 10% of them are relevant to the keyword and 90% are not (the assumption here is that if the page appears in a Google search then it is relevant). Then for each keyword, I collected the Page Authority and Language Model similarity score and sorted by each (the tables in the middle).

Finally, I computed the Precision at 50, which is the percentage of the top 50 results sorted by PA/Language Model score that are actually in the search result. This directly measures the extent to which PA or the Language Model can separate relevant from irrelevant pages. Since 10% of the 500 documents are in the search result, we can achieve a 10% precision by randomly sorting them. This 10% precision is our baseline (bottom gray bars in the image).

The results are striking. The PA precision is very close to the baseline, which says that is does no better then a random number at determining relevance even though it does do a good job at ranking the top 50 once they are known to be relevant. On the other hand, the Language Model precision is close to 100%. Put another way, the Language Model is nearly perfect in determining which of the 500 pages are in the search result, but does a poor job at actually ranking those relevant documents.

Takeaways

This type of query-document similarity scoring is well established in the research literature and underlies every modern information retrieval system. As such, it is fundamental to search and is immune to algorithm change.

Since search engines use sophisticated query and document models, there is no need to optimize separately for similar keywords. For example, any page targeting "movie reviews" will also target "movie review."

Finally, you can use the conceptual split between relevance and ranking in your workflow. When creating or modifying existing content, first concentrate on making the page relevant to a broad set related keywords. Then concentrate on increasing the search position.

More Ranking Factors results coming soon

These are the first results we've released from the 2013 Ranking Factors project. As in years past, the project includes both an industry survey and large correlation study. I'll be presenting the results at MozCon this year (so get your tickets if you haven't already!), and we'll be following it up with a full report sometime later this summer.

To dig deeper

Here are all the slides from my SMX Advanced talk:

I highly recommend the book Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning et al. It is available for free online reading from their site and provides a comprehensive description of everything discussed in this post (and much, much more). In particular, see Chapters 2, 6, 11 and 12.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to continuing the discussion in the comments below!

The Positive ROI of Conferences: A Deep Look at #MozCon

Erica McGillivray — 2013-06-11T11:03:00+01:00

Posted by Erica McGillivray

It's conference season! Our inbound marketing conference, MozCon, July 8th-10th in Seattle, is just around the corner, and we often get asked by your our community how to approach your boss, CMO, CEO, etc., about coming to MozCon. You want to know more about the value for you and your company or clients, about how we spend those MozCon dollars, and what you can expect once you're here. And furthermore, some of you might be considering coming on your own dime, especially if you're a freelancer, student, or owner of a small business.

Conferences can be spendy when you add up ticket costs, travel, hotel, meals, and more. It's important that you can justify a positive ROI when it comes to your budget. At Moz, we're big believers in what you can learn at conferences, whether in sessions or through networking, (clear ROI) and in the power of serendipity (which can have a less concrete ROI).

Let's take a deep-dive into what MozCon looks like both from a value and a cost standpoint. MozCon's truly an amazing three-day conference where you'll take away a ton of actionable tips to implement on your site(s) and make new friends, whether the fellow community member sitting next to you, a Mozzer, or one of our industry leaders who are speaking.

And for those of you ready to take the MozCon plunge:

What's the ROI of My Ticket

Actionable Tactics

This year, MozCon has an astounding 35 speakers! They'll be talking about everything from linking building and international SEO to analytics, conversion rate optimization, and email marketing. We have an incredibly strong mix of topics with something for everyone. Our goal is really for you to bring something back with you from every session, which is why every single speaker has a keynote-style session to deliver this information. It's a bit like the best of 35 college courses distilled down to the heart of the subject.

With the exception of our community speakers, who are selected from your pitches, all our speakers are curated from our MozCon selection committee. After speakers have accepted for MozCon, we work with them to ensure that they're going to bring their very best, unique content to MozCon. Topics are chosen both by what said speaker's an expert on, but also what they're currently excited about.

This year, every speaker had a kick-off call to establish their topic and set up expectations. Even many seasoned speakers can be intimidated by the MozCon stage, and one of my jobs is to make sure that they are ready and confident about their talk. Speakers are also required to send in a draft or outline of their presentation so we can make sure they're on track. Every year, our post-MozCon survey shows that MozCon goers have extremely high expectations. By seeing a draft, we can offer advice. A lot of which is based on what you, the audience, expects from speakers. We make a lot of suggestions about actionable tactics, setting up the audience with what Nancy Duarte calls "the new bliss" to conclude their talks, and pushing content to the next level.

Speakers can send in as many drafts as they'd like for us to review, and final drafts are due about a week before MozCon. Which means I hope speakers are relaxing and practicing their talk, instead of hustling to put last minute slides together. For Mozzers, we've put together several practice sessions (first one was Friday!) for us internally to run through MozCon presentations.

Every single speaker is incredibly excited to be up on that stage and giving you their best. In fact, last year, Paddy Moogan really showed this spirit when he offered, for anyone who didn't learn something from his talk, that he'd buy them a beer and talk with them specifics about their website. Talk about TAGFEE! I don't doubt there will be some similar offers this year.

Inspiration

After actionable tactics, you're sure to come back inspired by MozCon. I know the best conferences I've come back from were the ones that I couldn't wait to get back to work or dive more into learning. Not to mention, the videos are included in the ticket costs, which means you can share the MozCon love with your coworkers and rewatch them yourself when you need a recharge in-between MozCons.

While we certainly stress actionable tactics with our speakers, inspiration comes through with every talk. The tactics may help you win, but the inspiration will fuel the fire. And who doesn't benefit by your productivity being up? You may find yourself excited about a topic you've delved into or seen yourself doing. You may understand what a coworker does a little better. You may have a deeper understanding of something you're already very much an expert in. It says a lot that even MozCon speakers hang out for the other talks to learn too!

A lot of us work around people who doesn't quite "understand" what is we do. Being in a room full of other marketers will keep you on your toes and make you so excited. Who doesn't want to nerd out about OG tags and that link you got in Forbes.

Making Friends

Other people might call this "networking," but at Moz, we're a little more about making friends, who happen to be professional contacts. The MozCon audience is an incredible community. I've never met a group of people who were sharper, more giving of their knowledge and time, and, of course, TAGFEE.

Whether you're adding industry folks on Twitter or finding a local group to hang out post-MozCon, you'll probably find that connection at MozCon. I know some employers worry about "networking" at conferences and that their employees might come home with connections for new jobs. But more what I see is excited people, who've found connections who often end up solving those "omg, I'm trying to do this and it is not working" and then a community member steps in to share knowledge. This sharing of knowledge doesn't stop when attendees have returned to their respective homes.

1:1 with Mozzers and Speakers

We highly encourage all speakers and all Mozzers to mix and mingle with attendees. This year, we'll all be eating in the same room. (Yay for the new venue!) And not to mention, we'll all be in the same big room as speakers are on stage. In the past, we've always had an overflow room for people interested in getting some work done or stepping aside to chat. But this year, there's going to be a larger space with comfortable furniture -- and don't worry, a screen to watch to the presentations -- so you chat and meet-and-greet between sessions or take a brain breather from all the fun.

Most of our speakers are highly approachable to ask them follow up questions after their talks or just in general get to meet them. I mean, who doesn't want to get their photo taken with Rand? ;)

This year, all Mozzers will be wearing blue t-shirts labeled with "staff" so you won't miss us. (Don't worry, we have three identical ones, so we'll be fresh smelling during MozCon.) We're here not only to point out where the coat rack is, but also just hang out and give you insights into what it's like to work at Moz. Everyone from our engineers and finance team to marketing and help will be attending MozCon for our own learning experience and to meet each and every one of you. We seriously love to talk all things Moz. And who knows, you might get some extra insights into the future of what we're cooking.

Tuesday Night Party

No one throws a party like that robot Roger. Okay, we can't always bring Roger with us -- those robot repair bills are astronomical! -- but we do know how to throw a great party. Okay, this might not be something to write home to the boss about, unless you do solve that work problem that night, but it is a place to make more friends and also relax after all that learning. We provide noms and drinks, not to mention plenty of karaoke.

This year's party takes place the EMP Museum. Where you'll not only be able to sing your heart out on stage, but you'll also be able to find a quiet place to chat with someone or tour the EMP Museum. You know, they have Daleks in the basement, David Bowie's infamous Labyrinth gear, and a whole amazing tribute to Seattle's favorite hometown band, Nirvana. Seriously, for those of you just flying in and out for MozCon, you'll have a chance to take a tour of one of Seattle's most unique and fun museums. I think it's pretty rad.

Roger Hugs

Every year that loveable robot of ours, Roger Mozbot, makes his way out from crunching your data to the breaks during MozCon. He gets his own photo booth, and you can get all the hugs from him. Plan on bringing some props and lots of love. Because this fellow can't get enough hugs from you.

Fun

See EVERYTHING. If you don't find some fun at MozCon, I will personally buy you a cupcake. (Cupcakes are the international sign of fun, right?)

Yummy Food

For those of you following us on social media, you may have noticed a theme: we love good food. I can't think of a Mozzer who doesn't fancy themselves something of a foodie. We can seriously give Anthony Bourdain and Guy Fieri a run for their money as our staff includes a former chef, a former bartender, and someone we're sure has sampled every dessert from Seattle to South Africa. Whether you're looking for a great steak, an amazing mixed drink, or some blasted broccoli, some Mozzer will be able to point the way. (Seriously, stay tuned because my fellow Mozzers are crowdsourcing a list of the most delicious places in Seattle to eat at and more.) We bring the same enthusiasm to our menus at MozCon. But more on that soon.

Okay, that's the incredible value you can get from coming to MozCon. But what about the actual price? Why does a PRO member ticket cost $999? What do we actually do with that money?

What's the Breakdown of the Cost of My Ticket?

Every bit of money made for MozCon goes directly back into MozCon. Moz has actually never turned a profit on MozCon (or covered its costs) from MozCon ticket sales. And that's okay, because we don't have to. Other conferences have to get sponsors and have exhibitor halls to make extra cash because they need it to cover conference costs. We're pretty privileged that we don't have to. Don't get me wrong, it's our goal every year to cover costs; but we'd rather you have a world-class experience you won't ever forget than say not pay for international travel for some speakers or skimp on a/v.

Let's get into specific costs. Transparency, ftw. I've broken down the costs from a $999 and how much goes to what. (Now, I realize that not everyone bought a $999 ticket; some people aren't PRO members, some people got early bird deals, etc. But the $999 is our standard ticket, and varying ticket costs cover for those other tickets.)

Food and Beverage - $365

Yep, food and beverage makes up the biggest costs to us. Your ticket includes breakfast and lunch each day (six meals!), two snacks (mid-morning and mid-afternoon), and one Tuesday evening party. As I mentioned above, Mozzers are foodies, and we don't cut corners when it comes to your meals during MozCon. We do this for a few reasons: it makes your experience more awesome and you're more likely to stick around during mealtimes, which means hanging out with Mozzers and Speakers.

Let's face it, no one likes it when you're handed a cardboard box with a turkey sandwich and a smashed cookie. Or in this vegetarian's case, some wilted lettuce and a soggy apple. (If I've learned one thing from conference and airline catering, it's that no one thinks vegetarians like cookies!) Not to mention, usually you see the Speakers and others sneaking out when they look at those cardboard boxes.

If we didn't have meals, it's true, you might be able to save your employer some monies by eating at Subway every day. (Subway affectionato and Mozzer Andrew Dumont probably has coupons he'd let you have.) But you're going to have to find where you want to eat, maybe take some friends, leave the conference, find the place, order, put the recipe in that very special place you won't forget it, eat, and then find your way back. Sure, Seattle has tons of delicious options, but I recommend coming in the weekend before or heading out Monday and Wednesday nights for that sort of exploration.

This cost also covers the catering staff, who besides cooking the food, will be making sure everything goes smoothly with serving and stays neat and tidy. They also assist in special meals for those of you who are vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, kosher, halal, or have other allergens. (Don't worry, fellow vegetarians, there's plenty of great noms for us in the main buffet.) Remember, these catering folks are the ones refilling the coffee, so we love them.

Speakers - $158

MozCon truly brings in top-notch industry speakers who are experts in their fields and great presenters. We cover these speakers travel costs and hotels, and we believe that it's worth every penny. MozCon speakers are the heart-and-soul of MozCon, along with Roger hugs, so we want all our Speakers to be wrapped in that great Seattle hug.

A/V and Video - $157

Okay, this is probably another bucket were you're like "What, Moz, A/V is how much of my ticket cost? Almost as much as Speakers?" Last year, the MozCon crew decided that we really needed to make the next step into making MozCon truly world-class. Many Speakers from 2012 said that they felt like rock stars on our stage. A/V sends all the signals from when to clap for the next speakers to when to quite down after a break. Not to mention, we've, by popular demand, baked the price of MozCon Videos into the ticket costs.

Our 13-person a/v crew ensures our speakers' presentations look sharp and do all the exciting things they're supposed to. No matter if they're playing video or rapping Mad Men-style like Mike King did last year, we want to be able to support it. Plus, an impeccable stage means all eyes are always where they're supposed to be. Our a/v crew does more than just the stage. They also do the lighting -- just say no to fluorescents you can't dim or control --, play any music, make sure we have video in the lounge area, and generally make MozCon feel like one heck of an amazing show.

A/V also assists with getting us the MozCon Videos all pretty and ready for you. We truly couldn't put on such an amazing show and deliver such awesome videos post-show. How else are you going to catch all those tips that you missed writing down because they were flying off the stage so quickly? Or share with your coworker, who's planning on going next year, what happened.

Interior Design and Signage - $75

The Washington State Convention Center is basically a big room with four walls, concrete floors, and fluorescent bank lights. The good news is, unlike a hotel, we can really make it ours. The bad news is that isn't cheap. Just covering that cement floor with carpet is $30,000. But we wouldn't want to hear people's shoes on the floor over analytic tactics from Avinash Kaushik. We also need to make sure we have tables, chairs, registration booths, and all those others conference basics. At MozCon, we don't make you balance your laptop on your lap with your drink, your phone, and your snack. Instead, we have tables where everyone can put down their laptops, drinks, etc., which leads to far more productivity and less spillage. :) Not to mention my Cliff Bars never fly over seats and hit people in the backs of their heads as I struggle to open the package while holding onto all my stuff. (Sorry, friends at SES NYC!)

Networking Party - $70

I've already talked a lot about the Tuesday night party at the EMP Museum. It's going to be pretty awesome. Not only are you getting to see the Museum exhibits (normally $20 per adult), but you're getting food and drink and some amazing extras. Wine, beer, and well drinks are all on us. Anyone who's ever thrown a wedding, anniversary, office, or birthday party with the cost of alcoholic beverages factored in knows that it starts to add up quickly.

Electrical - $40

The first time I helped run a large event -- GeekGirlCon 2012, approximately 2,000 people over two days -- I was shocked to receive a post-event bill in the thousand plus dollar range for overages on electrical even when I'd put down a deposit for overages. Not even counting what was already included in my contract. Electricity runs everything. We not only have our big stage at MozCon, but we also just have to keep the lights on, keep the room temperature optimal, and make sure that you can charge your laptop, tablet, and phone so nothing goes dead during MozCon. MozCon's a little unique in that each table is equipped with electrical plugs so no one ever cries over a dead battery. Or worse, has to switch to live tweeting on a smart phone! ;)

Swag - $35

This year, each MozCon attendee will get a Roger figurine. Yep, I think that's all you need know. :)

We also will give out some other pretty nifty swag items, including limited edition MozCon t-shirts and a host of other Moz-branded items. Yep, be the first one to get some Moz swag at MozCon.

Credit Card Processing Fees - $33

Pretty boring. But have you ever been annoyed when purchasing tickets, say on TicketMaster, at the additional "processing fees"? Unlike other events, who make the price go up in your shopping cart, we adjust for them and pay EventBrite monthly.

WiFi - $28

Yes, yes, we know. WiFi hasn't been one of our shining moments at past MozCons. However, with our move to a new venue, we are much more confident in the wifi situation for MozCon. Ideally, each and every one of you will be able to log into the MozCon wifi and tweet (#MozCon), email with coworkers (only pictures of you hugging Roger), and Facebook (with grandma, of course) whenever you need to.

Venue - $23

Besides this being a space cost, the venue costs also include convention center staff, aka the green coats, who assist in all things badge-checking, directional, and more. They work about every event at the convention center and know the place inside and out. Just don't forget your badge in your hotel room!

Misc Labor - $15

While most of our labor costs are tied up either in a/v, catering, or venue costs and Mozzers' salaries, we do have to bring in a few outside this sphere to help out. You'll see our photographer, Rudy Lopez, taking all the photos. And there will be some behind-the-scenes magic that happens before and after MozCon like riggers putting up and taking down signs.

I hope this transparency about values and hard costs of MozCon give you a better insight both into how MozCon operates and what to consider when talking to the person who's signing off your MozCon ticket and travel. Or heck, maybe helping you make that decision as a freelancer, student, or otherwise self-employed person to send yourself or as a boss, to send your employees. I also hope this might inspire other conference runners to share a little bit about the value and costs of their conferences.

MozCon is truly a celebration of the inbound marketing community. Around the MozPlex, we like to refer to it as a hug from us to our community. My dream is that each and every one of you has the opportunity to join us for MozCon. I can't wait to meet you and to see you inspired and ready for the next step in your career and your journey as a marketer. Conferences can really be a great stepping stone and have a huge positive ROI for you and your company.

Still in the undecided camp? In the words of LeVar Burton, "but you don't have to take my word for it":

"MozCon is like Disneyland for SEO’s, jampacked with super-geeky SEO Magic Tricks and great chances to meet and say hello to others in the search industry." - Pete Campbell

Why MozCon was the Best Investment I Made in 2011 by Mike King

Plus, if you're interested in that $999 PRO price, sign up for your 30 day free trial and get that MozCon discount. :)

See you there!