Moz BlogMoz, a Seattle-based search engine optimization company, serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services.http://moz.com/blog
2013-06-16T17:22:07+01:00
text/html2013-06-13T21:48:00+01:00http://moz.com/blograndfishHow Processing Fluency Impacts Web Marketing – Whiteboard Fridayhttp://moz.com/blog/processing-fluency-impacts-web-marketing-whiteboard-friday
<p>Posted by <a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/63″>randfish</a></p>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?<p></p><p>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.</p><p><center><div id=”wistia_5n8ij47rcb” class=”wistia_embed” style=”width:640px;height:386px;” data-video-width=”640″ data-video-height=”360″><div itemprop=”video” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/VideoObject”><meta itemprop=”duration” content=”PT9M7S” /><meta itemprop=”thumbnailUrl” content=”http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/d7842df41bfadb75ab1095760226dd0e73a0d3c0.bin” /><meta itemprop=”contentURL” content=”http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/23983736d40b4a1804663b8076aa6a9bbabcc7dd.bin” /><meta itemprop=”embedURL” content=”http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v2.0.swf?2013-05-14&customColor=2299db&hdUrl%5Bext%5D=flv&hdUrl%5Bheight%5D=720&hdUrl%5Btype%5D=hdflv&hdUrl%5Burl%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fseomoz-cdn.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2F928e506f42bc14402154c40fd7f3077405527755.bin&hdUrl%5Bwidth%5D=1280&mediaDuration=547.0&showVolume=true&stillUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fseomoz-cdn.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2Fd7842df41bfadb75ab1095760226dd0e73a0d3c0.jpg%3Fimage_crop_resized%3D640x360&unbufferedSeek=false&videoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fseomoz-cdn.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2F23983736d40b4a1804663b8076aa6a9bbabcc7dd.bin” /><meta itemprop=”uploadDate” content=”2013-06-10T20:24:25Z” /><object id=”wistia_5n8ij47rcb_seo” classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ style=”display:block;height:386px;position:relative;width:640px;”><param name=”movie” value=”http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v2.0.swf?2013-05-14″></param><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><param name=”bgcolor” value=”#000000″></param><param name=”wmode” value=”opaque”></param><param name=”flashvars” value=”customColor=2299db&hdUrl%5Bext%5D=flv&hdUrl%5Bheight%5D=720&hdUrl%5Btype%5D=hdflv&hdUrl%5Burl%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fseomoz-cdn.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2F928e506f42bc14402154c40fd7f3077405527755.bin&hdUrl%5Bwidth%5D=1280&mediaDuration=547.0&showVolume=true&stillUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fseomoz-cdn.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2Fd7842df41bfadb75ab1095760226dd0e73a0d3c0.jpg%3Fimage_crop_resized%3D640x360&unbufferedSeek=false&videoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fseomoz-cdn.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2F23983736d40b4a1804663b8076aa6a9bbabcc7dd.bin”></param><embed src=”http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v2.0.swf?2013-05-14″ allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” bgcolor=#000000 flashvars=”customColor=2299db&hdUrl%5Bext%5D=flv&hdUrl%5Bheight%5D=720&hdUrl%5Btype%5D=hdflv&hdUrl%5Burl%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fseomoz-cdn.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2F928e506f42bc14402154c40fd7f3077405527755.bin&hdUrl%5Bwidth%5D=1280&mediaDuration=547.0&showVolume=true&stillUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fseomoz-cdn.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2Fd7842df41bfadb75ab1095760226dd0e73a0d3c0.jpg%3Fimage_crop_resized%3D640x360&unbufferedSeek=false&videoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fseomoz-cdn.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2F23983736d40b4a1804663b8076aa6a9bbabcc7dd.bin” name=”wistia_5n8ij47rcb_html” style=”display:block;height:100%;position:relative;width:100%;” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”opaque”></embed></object><noscript itemprop=”description”>How Processing Fluency Impacts Web Marketing – Whiteboard Friday</noscript></div></div>
<script charset=”ISO-8859-1″ src=”http://fast.wistia.com/static/concat/E-v1%2Csocialbar-v1.js”></script>
<script>
wistiaEmbed = Wistia.embed(“5n8ij47rcb”,
version: “v1″,
videoWidth: 640,
videoHeight: 360,
volumeControl: true,
playerColor: “2299db”,
plugin:
“socialbar-v1″:
buttons: “embed-twitter-facebook”
}
});
</script>
<script charset=”ISO-8859-1″ src=”http://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/5n8ij47rcb/metadata.js”></script></center></p><p>For reference, here is a still of Rand’s whiteboard.</p><p></p><center><img src=”http://moz.com//d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/processing-fluency-impacts-web-marketing-whiteboard-friday/51ba5a74d15a04.88975293.jpg” style=”width: 553.4982935153583px; height: 499px;”></center><p></p><p></p><h2>Video Transcription</h2><p></p><p></p><blockquote><i>”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.</i><p></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.”</i></p><p><i>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.”</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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?</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.”</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>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.</i></p><p><i>All right everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.”</i></p><p></p></blockquote><a href=”http://www.speechpad.com/page/video-transcription/”>Video transcription</a> by <a href=”http://www.speechpad.com/”>Speechpad.com</a><p></p>
<br /><p><a href=”http://moz.com/moztop10″>Sign up for The Moz Top 10</a>, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!</p>text/html2013-06-13T04:00:00+01:00http://moz.com/blogDr-PeteSEO Tactics Die, But SEO Never Willhttp://moz.com/blog/seo-tactics-die-but-seo-never-will
<p>Posted by <a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/22897″>Dr-Pete</a></p><p></p><p><span style=”line-height: 1.45em;”>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/blog/goodbye-seomoz-hello-moz#retiring”>talked extensively</a> 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.</span><br></p>
<h3>The Essence of
Search</h3>
<p>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:</p><p style=”text-align: center”><img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b8de7603b0c4.36277081.jpg” style=”padding: 12px 0px; width: 678.8461538461538px; height: 224px;”></p>
<p>The
internet is so big that even <a href=”http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html”>Google got tired of counting</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Searchers and
Searchees</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The
desire to be found isn’t new or unique to online search – just ask <a href=”http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/biography.en.html”>Melvil Dewey</a> or call up “AAA
Aardvark Plumbing” in the Yellow Pages. What’<span style=”line-height: 1.45em;”>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.</span></p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>SEO Is Not One
Tactic</h3>
<p>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). </p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>The Construct: Search
in 2063</h3>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <b>S</b>pace <b>E</b>gg <b>O</b>ptimizer was never dull.</p><p></p>
<br /><p><a href=”http://moz.com/moztop10″>Sign up for The Moz Top 10</a>, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!</p>text/html2013-06-12T09:28:13+01:00http://moz.com/blogKeriMorgretInside YouMoz: How To Guest Blog for Mozhttp://moz.com/blog/inside-youmoz-how-to-guest-blog-for-moz
<p>Posted by <a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/21451″>KeriMorgret</a></p><p>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.</p>
<p>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%.<br>
</p>
<h2>Who Reviews Posts?</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/13017″>Miriam Ellis</a> is a Moz Associate specializing in copywriting and Local SEO. She provides the initial review of your post.</li>
<li><a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/85224″>Melissa Fach</a> 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.</li>
<li><a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/21451″>Keri Morgret</a> (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.</li>
<li><a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/98309″>Erica McGillivray</a>, <a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/81197″>Jen Lopez</a>, <a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/391801″>Ashley Tate</a>, and <a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/544762″>Trevor Klein</a> also help with the review process as needed.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<h2> What is the Review Process?</h2>
<ol>
<li>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.<br>
<br>
</li>
<li>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.<br>
<br>
</li>
<img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b50f69019cc6.31792426.jpg” style=”" alt=”">
<li>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.<br>
<br>
<em>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.</em><br>
<br>
</li>
<li>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).</li>
</ol>
<h2>What Content is a Good Fit for YouMoz?</h2>
<p>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/blog/using-google-analytics-to-power-an-effective-qa-strategy”>using Google Analytics to develop an FAQ strategy</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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:</p>
<ul>
<li> 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.</li>
<li>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.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/blog/dusting-the-website-for-spring-optimization-seo-cleaning”>spring cleaning your website</a>. 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.<br>
</p>
<h3>I want to write a case study, but am not able to share sales figures or visitor data. What can I do?<br>
</h3>
<p style=”">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 <a href=”http://moz.com/ugc/content-karma-why-being-generous-with-your-content-will-help-you”>opening up content on their website</a> doesn’t have exact visitor information, but does include enough information to show that their experiment had a positive impact. <br>
</p>
<p align=”center”></p><p><img style=”" src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b89f1b0716e6.51662902.jpg”></p><p></p>
<p>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/ugc/blasting-through-a-selfeducation-plateau”>reviewed job descriptions</a> to build a list of topics to learn more about, and how he prioritized that list.<br>
</p>
<h3>Google just announced that they are doing XYZ, and I’d like to write about it for YouMoz!</h3>
<p>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 <a href=”http://searchengineland.com/”>Search Engine Land</a> and <a href=”http://www.seroundtable.com/”>Search Engine Roundtable</a>. 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 <a href=”http://moz.com/ugc/how-much-will-google-readers-demise-cost-your-business”>shutdown of Google Reader</a> might impact your bottom line, example spreadsheets, and how to explain this to your C-level executives.<br>
</p>
<h3>How many words should I write?<br>
</h3>
<p>We don’t have a minimum or maximum word count. Generally posts run from 1000-3000 words, but we have published posts that were <a href=”http://moz.com/ugc/headsmacking-tip-1845-use-google-analytics-to-prioritise-404-fixes”>fewer than 500 words</a> and posts that were <a href=”http://moz.com/blog/holygrail-of-ecommerce-conversion-optimization-91-points-checklist”>over 10,000 words</a>.</p>
<h3>What about links?</h3>
<p>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/blog/10-lessons-from-a-100k-pageview-post”>lessons from a 100k pageview post</a>, 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.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we often see posts that start out “My coworkers at our <strong>Springfield SEO agency</strong> 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). <br>
</p>
<p>Affiliate links are not allowed.</p>
<h3>Do I need to have a degree in writing to write for YouMoz? What if English is not my first language?</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/blog/how-to-prepare-for-authorrank-and-get-the-jump-on-google”>Author Rank</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Technical Details</h2>
<h3>Finding Images</h3>
<p>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<a href=”http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/get-photos-for-your-website/”> finding photos for your blog post</a>, 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.<br>
</p>
<h3>Adding Images</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Our biggest request</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p></p><p></p><p><img style=”" src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b8a06be87eb3.02398657.jpg”></p>You don’t need Photoshop or fancy image editing tools. I’m on a PC, and use a combination of Paint and <a href=”http://moz.com/posts/compose/17477″>Irfanview</a> (free) to resize images, automatically crop extra white space, and with the <a href=”http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/”>RIOT plugin</a> you can “save for web” and have a reasonable file size for your image.<br>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p><img style=”" src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b61a5ce4ed79.06324292.jpg” alt=”" border=”2″ height=”360″ width=”697″></p>
<h3>Formatting your post<br>
</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p><img style=”" src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b620c9973230.95126107.jpg” alt=”" border=”2″></p>
<p>If you’re accustomed to our old editor and resistant to change, you might give <a href=”http://www.free-online-html-editor.com/”>this editor</a> 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).<br>
</p>
<h3>Spelling and grammar checking</h3>
<p>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 <a href=”http://www.colby.edu/lrc/help/spell.html”>setting your language in Word </a>that will help you find this semi-hidden setting.</p>
<h2> FAQs</h2>
<h3> How does a post get promoted to the main blog?</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Did you know that we have post analytics that are available on every post? Take a look! <br>
</p>
<p></p><p><img style=”" src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b8a16f58ef45.82748523.jpg”></p>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!
<p></p><h3>Why do some posts go straight to the main blog?</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Why is the review period so long?<br>
</h3>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>We Want You to Write for YouMoz!</h2>
<p>Are you ready to write a post? We hope you can take what you’ve learned here and decide to <a href=”http://moz.com/posts/ugc_guidelines”>Submit a YouMoz Post</a>!<br>
</p>
<br /><p><a href=”http://moz.com/moztop10″>Sign up for The Moz Top 10</a>, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!</p>text/html2013-06-12T03:48:00+01:00http://moz.com/blogMatt PetersDetermining Relevance: How Similarity Is Scoredhttp://moz.com/blog/determining-relevance-how-similarity-is-scored
<p>Posted by <a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/286574″>Matt Peters</a></p>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.<p></p><p></p><h2>Determining Relevance</h2><p>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:</p><p><i>Given a search query and a document, compute a relevance score that measures the similarity between the query and document.</i></p><p>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.</p><p>The relevance problem has been extremely well studied in the research community. The first papers go back several decades, and it is still an <a href=”http://sigir2013.ie/full_papers.html”>active area of research.</a> In this post, I focus on the most influential approaches that have stood the test of time.</p><h2>Relevance vs Ranking</h2>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.<p></p><center><img style=”width: 644.3511450381679px; height: 367px;” src=”http://moz.com//d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/how-does-a-search-engine-know-what-a-page-is-about/51b67b804022d6.52433438.png”></center><p></p><p>I’ll present some data later in this post that vividly illustrates this split and how it relates to different ranking signals.</p><p></p><h2>Query and Document Models</h2><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><center><img style=”width: 673.6887871853546px; height: 417px;” src=”http://moz.com//d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/how-does-a-search-engine-know-what-a-page-is-about/51b67b80f01fd1.72863506.png”></center><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><h3>Query Models</h3><p></p><p>The following image illustrates some different types of query models:</p><p></p><center><img style=”width: 655.6660412757974px; height: 495px;” src=”http://moz.com//d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/how-does-a-search-engine-know-what-a-page-is-about/51b67b817aa2d3.07037382.png”></center><p></p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p></p><h3>Document Models</h3><p></p><p>Like query models, there are several different types of document models commonly used in search.</p><p></p><center><img style=”width: 666.7777777777777px; height: 289px;” src=”http://moz.com//d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/how-does-a-search-engine-know-what-a-page-is-about/51b67b81dc6893.71902198.png”></center><p></p><p><a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf”>TF-IDF</a> 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 <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_model”>language model</a> 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, <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi_BM25″>Okapi BM25</a> has been shown to be particularly effective.</p><p></p><h2>Correlation study</h2><p></p><p>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/rand/what-do-correlation-metrics-really-tell-us-about-search%20-rankings/”><a href=”http://moz.com/rand/what-do-correlation-metrics-really-tell-us-about-search-rankings/”>this for some background on the general approach</a></a>). 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.</p><p></p><center><img style=”width: 624.0792540792542px; height: 410px;” src=”http://moz.com//d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/how-does-a-search-engine-know-what-a-page-is-about/51b67b825a9fb4.62601362.png”></center><p></p><p>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.</p><p>If we do some stemming of both the query and document first and recompute, the correlations increase slightly across the board:</p><p></p><center><img style=”width: 636.3090128755365px; height: 420px;” src=”http://moz.com//d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/how-does-a-search-engine-know-what-a-page-is-about/51b67b82d5a9f2.94127956.png”></center><p></p><p>This suggests that Google is indeed doing some type of word normalization or stemming in their relevance calculation.</p><p></p><h2>Relevance vs Ranking revisited</h2><p></p><p>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:</p><p></p><center><img style=”width: 659.4340425531915px; height: 439px;” src=”http://moz.com//d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/how-does-a-search-engine-know-what-a-page-is-about/51b67b835de6d0.59509503.png”></center><p></p><p>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.</p><p>To convince myself, I constructed an experiment as illustrated below:</p><p></p><center><img style=”width: 650.5116822429907px; height: 433px;” src=”http://moz.com//d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/how-does-a-search-engine-know-what-a-page-is-about/51b67b83d0a473.12768463.png”></center><p></p><p>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).</p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p></p><h2>Takeaways</h2><p></p><p>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.</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p></p><h4>More Ranking Factors results coming soon</h4><p></p><p>These are the first results we’ve released from the 2013 Ranking Factors project. <a href=”http://moz.com/article/search-ranking-factors”>As in years past</a>, the project includes both an industry survey and large correlation study. I’ll be presenting the results at <a href=”http://moz.com/mozcon”>MozCon</a> this year (so <a href=”http://mozcon-2013.eventbrite.com/”>get your tickets</a> if you haven’t already!), and we’ll be following it up with a full report sometime later this summer.</p><p></p><h2>To dig deeper</h2><p></p><p>Here are all the slides from my SMX Advanced talk:</p><p></p><center><iframe src=”http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/22827951″ width=”427″ height=”356″ frameborder=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ scrolling=”no” style=”border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px” allowfullscreen=”" webkitallowfullscreen=”" mozallowfullscreen=”"></iframe></center><p></p><p>I highly recommend the book <i><a href=”http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/”>Introduction to Information Retrieval</a></i> 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.</p><p>Thanks for reading. I look forward to continuing the discussion in the comments below!</p>
<br /><p><a href=”http://moz.com/moztop10″>Sign up for The Moz Top 10</a>, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!</p>text/html2013-06-11T11:03:00+01:00http://moz.com/blogErica McGillivrayThe Positive ROI of Conferences: A Deep Look at #MozConhttp://moz.com/blog/the-positive-roi-of-conferences-a-deep-look-at-mozcon
<p>Posted by <a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/98309″>Erica McGillivray</a></p><p>It’s conference season! Our inbound marketing conference, <a href=”http://moz.com/mozcon”>MozCon, July 8th-10th in Seattle</a>, 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.</p><p>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/rand/manufacturing-serendipity/”>the power of serendipity</a> (which can have a less concrete ROI).</p><p></p><p><img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b65383896932.75190159.jpg” style=”float: none; margin: 0px;” alt=”Aleyda on stage!”></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p>And for those of you ready to <a href=”http://mozcon-2013.eventbrite.com/”>take the MozCon plunge</a>:</p><p style=”text-align: center;”><a href=”http://mozcon-2013.eventbrite.com/”><img src=”http://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/img_uploads/buy-your-ticket.jpg” style=”" alt=”Buy Your Ticket Today!”></a></p><h2>What’s the ROI of My Ticket</h2><h3><p></p><p><img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b644746e1ff1.70596093.jpg” style=”float: right; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px;” alt=”MozCon ROI”></p>Actionable Tactics</h3><p>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.</p><p>With the exception of our community speakers, <a href=”http://moz.com/blog/announcing-the-mozcon-2013-community-speakers”>who are selected from your pitches</a>, 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. </p><p>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 <a href=”http://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks.html”>Nancy Duarte</a> calls “the new bliss” to conclude their talks, and pushing content to the next level.</p><p>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.</p><p>Every single speaker is incredibly excited to be up on that stage and giving you their best. In fact, last year, <a href=”http://www.paddymoogan.com/”>Paddy Moogan</a> 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.</p><h3>Inspiration</h3><p>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.</p><p>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!</p><p>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 <i>Forbes</i>.</p><h3>Making Friends</h3><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p></p><p><img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b64f7424f320.13616273.jpg” style=”float: none; margin: 0px;” alt=”Make new friends”></p><p></p><h3>1:1 with Mozzers and Speakers</h3><p>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.</p><p>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? 
</p><p>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.</p><h3>Tuesday Night Party</h3><p>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. </p><p>This year’s party takes place the <a href=”http://www.empmuseum.org/”>EMP Museum</a>. 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 <i>Labyrinth</i> 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.</p><h3>Roger Hugs</h3><p>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.</p><p></p><p><img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b651f50301e7.88014454.jpg” style=”float: none; margin: 0px;” alt=”Roger and Phil are BFF”></p><p></p><h3>Fun</h3><p>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?)</p><h3>Yummy Food</h3><p>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/about/team/douglas”>former chef</a>, a <a href=”http://moz.com/about/team/elizabeth”>former bartender</a>, and <a href=”http://moz.com/about/team/randfish”>someone</a> 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 <a href=”http://blackbottleseattle.com/”>blasted broccoli</a>, 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.</p><p>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?</p><h2>What’s the Breakdown of the Cost of My Ticket?</h2><p></p><p></p>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.<p></p><p>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.)</p><h3>Food and Beverage – $365</h3><p><img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b6482b56ad85.50799520.jpg” style=”float: right; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px;” alt=”The Cost of MozCon”>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href=”http://moz.com/about/team/andrewdumont”>Andrew Dumont</a> 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.</p><p>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. </p><h3>Speakers – $158</h3><p>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.</p><h3>A/V and Video – $157 </h3><p>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.</p><p>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 <i>Mad Men</i>-style like <a href=”http://ipullrank.com/”>Mike King</a> 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. </p><p>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.</p><h3>Interior Design and Signage – $75</h3><p><a href=”http://www.wsctc.com/”>The Washington State Convention Center</a> 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 <a href=”http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/”>Avinash Kaushik</a>. 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!)</p><p></p><p><img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b64e728de536.20654320.jpg” style=”float: none; margin: 0px;” alt=”Happy MozCon goers”></p><p></p><h3>Networking Party – $70 </h3><p>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.</p><h3>Electrical – $40 </h3><p>The first time I helped run a large event — <a href=”http://www.geekgirlcon.com/”>GeekGirlCon 2012</a>, 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! </p><h3>Swag – $35</h3><p><b>This year, each MozCon attendee will get a Roger figurine.</b> Yep, I think that’s all you need know. </p><p></p><p><img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b652508787e6.55251466.jpg” style=”float: none; margin: 0px;” alt=”Roger for everyone!”></p><p></p><p>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.</p><h3>Credit Card Processing Fees – $33</h3><p>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.</p><h3>WiFi – $28</h3><p>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.</p><h3>Venue – $23</h3><p>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!</p><h3>Misc Labor – $15</h3><p>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, <a href=”http://rudylopezphoto.com/”>Rudy Lopez</a>, 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. </p><p></p><p><img src=”http://moz.com//d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51b654428fea38.72271709.jpg” style=”float: none; margin: 0px;” alt=”Erica and the MozCon speakers”></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Still in the undecided camp? In the words of LeVar Burton, “but you don’t have to take my word for it”:</p><p>”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.” – <a href=”http://www.petecampbell.com/seo/conferences/mozcon-seo-tips/”>Pete Campbell</a></p><p><span style=”line-height: 1.45em;”><a href=”http://ipullrank.com/why-mozcon-was-the-best-investment-i-made-in-2011/”>Why MozCon was the Best Investment I Made in 2011</a> by Mike King</span></p><p>Plus, if you’re interested in that $999 PRO price, <a href=”http://moz.com/pro”>sign up for your 30 day free trial</a> and <a href=”http://mozcon-2013.eventbrite.com/”>get that MozCon discount.</a> </p><p>See you there!</p><p style=”text-align: center;”><a href=”http://mozcon-2013.eventbrite.com/”><img src=”http://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/img_uploads/buy-your-ticket.jpg” style=”" alt=”Buy Your Ticket Today!”></a></p>
<br /><p><a href=”http://moz.com/moztop10″>Sign up for The Moz Top 10</a>, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!</p>text/html2013-06-11T03:21:00+01:00http://moz.com/blogMackenzie FogelsonMeet Your Community-Building Teamhttp://moz.com/blog/meet-your-community-building-team
<p>Posted by <a href=”http://moz.com/community/users/233927″>Mackenzie Fogelson</a></p><p>Building a community around your brand isn’t just about the strength of your social media presence. It’s not about how you manage your social media outlets or whether you’re on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter. It’s not about how many blog posts you write or how often you use video or email marketing.<br />
<br />
It’s about building a company.<br />
<br />
A thriving community — one that brings visibility, targeted traffic, trust, credibility, conversions, customers, and ultimately revenue — is built upon a solid business that is investing tirelessly in its products, its services, and improving the experience it provides for its customers. </p>
<p>If you want to build your business and a <a href=”http://moz.com/blog/how-t