Analytics Blog
101 SEO Tips from MozCon 2013 Day 1
David McCormick
The time has come for this year’s top SEO conference MozCon. Three days of world-class speakers sharing their newest ideas, products and strategies for all things SEO and digital marketing. Rand Fishkin knows how to throw a conference and true to form, this year’s is bigger and better than ever before.
With 3 giant video screens, animated light graphics on the walls and a high quality sound system, this conference makes SEO very exciting. This is a time for SEOs to feel more like rockstars and less like the geeks we are.
Begin: MozCon 2013 Day 1
The first day kicked off with a motivating speech from Rand in which he reviewed the current state of SEO and marketing. He also gave an update on all the big things happening for this baby, Moz.com, which is growing by leaps and bounds of late.
The most energetic speaker of the day was Avinash Kaushik from Google. Anybody who follows Avinash’s blog or prolific posting on Google+ will know that he is brilliant and knows more about data, analytics and marketing than pretty much anybody else in the room…any room. He’s also a very animated and passionate presenter. A transcript of his talk would need heavy censoring to be family-friendly, but even so, you can’t help but appreciate the conviction with which he yells expletives or how ferociously he declares things either God-sent or stupid *$#*ing s*$t.
SEO Tips from the pros
The first day fulfilled its mission and delivered high-quality seo tip after high-quality seo tip. The great thing about a conference like this is that speakers are almost always out in the trenches actually doing SEO and digital marketing. Their ideas and tactics are born from necessity, not just theory.
There were so many incredibly valuable tips given at MozCon 2013 Day 1. I’ve put it all together in this handy list that you can use as a starting point for further research. If you’d like more information feel free to ask with a comment below, or follow the provided link and have the SEO ball rolling.
Really Targeted Outreach
Richard Baxter
1. Get a hyper-focused target audience using Followerwonk
2. Find the authors that have the most influence over your target audience
3. We need to stop using Google to find our target audience and influencers because it’s too general
International SEO and the Future of Your ROI
Aleyda Solis
4. Validate your company characteristics internationally
5. Find out the most popular search engine in your target country; Google is not the most used search engine in every county
6. Get native support to achieve international seo success
7. Don’t forget competitor analysis in international seo
8. In general, the best approach is to use ccTLDs, then sub-domains, then sub-directories
9. Target Languages, not countries
10. Localize/translate your complete international website experience: from branding to urls
11. Track international website and search presence independently
Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas for Higher ROI
Avinash Kaushik
12. Consideration Stage – See, Think, Do
13. Focus on all stages of the customer relationship, not just the final “purchase”
14. Improve performance marketing by focusing on the real needs that people have now
15. Make sure your web page is giving enough space to what the user truly wants, not what you want them to see
16. Measure success based on every channel and realize that the relationship is dependent on all of them, not just the final purchase
17. Don’t rely on the last click or first click models, we must use multi-channel, multi-device modeling
18. Learn what your customers need to convert (even if this takes months and many different point of contact), then make custom attribution models
19. Hypothesize, test, be less wrong
Use similarweb.com to see what content is most popular for your competition
Wordless Wednesdays: How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes
Lena West
20. Use shareable images in your digital marketing
21. Think beyond alt text and file names
22. People love images so give people what they love
23. Use memes, infographics and quote graphics – they may get a lot of bad press, but they work really well
24. Use knowyourmeme.com to see what’s trending now
25. Use an online meme generator to make memes quickly and easily
26. Don’t be afraid to copy and past other memes, infographics or quote graphics – just be sure to include attribution
27. Use online resources like infogr.am, visua.ly, piktochart, easel.ly
When the info is great it can become a reference that people use every day – so make it great
28. Focus on Pinterest when using quote graphics
29. Quote graphics can add humanity and personality to big brands
30. Quote graphics can build KL&T – Know, Like & Trust
31. Be willing to try, test, fail
Rapid Fire Link Building Tips for Your Content
Ross Hudgens
Tools
32. Use email-format.com to find contact emails – this finds out the email format that a company uses
33. Save time remembering outreach account passwords with 1password.com
34. Locate old content with outdated content finder – use this to find valuable, but old content that can be updated by you
35. Tracks email opens for better follow-ups with bananatag – unobtrusive way to track email opens
36. Easily bulk open urls with linkclump
37. Speed up boomerang for gmail with auto boomerang extension (developed by Ross & partner)
Improve visibility
38. Send stumbleupon traffic to your content on sites with “popular” sections to get more visibility – paid
39. Get your team to like non-owned facebook posts to improve edgerank
40. Target newsletters within own twitter network and/or email influencers in new vertical with Ask
41. Use Topsy and give author credit for articles you find yourself
42. Engage with the people you influence personally on a corporate account to get a second social hook
43. Write great articles, add links from influencers after the fact, then reach out
Build Links
44. Link drop client images in guest posts on sites that are non-related
45. Only guest post for high value target sites
46. Nudge webmasters into preferred anchor text in outreach emails
47. Filter out sites with zero outlinks to improve signal
48. Gather interesting data with Google consumer surveys
49. Create embeddable slideshows with huge markets as targets – such as a city-focused images or video
50. Create embeddable slideshows with local news sites desperate for content as targets
51. Create gmail filters for haro – use “has the words” filter to find ones about seo, etc
52. Create remarkable short-rom text that gets stolen – use FreshWebExplorer to find that stolen content and ask for link
53. Re-engage the authoritative domains you’ve lost links from using ahrefs (broken link building)
54. Spend more time on marketing research up front to know which of these tactics are the best to use
Strings to Things: Entities and SEO
Matthew Brown
55. Realize that links don’t become obsolete with semantic web
56. Add schema and open graph code on your sites – these are huge opportunities right now
wikilinks.corpus
57. Use schema “sameAs” tag that links to the wiki page (or some other trusted data source) to take advantage of the knowledge graph
58. Don’t forget Yahoo – if your site gets a link on a Yahoo page (sports, culture, etc) you’ll get a huge increase in traffic. Schema can help get you that link
59. Use structured data – Google is looking for you to have structured data that removes topic ambiguity
The Mobile Content Mandate
Karen McGrane
60. We need to develop a content strategy for mobile
61. Know your workflow – how content gets made
62. Don’t make a separate mobile team, mobile and desktop should be the same (or at least work very closely together)
63. Never forget that it’s not a strategy if you can’t maintain it
64. Write better content
65. Look at the American Cancer Society site as a good mobile experience reference point
66. Don’t write content “for mobile”, just write great content and make it available to anyone on any device
67. Get away from blobs of unordered content
68. When planning for mobile, ask yourself:
69. Which content should be included or excluded
70. Should long pages be broken into shorter ones
71. Will it work to reuse headings as links
72. Will it work to truncate body copy for teasers
73. What fallbacks can we provide if our desktop content just won’t work
74. Realize that responsive design won’t fix your content problems
Building a Better Business with Digital Marketing
Mackenzie Fogelson
75. Put your focus on the business by building community – that will build your business
76. Focus on goals, not tools
77. Set goals for the whole company, not just seo or content
78. Identify and define KPIs, they are different for every company – work with whole company for this
79. Build a creative strategy as a roadmap for achieving goals
80. Execute by sticking to the strategy, reviewing, adjusting as needed
81. Analyze performance
82. Build diverse content
83. In addition to blog posts and infographics, build content that provides an experience and accomplishes your goals
84. Bridge online and offline
85. Let your community do the work for you – they are the best brand representatives
To succeed in building community you must:
86. Push back
87. Break silos
88. Effectively set expectations
89. Determine whether the client cares – if the client doesn’t care, you can’t build community. It has to start with them
90. Build a process and team together
91. Risk saying no
92. Focus on goals
The 7 Heavenly Habits of Inspired Inbound Marketers
Dharmesh Shah
93. Don’t under-think and under-invest in your domain name
94. Trying to beat the brands, why not BECOME the brand?
95. If you want to buy a domain from someone, begin the conversation with a reasonable offer
96. Focus on getting the domain name for a price within your budget, not getting it for the cheapest price ever
97. Experiment early, experiment often – there’s an early mover advantage
98. Use LinkedIn for posting your articles
99. Be an early adopter on social platforms – you’ll get exposure that you may never get otherwise
100. Be open – in a world of increasing choices and decreasing trust, openness wins (it needs to be extremely open to be genuine)
101. Measure what matters, but more importantly: do what matters
Related Insights
Digital Analytics
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