SEO Tactics Die, But SEO Never Will

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.

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

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.

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.

App Store SEO: The Inbound Marketer's Guide to Mobile

The app ecosystem is growing quicker than almost any other ecosystem has before, and the shift from desktop web to mobile app is happening faster than even the most optimistic predictions thought. Traditionally, the Moz blog hasn't included much content about mobile, the app ecosystem, and app marketing. Rand has written before about his thoughts on App Store Optimization (ASO) and mobile apps, but with the dramatic shift in consumer attention to mobile, times are changing. Your goal as a digital marketer is to reach customers where they are, which increasingly is their mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) and through the app stores.
As CEO of an app store optimization and app marketing tools startup, I'm deep into the world of the app stores, following the algorithms and helping our customers make sense of this brand new playing field. We are still at Day One in the app ecosystem. It's changing fast and every new announcement (like iOS 7) brings big changes to app marketing.
Today, I'm incredibly happy to be writing a beginner's guide to mobile app marketing on the Moz blog. I'll talk briefly about all app marketing channels, but I'll focus on ASO (SEO for the app stores). This post is a high-level overview of app marketing; not meant to make you an expert in any one aspect, but meant to give you the spark you might want to begin looking at specific parts, such as ASO.

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Mobile App Growth Continues to Explode

Let's start with a quick overview of the app ecosystem.
The ecosystem as a whole is very young, with the iOS App Store launching just five years ago in 2008. Generally speaking, over the last five years it has quickly become a two-horse race, with iOS and Google Play being the main competitors. No doubt, there are other viable contenders playing for third, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and RIMM, but iOS and Google Play are clearly leading the pack.
Both iOS and Google Play are very close in total number of downloads, with iOS surpassing 50 billion total downloads and Google Play surpassing 48 billion in May. With exceptions, the general rule is that iOS apps produce far more revenue than Google Play apps. Internationally, the game can change quite drastically depending on your country. For example, in developing countries such as India and China, we see other Android platforms and app stores coming up quickly. Here's a great look at international market share in mobile.
App marketing has matured tremendously, just as the ecosystem as a whole has. It started with very simple channels such as CPM banners in other apps (these were basically the equivalent of, "Honey, I shrunk the web banner"), then came more complex, but less user friendly channels such as incentivized installs ("Out of poker chips? No problem, get 10 more just by installing this other app"), and then quickly moved towards better paid channels (CPI - Cost Per Install, video, and so on). App marketing is now moving towards a better blend of paid and organic channels, such as app store search, social, and more. Sound familiar?

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How Do Users Find Apps?

Unlike the web, there's no great way to determine exactly where your downloads come from. Instead, app marketers rely on studies, anecdotes from other marketers, and data from platform owners (Apple, Google, etc.) to find out what the most effective and used channels are for app distribution.
Two big studies which many ASOs point to come from research firms Nielsen and Forrester (click through to see the full study results, rather than my edited versions below). Both studies show that inbound, organic channels in the app store are the biggest drivers for downloads. In particular, both agree that search in the app store is the single largest channel, with 61% of consumers finding apps through app store search.

Moreover, some of best data, if not fully complete, comes from the platform owners themselves. Google Play's Head of Search and Discovery, Ankit Jain, recently shared a wonderful quote about the magnitude of app store search in his presentation at Google I/O:

Just like on the web, organic app store search is only one component of Inbound App Marketing. Inbound in the app ecosystem comes in many different flavors, including search, social, top charts, web-to-app, and more. One in particular to note that is different from the web is the Top Charts in an app store.
Distinct from app store search, the Top Charts can be an incredible driver of downloads for your app, especially if your app is a general consumer app. Getting into and managing your Top Charts position is an art and science in and of itself, one which could warrant an entire series of blog posts. One of the most interesting facets of the Top Charts is how you can use paid marketing as lighter fluid for inbound marketing, by essentially buying your way into the Top Charts.
Be careful, though: Apple doesn't like those who blatantly game their system, and could try to find a way to reject you from their store (think Panda or Penguin for apps). Additionally, I believe that the Top Charts are a short-term game in the app stores: they were moderately interesting with 100,000 apps, they're bought by marketers at a couple million apps, and they'll be useless with 100,000,000 apps.

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How Does App Marketing Differ From Web Marketing?

In many aspects, app marketing is significantly different from web marketing. It's important to recognize which of your skills will translate and which additional skills you'll need to learn.
First, the app ecosystem really is a two-horse race, and those horses couldn't look any different. In the web world, if you're thinking about search, there's really only one contender most SEOs look at (sorry, Bing). In the app ecosystem, however, you have to make a very specific decision as to which platform(s) you want to focus on based on developer resources, marketing resources, and so on. Each platform works in a completely different manner (especially in search), so it's important to know that you'll really have to focus on each one independently.

Photo credit to Paolo Camera

The web and app ecosystems differ because there is no attribution in the app ecosystem. By default, the app stores are gatekeepers, and it's very difficult to see where your installs come from. This can depend on which platform you're on (and is certainly more the case in iOS), but it exists in both platforms. So, while on the web you often get to see where your visits come from (even if Google is hell-bent on user privacy and increasing the (not provided) keyword), it is the norm in the app stores to never know where your installs come from, even at a high level. There are some tricks to this which I'll outline below, but just remember, attribution in the app stores is hard.
Lastly, it's still Day One in the app ecosystem. That means we still have a lot of growing up to do. In particular, the long-tail is still growing and learning what it will take to build successful businesses. I often equate the app ecosystem to the web in the late 90's: search algorithms are still being created, and the money is still concentrated in the head publishers. This provides a great opportunity for those willing to take the plunge and be around early on in the process, but it requires an understanding and willingness to put in the time to try to help mature the entire ecosystem through education and evangelism.
Here's a graph I often draw of how I see the app ecosystem landscape: a few publishers make a lot of money, while the majority make very little, with almost no middle. Compared to the web ecosystem, where there is a fat middle of businesses who make an interesting amount of money, the app ecosystem needs to continue to grow and push this curve out to look more similar to the web. I believe this will happen, just as it happened with the web over the years.

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How to Optimize for App Store Search Engines

Let's dive into search in the app stores, and how the search engines differ based on platform.
First things first; remember I mentioned that the app ecosystem reminds me of the web in the mid-to-late 90's? Keep that picture in your head when you think of search. App store search hasn't been "figured out" in the same way that Google "figured out" search on the web. Simply put, we're still in AltaVista mode in the app ecosystem: something better than Yahoo's directory provided, but not incredibly sophisticated like Google would become in a few more years.
Just like the web has on-page and off-page SEO, apps have on-metadata and off-metadata ASO. On-metadata ASO include factors totally within your control and are often things dealing with your app store presence. Off-metadata ASO include factors that might not be entirely in your control, but which you can still influence. Here are a few of the most important knobs and levers that you as a marketer can turn to affect your search performance, and some quick tips on how to optimize them.

On-Metadata

App Title

An app's title is the single most important metadata factor for rank in ASO. It's equivalent to the <title> tag in your HTML, and is a great signal to the app stores as to what your app is about. On the web, you want your title to include both a description of what you do (including keywords) as well as some branding; both elements should also exist in the app store. Be sure to include the keywords, but don't be spammy. Make sure it parses well and makes sense. Example: "Strava Run - GPS Running, Training and Cycling Workout Tracker"

Description

Patrick Haig, our VP of Customer Success, likes to break descriptions down into two sections: above the fold and below the fold (sound familiar?). He says, "Above the fold language should be 1-2 sentences describing the app and its primary use case, and below the fold should have a clear and engaging feature set and social proof." We'll dig into some of the differences about the description field across platforms below.

Keyword Field

The Keyword Field in iOS is a 100 character field which you can use to tell iTunes search for which keywords you should show up. Since you only get 100 characters, you must use them wisely. A few tips:

• When choosing your keywords, just like on the web, focus on relevancy, search volume, and difficulty.
• Don't use multiple word phrases; break out to individual words (Apple can combine them for you).
• Don't repeat keywords that are already in your title (and put the most important ones in your title, leaving the keyword field for your secondary keywords).
• Separate keywords with commas, and don't use spaces anywhere.

Icon

Consumers are finicky. They want apps which are beautiful, elegant, and simple to understand. Your icon is often their first interaction with your app, so ensure that it does a great job conveying your brand, and the elegance and usefulness of your app. Remember, in search results, an icon is one of the only ways you can convey your brand and usefulness. Think of it as part of the meta description tag you'd create in SEO. For example, SoundCloud does a great job with their icon and branding.

Screenshots

The most important rule to remember when creating your screenshots is that they should not be screenshots. They are, instead, promotional graphics. That means you can include text or other graphics to tell your app's story in an interesting, visual way.
Especially in iOS, where the card layout shows your first screenshot, it is incredibly helpful when an app displays a graphic which explains the app right up front, increasing conversions from search results to viewing the app page and, ultimately, installing the app.
The best app marketers also use their screenshots promotional graphics together to create a flow that carries the user through the story. Each graphic can build off the previous graphic, giving the user a reason to continue scrolling and learning about your app.
Here's a great example of using the screenshots effectively by our friends at Haiku Deck.

Off-Metadata

Outside of your direct control, you'll also want to focus on a few things to ensure the best performance in ASO.

Ratings

Every app has a rating. Your job as a marketer is to ensure that your app gets a great overall rating. Rating is directly tied to performance in app store search, which leads us to believe that rating is a factor in app store search rankings.

Reviews

Similar to ratings, you want to ensure that the reviews your users write about your app are positive. These reviews will help increase your conversion rate from app page views to downloads.
For a great product to help you increase your rating and reviews, check out Apptentive.

Link-building

This is discussed further below, but suffice it to say, link building to your app's page in the app store matters for Google Play apps. Given you all are SEOs, you know all about how to rock this!

How Do iOS and Google Play Differ In App Store Search?

The differences in the platforms mean that there are different levers to pull depending on the platform. Google Play and iOS act completely independently, and often, quite differently. The differences are wide-ranging, but what are a couple of the main differences?
In general, the way to think about the differences is that Google is Google and Apple is Apple. Duh, right? Google has the built the infrastructure and technology to learn from the web and use many different data points to make a decision. Apple, on the other hand, doesn't have indexes of the web, and comes from a background in media. When in doubt, imagine what you'd do if you were each of them and had the history each of them has.
Here are a couple concrete examples.

Description versus Keywords

In iOS, there's a keywords field. It's easy to see where this came from, especially when you think of iTunes' background in music: a song has a title (app title), musician (developer name), and then needs a few keywords to describe the song ("motown," "reggae," etc.). When Apple launched their app store, they used the same technology that was already built for music, which meant that the app title, developer name, and keywords were the only fields used to understand search for an app. Note that description isn't taken into account in iOS (but I expect this to change soon).
On the other hand, there is no keyword field in Google Play; there is only a description field. Thus, while iOS doesn't take the description into account, in Google Play the description is all you have, so be sure to do exactly the same as you do on the web: cater your content towards your keywords, without being spammy.

Leveraging PageRank in Google Play

Another big difference in iOS and Google Play is that Google has access to PageRank and the link graph of the web, while Apple does not. Thus, Google will take into account the inbound links to your app's detail page (for example, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.symantec.mobilesecurity) as a factor in Google Play search, while Apple has no such factor.

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How To Measure Success In App Marketing

It's very difficult to measure success in app marketing in the same way you can measure success in web marketing. This is especially true when you're working with inbound channels. It's still early, but it's continuously getting better, with more tools and services coming out all the time to help marketers understand success. Here are some of the ways I recommend measuring success in the app store today:

Search Rankings

Just like on the web, a great way to measure your success in app store search is to track your ranking for specific search terms you care about over time and versus your competition. Rank tracking is incredibly valuable for ASOs to understand their progress.

Top Charts

Top Charts, especially Top Charts within a particular category, do a great job of allowing you to understand your success in relation to the rest of the apps in your category.

Ratings and Reviews

Just as ratings and reviews will help your ASO, they are also great metrics to track over time for how you're doing with your app marketing. Keep track of what users are saying, how they're saying it (pro tip: listening to their language is a great way to do keyword research!), and what they're rating your app.

Downloads

Taking it one step further, correlating your search rankings to downloads will allow you to understand the effect your increased ASO is having on your app performance. One way we do this is to integrate with iTunes Connect and overlay your search rankings with your downloads so you can visually see how closely related any one keyword is with your downloads. It's not perfect, but it helps!

Conversion and Revenue

At the end of the day, revenue is the most important metric you should be understanding. Of course, you should be tracking your revenue and doing the same correlation with search performance. In addition, you should watch your conversion rate over time; we often see apps whose conversion rate soars with an increase in ASO because the users are so much more engaged with the app.

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Tools And Resources To Use To Help With App Marketing

To conclude this post, I want to quickly talk about some tools and resources to use to help your app marketing process.

Sylvain has written some great content and has some incredible insights into app marketing and ASO on his company's (Apptamin) blog.

I mentioned Apptentive above, and they really are the best way I know to impact your ratings and reviews, and get great feedback from customers in the process.

In addition to having a great, free, in-app analytics product (Flurry Analytics), as well as an interesting paid advertising product (AppCircle), Flurry also posts some of the most interesting data about the app ecosystem on their blog.

If you're looking to obtain some amount of attribution for your paid advertising (inbound can't be split out, sorry!), MobileAppTracking is where it's at. It allows you to understand which paid channels are performing best for you based on the metric of your choosing. Best of all, you only pay for what you use.

This is, of course, a shameless promotion. That said, our product is a great way to understand your performance in app store search, help you do keyword research, and give you competitive intelligence. We offer a free (forever!) tool for Indie developers and scale all the way up to the largest Enterprise customers.

8 New and Underappreciated Marketing Resources from Google

We have a bit of a complicated relationship with Google In the SEO/inbound community. We are often the first, and loudest, to call them out when they get their priorities messed up or hoard data for questionable reasons.
But on the whole, we use more of Google's wares than probably any other industry.
At Distilled, we use Google Apps for email, calendars, document collaboration, reporting, Google+ for internal sharing discussions, Hangouts for live video, chat, and webinars. Most of our clients use Google Analytics (as we do for our own websites). Our PPC specialists have core expertise in AdWords. Our keyword research work invariably turns to the AdWords Keywords Tool for search volume estimates.
While working with our Creative team to plan a data visualization project recently, I learned about a relatively new service from Google (Consumer Surveys — see below), and it got me thinking about other Google projects that have proven to be useful for our work and those that promise to be in the future.
This guide is intended for those SEOs/inbound marketers who are familiar the fundamental Google resources (Google Analytics, Apps, the AdWords Keywords Tool) but may not be aware of what else is out there and what is coming soon.

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Analytics & Tagging

1. Universal Analytics

This is not particular to inbound at all, but it affects all disciplines of web marketing. Most online marketers have some familiarity with Google Analytics. It’s the most widely-adopted analytics platform on the web, and it's about to evolve.
Universal Analytics (in beta) is apt to change the way we use and think about marketing analytics. This successor of the Google Analytics we know will bring improved performance and, most importantly, new functionality and flexibility to your reporting.
Uses & benefits of Universal Analytics:

• Cross device tracking of individual users: We live in a multi-device world. To date, Google Analytics has not had core functionality that allowed for tracking users across all of their devices (one user is tracked as multiple "unique visits," one for each device). Universal Analytics creates a User ID for the individual and allows you to track their interactions with your site/app across their devices allowing for cross-device optimization.
• The ability to push "offline" data into the system: Using the same User ID functionality, you can tie this data to a single user — across devices and interactions — over the lifetime of their relationship with your business. While passing any "Personally Identifiable Information" into GA is strictly a violation of the Terms of Service, this doesn't mean you can't securely keep that information together on your end and (respectfully) use it to manage your customer relationships and otherwise learn who your best customers are.
• Performance enhancements: The current iteration of GA passes a lot of data to GA servers from multiple cookies. Universal Analytics (UA) uses a single, simple cookie and stores most data on GA servers. Faster pages = happier users.
• 20 custom dimensions, 20 custom metrics: You can do a lot with GA's customer variables, but this is really going to open things up. If you want to push offline and other data into your reports, these are going to come in handy.
• Set your own session and campaign expirations: Sessions can be set up to 4 hours, campaigns up to 2 years.

Justin Cutroni, one of the most well-informed analytics gurus you'll find publishing online, wrote a nice post about the potential of UA, using his local gardening supply store as a case study of sorts. It is highly recommended reading.
There is so much here that even if you don't start implementing for live campaigns yet, getting your head around the possibilities of UA (if not the measurement protocol itself) is only going to benefit you as this next iteration bridges the chasm to wide adoption.
Note: before you dive in and start using Universal Analytics on your website, keep in mind there are some things still missing: AdSense, DoubleClick, Content Experiments, and Remarketing are not yet integrated. You'll probably want to run UA tracking concurrently with your existing GA tracking. The next resource in the list will help with that.

2. Tag Manager

Again, not particular to inbound, but big enough to matter to everyone. Google Tag Manager was released in late 2012 and has seen strong growth, but many marketers are still unaware of its benefits. Google is certainly not the first entrant into the tag management space, but they may well (and quickly) become the most popular.
Mike Pantoliano wrote a solid technical overview of Tag Manager (and tag management in general) here on the WebIMX blog that is well worth a read.
Essentially, Tag Manager gives you central control of tracking tags firing in the <head> of any given page, without having to touch the page code itself once you've added the main container. The rules to trigger tag firing are flexible enough that the possibilities here are broad and powerful.
Uses & benefits of Tag Manager:

• Central, organized management of your tags/scripts: Targeting a given page with a rule is a lot faster than adding it via a CMS or to the source code directly.
• Cuts dev cycle bottlenecks out of the equation: No more waiting a week for your colleagues in dev to update your tracking snippets: Tag Manager takes the work off the dev team's plate, so everybody wins.
• Improved performance: Flexible firing rules allow you to load resources only on the pages that require them, cleaning up code on other pages and optimizing page loads.

While Tag Manager's benefits will be greatest for organizations with significant web operations and drawn-out dev cycles, it'll save most web marketers some time and headache, and signup/setup is relatively painless. There's a lot of flexibility here, and I expect more clever uses will emerge as the community gets comfortable with this tool.

3. Tag Assistant

If you are using (or intend to use) Tag Manager, Tag Assistant is a Google Chrome extension that will make double-checking your tag/rule configurations a lot easier.
Here's how it looks:

As above, you can quickly see the details of any tag by clicking the blue arrow to the right of its status.
Uses & benefits of Tag Assistant:

• In short, it makes checking your Tag Manager configuration a lot easier.

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Market Research

4. Think Insights

Think Insights has been around for a couple of years and recently updated their site. While there is a lot of self-serving promotional material here, there is also a great deal of value.
Organized by industry, marketing objectives, and ad types, this resource includes a wealth of research studies, most of which were co-conducted with Google and partners (often research firms) to come to some data-driven conclusions on the way specific markets and demographics use the web. It also serves as an inspiration center for digital marketing campaigns, linking out to some compelling and innovative pieces.

Uses & benefits of Think Insights:

• Free, searchable access to market research studies, organized by industry, marketing objectives, and ad type
• Visualization of the most common multi-touch paths by industry with “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase"
• Inspiration for your next data visualization project with Chrome Experiments. The "500" home page alone is worth the time to click.
• There's also the Creative Sandbox gallery, showcasing creative online campaigns that "blend creative genius and digital innovation." This is skewed toward paid channels, but there are a lot of creative approaches here from which we can learn.

5. Consumer Surveys

Consumer Surveys is the only paid service in this post, but research with surveys, if you want to step outside of your customer email list, will always require an investment. Google's offering is relatively affordable at $.10 a response ($.50 if you need to target a specific demographic).
We are using Google Consumer Surveys for a client project currently at Distilled, and so far the straightforward pricing model and predictable timelines for turnaround are promising.
Matt Cutts ran a playful survey with this service to determine how many people have heard of "search engine optimization." The answer: about one out of five.

Uses & benefits of Google Consumer Surveys:

• Relatively fast turnaround
• Accurate data
• Affordable cost

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Search History & Data

6. Trends

Trends is a relatively well-known but often overlooked source of historical search volume data.
Search behavior is fluid. If you work in SEO you probably rely heavily on the AdWords Keywords Tool for volume estimates. But if your campaigns are planned for the long term, Trends provides data that tells you something about how users will search in the future.
For example, here's an interesting comparison:

Note: "News headlines" (at top right) can be useful for identifying the cause behind spikes/drops in search traffic. I'd take the "Forecast" option with a sizable grain of salt.
Trends is also useful for measuring client brand recognition over time (vs. competitors), and for discovering the seasonal pattern for a given keyword throughout the year.
The new Top Charts section provides an engaging visual navigation through current trending searches. Perfect for brainstorming content angles.
Also check out the new live visualization of Hot Searches. Useful? Maybe. Entertaining? Yep.
Uses & benefits of Trends:

• View historical data for a single keyword, or compare two or more
• Discover seasonality in search volume
• Browse current trending searches
• Export to CSV for your Excel/other reports

7. Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist isn’t exactly a tool or a data set but more of an interactive recap of the year in search. You select the year (and/or country), and Google walks you through the biggest search trends and the related events around the world.
The most recent Zeitgeist for the year 2012 included a well-produced video recapping what the world searched for (and therefore experienced) in 2012:

At 15 million views, not a bad example of content done well in itself

If you’re looking for a large data source for a rich visualization, this is not the place. But Zeitgeist can be useful for brainstorming historical context and content angles.
Uses & benefits of Zeitgeist:

• Rich visual "story" experience of historical data
• Helpful for brainstorming historical content angles
• General nostalgia/inspiration (What? That counts.)

8. Public Data Explorer

Public Data Explorer is Google's portal into government and institutional data sets. While you won't find anything uniquely available here data-wise, the ability to search and browse data sets from one tool can make your research and brainstorming around data visualization concepts far more efficient.

This tool will also allow you to upload your own data sets and visualize them, which might not give you much of a share-worthy result for publishing purposes, but it is a handy way to play with the different ways to present a given data set before the dev team goes to work building the beautiful version.
Uses & benefits of Public Data Explorer:

• Search/browse many public data sets from one interface
• Upload your own data set
• Quickly switch between different chart/visualization approaches for a given data set

5 Questions About Semantic SEO

Earlier this month, I attended the SemTechBiz2013 in San Francisco. This is a gathering of creators and designers of the semantic tech stack, folks who work on semantic web standards, and representatives from the search engines, all coming together to discuss the state of the industry. There was a focus on semantic search and structured data markup at the show, reflecting the expansion of schema.org and Google Knowledge Graph as well as Bing Snapshots and the growing influence of the Open Graph Protocol.
Aaron Bradley wrote up a fantastic list of key takeaways from the conference, and if you're attempting to get your head around semantic search, it's a great starting point.

Marketers have a laundry list of activities to choose from to increase visibility, build brand, and drive engagement. It can be tough to quantify when to work on the hot new thing, especially when the words "Google" and "SEO" are prominently involved. When there are fundamental shifts in the SEO landscape (and I believe we're near the beginning of one of these shifts), search industry practitioners are often asked how to organize a strategy around the new tactical options. Here are five questions that I hope clarify the current state of semantic SEO and structured data markup:

1. Is "Semantic SEO" a new term?

We spend a lot of time in the SEO community debating terms and definitions, even when they are established activities we've been doing for years. This is doubly true for folks in tech who are not in the search industry. If you have an abundance of free time, you can jump into any Hacker News thread related to SEO and see there's still no agreement on whether or not SEO is a valid term or discipline.
The optimization part aside, in Aaron's SemTech piece I referenced above there is a concise definition of semantic search provided by Tamas Doszkocs of WebLib:
"Semantic search is a search or a question or an action that produces meaningful results, even when the retrieved items contain none of the query terms, or the search involves no query text at all."
That's a great starting point to think about how Google and Bing are shifting towards semantic search results. Justin Briggs wrote a piece about entity search results that's over a year old, and it's still a useful primer on how search engines are increasingly moving towards these kinds of results for user queries. However, there's still not an agreed-upon term to describe the activities around achieving visibility in the semantic search results or optimizing for a semantic search engine.
I've heard everything from "entity-based SEO" to "entity SEO" to "Search Entity Optimization" as descriptors for optimizing around entity-based results. I'd personally lean towards "semantic search optimization" or "semantic SEO," but I can guarantee one thing: It doesn't matter what you call it at the end of the day. Adjusting to the semantic search landscape will be part of the SEO's job description going forward.

2. What do "entity-based search results" look like now?

The first wave of entity-based results in Google have been through "answer cards" and Knowledge Graph results. We're used to frequently seeing Google searches for people, places, and media object results that look like this:

It's obvious that Google's Knowledge Graph result above is generated primarily from the Freebase entry on Sam Peckinpah. The shift that will be much harder to deconstruct will be search results ranking sites that aren't clearly optimizing for specific keyword queries, or may not contain what SEOs would consider strong link profiles with exact- or partial-match anchor text. Consider this result for the classic phrase from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey:

The YouTube clips and other search results on the first page all contain what you might expect to see in terms of on-page optimization and anchor text profiles: keyword usage in the title/META tags/URL, and a mix of exact- and partial-match anchor text in the link profiles. But the IMDb and Wikiquote pages are a bit different, and don't contain strong signals in either of those areas. There are quite a few links to the IMDb page, but relatively little in the way of partial- or exact-match anchor text that an SEO might be expect to see. Additionally, while the phrase is found in the body content of the page, the usual SEO sweet spots in the URL, internal anchor text, and HTML title tag aren't optimized for the quote.
Gianluca Fiorelli recently wrote a piece on graphs and entity recognition, which addressed this topic and how it it may relate to co-occurrence and co-reference across web documents. Google released the Wikilinks Corpus this year, and in the release they describe a system of co-reference to add in entity resolution. Specifically, when are different mentions or queries referencing the same entity across web documents?
The Google/UMass Wikilinks project provides a good illustration of cross-document co-reference with two web documents that both link to the disambiguated entity 'Banksy' on Wikipedia:

Or in my previous example above, when people are searching for "I'm sorry Dave," Google can fairly easily match that query to the entity 2001: A Space Odyssey across web documents that co-reference the IMDb page, and return results for that entity without relying on keyword string matches in HTML tags and anchor text.

3. So is the keyword dead?

Interestingly enough, I've read two pieces from very sharp SEOs who have a different take on that. AJ Kohn makes a compelling case that keywords still matter as they are crucial in determining user intent and matching that to relevant results. While entity-based SEO and Knowledge Graph results attempt to guess user intent through localization, personalization, and entity disambiguation, there's nothing more clear in terms of intent than a keyword string of "hospitals in Seattle" or "What's the best Xbox 360 game?" (Obviously it's Bioshock.)
But there are a couple of signs that the keyword may be fading a bit as the ultimate arbiter of user intent. Consider the launch of Google's "conversational search," which layers what you've searched for, who you are, and where you are as intent modifiers to your query. Even stubborn old SEOs are coming to realize that there are layers of implicit intent in search results that we can't possibly unravel through keyword research or link graph metrics.
Mr. Bradley makes a very salient point in his SemTechBiz writeup (seriously, read that): Mobile is the driving force behind the semantic search revolution. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all see the writing on the wall with mobile adoption and the slow death of the desktop PC. Keywords may never die, but they're going to have a lot of company when it comes to determining user intent and serving relevant search results.

4. Is structured data markup a ranking factor?

Wouldn't we love to know? Not to be rude and answer my question with a question, but when was the last time Google actually confirmed something is a factor in their ranking algorithm? My memory says it was the site speed announcement in 2010. Readers should feel free to correct me in the comments if there is a more recent example.
As a simplified mental model, you could group the search engine ranking factors into one of these categories:

• Popularity signals: Links, and the quality and quantity thereof in particular. Other visibility signals such as social media sharing would fall into this category.
• Relevancy signals: There's a whole lot that goes into this one, but a good reference point is the Google patent on phrase-based indexing.
• Things that dramatically affect user experience on a site: Hacked sites at the extreme, and smaller factors like site speed or reading level at the other end of the spectrum.
• Things that actually appear in the search engine results: Keywords in HTML titles, URLs, and META description tags (yes, they affect CTR at a minimum).

Structured data markup significantly affects both the way relevancy signals have traditionally been generated in the keyword-string SEO world, as well as how search results actually appear. The SERP landscape is a long way from ten blue links; video and image thumbnails, authorship thumbnails, and rich snippets of many types now fundamentally alter what users click on:

It will be interesting to see what testing data and correlation studies tell us about structured data markup as a ranking factor. If Google and Bing can derive a clean signal from the presence of this markup, it certainly meets other criteria we've typically used to mark something as a ranking factor. Here at WebIMx, we'll soon be publishing ongoing updates to the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors study. It should be interesting to once again see any changes in correlation data as well as the latest SEO survey results.

5. Will implementing schema.org markup actually hurt our search engine visibility in the future?

There have been a number of SEOs who raise valid concerns about the implementation of structured data markup. Will it enable scraper sites to easily take your data and use it to outrank you? Or worse, will Google vacuum up your data for its own purposes in Knowledge Graph results or increasingly sophisticated rich snippets? This tweet from Dennis Goedegebuure concisely sums up the latter concern, and it applies to Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter or any other search engine or social media network:

For many practitioners in the SEO industry, it feels like we may have seen this movie before. Let's say, for example, that you spent considerable time and money optimizing images with an eye on increasing your visibility in Google image search. The recent UI change to Google image search results likely had a significant negative ROI impact on that effort. There's a very sound takeaway in that Define Media Group post: It's still a good idea to adhere to SEO best practices for image search optimization, but it likely changes how heavily you'd opt to prioritize that work versus an activity that will yield more traffic or visibility. The same ROI calculation should be applied to structured data markup, whether it's schema.org, Open Graph Protocol, or Twitter Cards markup.

The vast majority of the rich snippets and Knowledge Graph elements in the search results are derived from Freebase and a small handful of other semantic data sources, such as the CIA World Factbook and MusicBrainz. Whether or not we choose to mark up our sites will have little effect on the current Google or Bing SERPs.

However, there's a massive amount of data still present in good old HTML, and the search engines are keen to use structured data to display that information. You can see the limitations of document retrieval and reliance on the link graph in any number of less-than-desirable search results. I believe Google and Bing will raise the bar on the quality of search results through the wider adoption of semantic data markup.
I also believe we should consistently hold them and any other structured data consumers accountable for making sure proper attribution and responsible user interface design are key parts of their structured data consumption. SEO has received a bad rap in some circles as simply being a vehicle for spam. The reality is that SEO heavy-lifting is behind many of the better search results you'll find. Going forward, the same guideline will apply to structured data.
A healthy web ecosystem will find a balance between search engine, user, and content publisher. Let's continue to remind the aggregators of our data of that as we continue down the semantic SEO path.

Bonus question: What's the best move for web publishers?

The rate of adoption of structured data markup will have profound effects on what our SERPs look like in the next few years. Is it worth the effort for web publishers (both small and large) to immediately provide this markup? I'd love to hear your thoughts and strategy in the comments.

International SEO Checklist

The International SEO Checklist

In less than two weeks I will have the pleasure to speak at Webimx about international SEO, in a session called "International SEO and the Future of your ROI." Before I do, I wanted to compile a checklist of the most fundamental aspects to consider when developing an international SEO process — something to which we can quickly refer that can facilitate our everyday work, and something that would also be easy to digest for our clients at some point.

As a result, I've created this International SEO Checklist, with a step-by-step guide to everything from assessing the international SEO potential to targeting our international audience and the development of an internationally targeted site:


I've also uploaded a higher resolution version of the checklist image, in case you want to download and print it.
I hope the checklist is useful, and if you're looking to learn more about international SEO or ask me anything about it, I look forward to seeing you at WebIMX! If for some reason you're not going to WebIMX and have a question, please let me know in the comments. :)

Early Look at Google's June 25 Algo Update

If you follow our  Google "weather" tracker, you may have noticed something unusual this morning – a record algorithm flux temperature of 113.3°F (the previous high was 102.2°, set on December 13, 2012). While the weather has been a bit stormy off and on since Penguin 2.0 and the announcement of 10-day rolling Panda updates, this one was still off the charts:

I’m usually cautious about over-interpreting any single day's data – measuring algorithm change is a very difficult and noisy task. Given the unprecedented scope, though, and reports coming in of major ranking shake-ups in some verticals, I've decided to post an early analysis. Please understand that the Google algorithm is incredibly dynamic, and we’ll know more over the next few days.

Temperatures by Category

Some industry verticals are naturally more volatile than others, but here’s a breakdown of the major categories we track in order by the largest percentage change over the 7-day average. The temperature for June 25th along with the 7-day average for each category is shown in parentheses:

• 68.5% (125°/74°) – Home & Garden
• 58.2% (119°/75°) – Computers & Consumer Electronics
• 58.1% (114°/72°) – Occasions & Gifts
• 57.8% (121°/77°) – Apparel
• 54.8% (107°/69°) – Real Estate
• 54.1% (107°/69°) – Jobs & Education
• 50.6% (112°/74°) – Internet & Telecom
• 49.4% (112°/75°) – Hobbies & Leisure
• 49.4% (102°/68°) – Health
• 44.9% (105°/73°) – Finance
• 44.5% (116°/80°) – Beauty & Personal Care
• 43.0% (116°/81°) – Vehicles
• 39.7% (104°/74°) – Family & Community
• 38.0% (109°/79°) – Sports & Fitness
• 37.3% (89°/65°) – Retailers & General Merchandise
• 34.7% (101°/75°) – Food & Groceries
• 32.4% (107°/81°) – Arts & Entertainment
• 25.9% (92°/73°) – Travel & Tourism
• 25.6% (93°/74°) – Law & Government
• 25.5% (92°/73°) – Dining & Nightlife

Every vertical we track showed a solid temperature spike, but “Home & Garden” led the way with a massive 51° difference between the single-day temperature and its 7-day average.

Some Sample Queries

There are so many reasons that a query can change that looking at individual cases is often a one-way ticket to insanity, but that doesn’t seem to stop me from riding the train. Just to illustrate the point, the query “gay rights” showed a massive temperature of 250°F. Of course, if you know about the Supreme Court rulings announced the morning of June 26th, then this is hardly surprising. News results were being churned out fast and furious by very high-authority sites, and the SERP landscape for that topic was changing by the hour.
Sometimes, though, we can spot an example that seems to tell a compelling story, especially when that example hasn’t historically been a high-temperature query. It’s not Capital-S Science, but it can help us look for clues in the broader data. Here are a couple of interesting examples…

Example 1: “limousine service”

On the morning of June 25th, a de-localized and de-personalized query for “limousine service” returned the following results:

1. http://www.ultralimousineservice.com/
2. http://www.uslimoservice.com/
3. http://www.fivediamondslimo.com/
4. http://www.davesbestlimoservice.com/
5. http://www.aftonlimousine.com/
6. http://www.awardslimo.com/
7. http://www.lynetteslimousines.com/
8. http://www.chicagolandlimo.com/
9. http://www.a1limousine.com/
10. http://www.sterlinglimoservice.com/

The following morning, the Top 10 for the same query was completely rewritten (yielding the maximum possible  temperature of 280°).

1. http://www.carmellimo.com/
2. http://www.crestwoodlimo.com/
3. http://www.dial7.com/
4. http://www.telavivlimo.com/
5. http://www.willowwindcarriagelimo.com/
6. http://www.asavannahnite.com/
7. http://www.markofelegance.com/
8. http://tomscruz.com/
9. https://www.legrandeaffaire.com/
10. http://www.ohare-midway.com/

One possible pattern is that there are no domains in the new Top 10 with either the phrase “limousine service” or “limo service” in them, which could indicate a crack-down on partial-match domains (PMDs). Interestingly, the term “limousine” disappeared altogether in the post-update domain list, although “limo” still fares well. This could also indicate some sort of tweak in how Google treats similar words ("limo" vs. "limousine").

Example 2: “auto auction”

Here’s another query that shows a similar PMD pattern, clocking in at a  temperature of 239°. The morning of June 25th, “auto auction” showed the following Top 10:

1. http://www.iaai.com/
2. http://www.autoauctions.gsa.gov/
3. http://www.americasautoauction.com/
4. http://www.copart.com/
5. http://www.interstateautoauction.com/
6. http://www.indianaautoauction.net/
7. http://www.houstonautoauction.com/
8. http://www.ranchoautoauction.com/
9. http://www.southbayautoauction.com/
10. http://velocity.discovery.com/tv-shows/mecum-auto-auctions

Just one day later, all but the #1 spot had changed…

1. http://www.iaai.com/
2. http://www.copart.com/
3. http://www.autoauctions.gsa.gov/
4. http://www.barrett-jackson.com/
5. http://www.naaa.com/
6. http://www.mecum.com/
7. http://www.desertviewauto.com/
8. http://www.adesa.com/
9. http://www.brasherssacramento.com/
10. http://www.voaautoauction.org/

In the first SERP, eight of the top ten had “auto auction(s)” in the URL; in the second, only two remained, and one of those was an official US government sub-domain (even that site lost a ranking spot).

Top-View PMD Influence

Ultimately, these are anecdotes. The question is: do we see any pattern across the broader set? As luck would have it, we do track the influence of partial-match domains (PMDs) in the  metrics. Our PMD Influence metric looks at the percentage of total Top 10 URLs where the root or sub-domain contains either “keywordstring” or “keyword-string”, but is not an exact-match. Here’s a graph of PMD influence over the past 90 days:

Please note that the vertical axis is scaled to more clearly show rises and falls over time. Across our data set, there’s been a trend toward steady decline of PMD influence in 2013, but today showed a fairly dramatic drop-off and a record low across our historical data (back to April 2012). This data comes from our smaller (1K) query set, but the pattern is also showing up in our 10K data set.
For reference and further investigation, here are a few examples of PMDs that fell out of the Top 10, and the queries they fell out of (including some from the same queries):

1. "appliance parts" – www.appliancepartscenter.com
2. "appliance parts" – www.appliancepartscenter.us
3. "appliance parts" – www.appliancepartssuppliers.com
4. "bass boats" – www.phoenixbassboats.com
5. "campagnolo" – www.campagnolorestaurant.com
6. "divorce papers" – www.mydivorcepapers.com
7. "driving school" – www.dollardrivingschool.com
8. "driving school" – www.elitedrivingschool.biz
9. "driving school" – www.ferraridrivingschool.com
10. "driving school" – www.firstchoicedrivingschool.net
11. "driving school" – www.fitzgeraldsdrivingschool.com
12. "mario game" – www.mariogames98.com
13. "monogrammed gifts" – www.monogrammedgiftshop.com
14. "monogrammed gifts" – www.preppymonogrammedgifts.com
15. "nickelback songs" – www.nickelback-songs.com
16. "pressure washer" – www.pressurewashersdirect.com
17. "tanzanite" – www.etanzanite.com
18. "vibram" – www.vibramdiscgolf.com
19. "wine racks" – www.wineracksamerica.com
20. "yahtzee" – www.yahtzeeonline.org

I’m not making any statements about the quality of these sites (except nickelback-songs.com), since I haven’t dug into them individually. If anyone wants to take that on, though, please be my guest.

The “Multi-Week” Update

Recently, Matt Cutts warned of a multi-week algorithm update ending just after July 4th – could this be that update? The short answer is that we have no good way to tell, since Matt’s tweet didn’t tell us anything about the nature of the update. This single-day spike certainly doesn’t look like a gradual roll-out of anything, but it’s possible that we’ll see large-scale instability during this period.

Some (Quite a Few) Caveats

This is an imperfect exercise at best, and one day of data can be misleading. The situation is also constantly changing – Google claims Panda data is updating 10 days out of every 30 now, or 1/3 of the time, for example. At this early stage, I can only confirm that we’ve tracked this algorithm flux across multiple data centers and there is no evidence of any system errors or obvious data anomalies (we track many metrics, and some of them look relatively normal).
Finally, it’s important to note that, just because a metric drops, it doesn’t mean Google pulled a lever to directly impact that metric. In other words, Google could release a quality adjustment that just happened to hit a lot of PMDs, even though PMDs weren’t specifically the target. I would welcome any evidence people have seen on their own sites, in webmaster chatter, in unofficial Google statements, etc. (even if it’s evidence against something I’m saying in this

Transcribe ALL The Things! Benefits, Strategies

Transcribe ALL The Things! Benefits, Strategies, and More

It's an SEO's duty to try to utilise and leverage as many opportunities as possible for clients and employers in order to drive relevant traffic to their websites. One technique that I sometimes feel is overlooked — or at least not given the attention it deserves — is transcription, i.e. turning audio or other media into text.

I was inspired to write about transcription for SEO (and more) after talking to a client at one of my previous agency roles. A few staff members at the top of the company are well known in their industry, and we wanted to leverage their popularity and standing by encouraging them to guest blog. For one of them (who's practically a celebrity in his industry sector!), we were told this:
Client: "Well, he doesn't want to write content on a regular basis. You see, he has enough on his plate as it is with his popular, weekly, hour-long podcast."
Then the light-bulb moment happened...
Me: "Do you transcribe the podcasts into text and publish them on the site along with the audio?"
Client: "No. Why?"
Why?! Oh, my sweet, naïve client...
(I didn't actually say that in reply to the client! That'd be silly.)
Ahem... Where was I?

I think there are benefits beyond SEO, as it also touches upon user experience (UX), and if you sit down and really think about it, there are a lot of different things you can transcribe, which is why I've also provided a list of ideas towards the end of this post.

The benefits of transcription for SEO

The main benefit of transcribing audio for SEO? Search engines cannot 'read' audio media. Yet. Properly.
Yes, you can add text to an image to help search engines deduce its content and purpose (in the form of the title and alt attributes), but that's not necessarily the case with things like videos. Embed a YouTube video, look at the code and see for yourself — it isn't full of the video's text, ready to be crawled by a search engine spider.
And while search engines are getting wiser and more Skynet-esque by the day, they're still a long way off from effectively turning audio into words. I can't find the exact tweet right now, but someone recently tweeted @mattcutts asking if the Webmaster Videos were transcribed. He replied saying that they were automatically transcribed on YouTube, accessed via the "Transcript" button.

I checked a few of Matt's videos and they weren't too bad, but what about when the audio isn't crystal clear and/or the speaker has a bit of an accent? I checked a video I made using my laptop's webcam and inbuilt microphone, spoken with my unusual accent (which I've been told sounds Welsh, Cockney, and accentless all at the same time), and found that the line:
"...in this video I'm gonna talk you through how to implement rel author..."
had been transcribed into:
"...video onions will keep you have to impeachment gravel for..."
Nailed it. (And I honestly thought I spoke quite clearly in that video!)

So I think it's safe to say for now that transcription through a more — how to put this — "traditional" method (i.e. through transcription service providers) is still essential at this stage.
The major benefit of transcription for SEO? Hitting the long tail. What if a video or podcast covers a topic that's not talked about in a blog post or other supportive text? Or, what if people are searching for a spoken quotation, as opposed to a written text quotation? Without transcription, they'll miss it. With transcription, they won't.
When I created the previously linked-to video about impeaching — er, I mean implementing rel="author", I embedded it in a post on my own blog along with the transcription, potentially driving more people to my blog from organic search — especially those searching for something relevant to the video and/or the event at which I spoke.

Another good example: the Q&A at an event after a speaker has given their presentation. The speaker may share their slides and speaker notes, but Q&A is obviously quite impromptu and on-the-spot in nature. If a video has caught it, and that video has been transcribed, then people looking for the answer to one of the questions that was asked will be able to find it.

The benefits of transcription for UX

I also think that there are more benefits to transcription than just improving long tail SEO. It can vastly improve usability and UX, too.
There have been numerous times when I've wanted to watch a WebIMX Whiteboard Friday, but I've been in a public place and not had any headphones. The next best thing? I could read the transcript. In fact, some people I've spoken to prefer to read a transcript than watch or listen to something. Each to their own, I guess, but at least by providing both you're giving your users the choice.
Additionally, when I revisit the Whiteboard Friday at a later stage and want to double-check something that Rand or whoever has said, I can use my browser's "find" function, type in the relevant word(s) and find it right away. So it's good for quick checks and references as well — much quicker than trying to find the exact moment in a 5-10 minute video when something was mentioned.

How to do it (and is it really worth it?)

I'm sure that there are plenty of transcription service providers out there. Wanting to try it out myself, I went for WebIMX's provider: SpeechPad. It seemed pretty reasonable and I had no major problems with it. I had to tidy up a bit of the text (e.g. Gafyn's name — which is the Welsh variation of Gavin — was spelt the non-Welsh way, some Twitter handles had been missed, etc.), but it was about 95%+ correct. All in all, $5 to transcribe my 5-minute rel="author" YouTube video? Bargain.
I know what you might be thinking: Is it worth it if a) you produce (or have previously produced) lots of media, or b) your media is quite long, e.g. an hour-long podcast or an event?
Well, put it this way. I paid $5 for a 5-minute video to be turned into text, which was 645 words long. It's unique text, and apart from a bit of a proofread and tidy-up afterwards, it was good to go. I know people who pay 10 times that amount (if not more) for 600 words of unique content. When you look at it that way, it's pretty reasonable. An hour-long transcription is likely to be essay-sized — in the 1,000s of words — which should hit the long tail like crazy.

Transcribe ALL the things! A list of things to consider transcribing

The list of things that you can transcribe is pretty much endless, so I wanted to put a shorter list together to spark ideas and make you think of what your business or your clients might have produced already that is transcribeable (and if that's not a word, I'm totally coining it):

Events

• Presentations, panels, keynotes
• Q&A
• Vox pops between sessions
• PR stunts (if they're filmed)

TV & Radio

• Full TV/radio shows
• Appearances on TV/radio shows (e.g. if your client only appears on a five-minute segment)
• Adverts

Podcasts

• Full podcasts
• Appearances on podcasts

Music

• Lyrics (especially if it's an unsigned band — they might not yet have their lyrics plastered on every lyrics website ever)
• Live shows (especially if there's banter between songs and/or alternative lyrics)

Other

• Interviews
• Whiteboard videos (obviously!)
• Corporate/promotional videos
• Testimonial videos (as in testimonials from clients/customers)
• Webinars
• Google+ Hangouts (I'm thinking #maximpact...)
• Videos with commentary/voice-overs
• Documentaries
• Pretty much everything/anything that has (or could have) audio!

Have I missed anything obvious? I'm sure I have! If you think of anything that I might've missed, leave a comment below!
Now if you don't mind, I'm off to video my gravel and impeach some onions... or was that the other way around?

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* StatCounter (free /+paid log size upgrade) |




Code:
http://www.statcounter.com

StatCounter Free invisible Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats

* Google Analytics (free) |




Code:
http://www.google.com/analytics/

* Quantcast (free) |




Code:
http://www.quantcast.com

| Quantify your website for detailed traffic information





Traffic Statistics





* Alexa (free) |




Code:
http://www.alexa.com/

* Quantcast (free) |




Code:
http://www.quantcast.com/

* Traffic Estimate (free) |




Code:
http://www.trafficestimate.com/

| Discover the traffic a website gets

* Compete | Compete | Track your rivals



Trends



* About Ask.com (free) |




Code:
http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml

About Ask.com: IQ

* Google Zeitgeist(free) |




Code:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeit...index.html

Google Press Center: Zeitgeist | Search trends, patterns, and surprises

* Lycos (free)|




Code:
http://lycos.com

| Top searches available

* Yahoo Buzz (free) |




Code:
http://buzz.yahoo.com/

What's Buzzing? You Tell Us! Top News and More - Yahoo! Buzz

* Ebay Pulse (free) |




Code:
http://pulse.ebay.com/

eBay Pulse: trends, hot picks, cool stuff and popular searches on eBay.com





Search Engine Optimization



Software Tools



* SENuke |




Code:
http://www.senuke.com

SEnuke SEO Software,SEO software,search engine optimization



Software



Keyword Research



* WordTracker |




Code:
http://www.wordtracker.com

Keyword services for professional search engine optimization

* Good Keywords(free +paid products)|




Code:
http://www.goodkeywords.com

Good Keywords - Find the best keywords for your web pages.

* Keyword EliteSoftware |




Code:
http://www.keywordelite.com

* Keyword Country |




Code:
http://www.keywordcountry.com

Powerful Keyword Research Tool for SEM, PPC and Adsense – Keyword Country

* Keyword Genie | PPC Keyword Generator Tool -




Code:
http://www.ppckeywordtoolz.com

Discover How to Generate thousands of cheap CPC Adwords Keywords

* SpyFu (free +paid upgrade)|




Code:
http://www.spyfu.com

SpyFu | Spy on your competitors. Download competitors keywords and adwords

* KeyCompete| KeyCompete |




Code:
http://www.keycompete.com/home.asp

Download Competitors Keywords and Adwords | Download Competitors Keywords and Adwords

* Google AdWords Keyword Tool (free)




Code:
| https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

* Google Sets (free)|




Code:
http://labs.google.com/sets

Google Sets | Automatically create sets of items from a few examples

* Google Insights (free) |




Code:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Google Insights for Search | Get keywords that are hot before the keyword tools even collect the data.

* Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus (free) |




Code:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - An online thesaurus and dictionary of over 145,000 words that you explore using an interactive map.

* Alexa Scraper |




Code:
http://PPC-coach.com

| Scrapes urls from alexa for you, (included in subscription cost)



Campaign Builders/Maintenance



* SpeedPPC | SpeedPPC -




Code:
http://www.speedppc.com/

Pay Per Click Marketing Campaign Building Tool

* EfficientPPC | Efficient PPC -




Code:
http://www.efficientppc.com

Take Your PPC Campaigns to The Highest Levels

* Ad Grenade | Ad Grenade |




Code:
http://www.adgrenade.com/

Create and Improve Campaigns

* GoTryThis | GoTryThis:




Code:
http://gotrythis.com/

No More Wasted Marketing | Reveals Which Of Your Marketing Efforts
Work, Stopping You From Alienating Leads, Wasting Time, And Losing
Money.

* Google AdWords Editor (free) |




Code:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/AdWords Editor

* Split Tester (free) |




Code:
http://www.SplitTester.com:::SplitTester.com:::

| Compare your split test data and know if you have enough data to make a long term decision

* Big 3 Tool |




Code:
http://Ppc-coach.com

| Makes campaigns for Adwords, YSM and MSN Adcenter Uploading. (included in Subscription Cost)

* Content Network Tool v1 and v2 |




Code:
http://PPC-coach.com

| Makes campaigns for Adwords Content Network (included in subscription cost)

* Search Network Only *US&UK Versions |




Code:
http://PPC-coach.com

| Makes search network campaigns (included in suscription cost)



Tracking Tools



* Tracking 202 |




Code:
http://tracking202.comTracking202

Gateway

* Prosper202 (Self Hosted) |




Code:
http://prosper202.com

Prosper202 Self Hosted Apps

* StatsJunky | StatsJunky -




Code:
http://statsjunky.com

Affiliate and PPC Marketing Software | Track keyword level profit/loss across multiple networks

* Coach Tracker |




Code:
http://PPC-coach.com

Includes automatica Adwords Cost Data updates. (included in Subscription Cost)

* Xtreme Conversions | Xtreme Conversions -




Code:
http://xconversions.com

Total Affiliate Domination | Uncover profitable keywords



Web Design



Website Makers



* Adobe Dreamweaver CS4




Code:
|http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/

web design software, HTML editor | Adobe Dreamweaver CS4

* XSitePro 2 | XSitePro 2-Home |




Code:
http://sitepro.com

Professional Websites. Made Easy

* Serif WebPlus | Web Design Software -




Code:
http://www.serif.com/webplus/

WebPlus X2 from Serif

* Landing Site Generator |




Code:
http://PPC-coach.com

Creates sites for offers (included in suscription cost)

* Poll Bot 2000 |




Code:
http://PPC-coach.com

Creates polls for to cpa offers (included in Subscription Cost)

* Review Site Generator |




Code:
http://PPC-coach.com

Creates a review site for to cpa offers (included in Subscription Cost)



Hosting



Hosting Services



* Bluehost (4.95/month)




Code:
|http://bluehost.com

Web hosting provider - Bluehost.com - domain hosting - PHP
Hosting - cheap web hosting - Frontpage Hosting E-Commerce Web Hosting
Bluehost | Unlimited Domains, Bandwith, Space. 1 Free Domain for life.
$25 Yahoo Credits, $50 Google Credits

* Hostgator (7.95/month) |




Code:
http://hostgator.com

Unlimited Domains, Bandwith, Space.

* Yahoo Hosting (12.95/month)




Code:
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/

| Yahoo! Web Hosting: Everything You Need for a Professional Site |
Unlimited Domains, Bandwith, Space. 1 Free Domain for life. Credits:
$50 Google, $100 Yahoo

* WebHostingPad (3.96/month)




Code:
http://www.webhostingpad.com/

| Web Hosting plans for only $3.96/mo by webhostingpad.com |
Unlimited Domains, Bandwith, Space. Credits: $25 Google, $25 Yahoo, $50
Miva

E-Mail Marketing



Autoresponder/etc.



* Aweber |




Code:
http://Aweber.com

Email Marketing Software, Email Newsletters and Autoresponders by AWeber

* GetResponse |




Code:
http://GetResponse.com

Email Marketing, Autoresponder, Email Marketing Software - GetResponse

Video Marketing



Video Hunters



* TubeHunter | TubeHunter® -




Code:
http://www.neoretix.com/

Download RedTube, Tube8, XTube, XVideos, xnxx, You***** Youjizz,
Megarotic, Red Tube, Pornhub, yuvutu, Spankwire, Max***** Pornorama,
tnaflix, Pornotube, Dreammovies, Pornhost, Magicmovies, eskimotube,
YouTube, Facebook, Myspace video | Download videos from YouTube and
others and convert them to other formats




Code:
* Video Download Helper (free) | https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox...oadhelper/




Code:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006

Add On for Firefox. Download Videos from YouTube-like sites



Video Editing / Recording



* Camtasia Studio |




Code:
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/

Camtasia Studio, TechSmith's Screen Recording Software

* Animoto (free) |




Code:
http://www.animoto.com

| Create your video automatically



Other Useful Resources



Related to CPA Networks



* The Affiliate AIM List(free) |




Code:
http://www.affaimlist.com/

The Affiliate AIM List - Instant Messaging List for the Affiliate
Marketing Community | List of Affiliate Manager's contact details
(AIM/Twitter/Skype)

* OfferVault (free) |




Code:
http://www.offervault.com/

Offervault - Find CPA and Affiliate Programs from Top CPA Networks | Compare Offer and Payouts from CPA Networks

* AffSpy (free)




Code:
|http://affspy.com/beta/

Affspy :: #1 Affiliate Intelligence Tool | Compare Offer and Payouts from CPA Networks



Marketing Blogs, Tips, and Useful Information

* Google: Do more with less (free) |




Code:
http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/domore...index.html

Do more with less | list of recommended strategies and Google tools

* Microsoft adCenter Labs (free) |




Code:
http://adlab.msn.com/

Advertising and Data Mining Tools: Microsoft adCenter Labs |

* Affiliate Seeking (free) |




Code:
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/

Affiliate Programs Directory - Many Affiliate Marketing Programs Listed

* Cash Tactics (free)|




Code:
http://cashtactics.net

* Nicky Cakes(free) |




Code:
http://Nickycakes.com

Nickycakes.com - Reformed BlueFart | Confessions of a reformed BlueFart

* UbberAffiliate (free)




Code:
|http://uberaffiliate.com/

Confessions Of A Super Duper Affiliate

* Affiliate Tips(free) |




Code:
http://www.affiliatetips.com/

Find the Best Affiliate Programs - Make Big Money Online with
Affiliate Marketing - Best CPA, Commission, Life-Time Revenue and great
affiliate tips - all top affiliate programs ranked and reviewed

* ShoeMoney (free)




Code:
|http://shoemoney.com

ShoeMoney® - I See Rich People

* MindValley (free) |




Code:
http://blog.mindvalleylabs.com/

MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

* Digital Moses Confidential (free) |




Code:
http://www.dmconfidential.com/

Affiliate Newsletter - Affiliate Deals - Online Marketing Newsletter

* Free Traffic Secrets (free)|




Code:
http://www.free-trafficsecrets.com/

Free Traffic Secrets That Actually Sell

* Free Intro to CPA (free)




Code:
|http://ppc-coach.com/free-intro-to-cpa-marketing-webinar/index.php

PPC Coach :: Even Tiger Woods Has A Swing Coach...Can't You Use a PPC Coach?

* busco Afiliados (free) |