Transcription
Eric McGehearty: My name is Eric McGehearty, here again and I’m really excited. James from Simpli.fi had a really exciting speech about re-marketing and display. Display has been one of those areas that we’ve used before, we’ve had some success with, we’ve had some failures, but after tonight’s talk I really feel like we’re going to have some big home-runs for some of our clients.

James, can you give me some insight about what you were talking about the keyword level targeting in display? How does that work?

James Moore: The reality is the display space, frankly, is starting to look more and more like search. The integration display and search is really at a fever pace rapidly coming together. Part of that has to do with the fact that publishers are releasing their inventory with real time bidding which is a role that the search people know all too well, bidding on keywords, the highest bidder to get a conversion.

Really what’s happening now is that they’re starting to release keyword data and search re-targeting in the simplest form simply means that when a company does a search on say Google and your text ad comes up. When they don’t click on that, you lost that opportunity for that customer, but not anymore because with search re-targeting, what’s happening is we’re able to build a profile of that user’s search behavior so that you can to me with your keyword list and have a second chance at targeting these individuals with display ads.

Eric: One of the things that you mentioned to me that was really powerful is the cost of difference and the potential to optimize that cost. On Google there’s a lot of different keywords at a very high cost. We have customers that spent an easy $15 on click. You’re telling me that in some senses there’s potential for me to get a customer who searched for that word, I can get a display ad to him for maybe a dollar a click. How does that work?

James: The example I gave in my speech tonight was mesothelioma. That’s a word that’s synonymous with very high CPC, cost per click. The reality is that when you’re bidding on that in a search engine you’re bidding on that keyword. Whenever I’m buying display ad space that may be one of hundreds of keywords I have attached to that user so I’m literally bidding for the price it costs to put that display ad on that publishers side at the time their eyeballs are there.

We’ve got data that basically says terms that could cost $20, $30, $40 a search are 90 cent, $1 terms in display and you’re able to take what was a costly segment and target them very specifically with these display ads at a very low cost.

Eric: In real world, these are a lot of things that big companies deal with but from a small business point of view just think about that roofer during a hailstorm. Roofers will pay a huge amount of money during a hailstorm to get those clicks. We can re-target those people at home improvement websites, or any website for that matter. They have been looking for a new roof suddenly we show them an ad that’s a very cheap cost for that roofing.

James: Actually it gets more exciting, right, because you’re able to take keywords that are important to that roofer that he can bid on at a low cost but at the same time because of the integration of display technology you can even layer that in with contextual. It diminishes the pool but basically you could say I want to bid on roof repair in Dallas, Texas during this time period but only when they have searched for that term and on a page reading about roofing which is amazing. The pool narrows but the click-through rates of conversion go relatively high.

Eric: James, I really appreciate it. We’re going to be bringing this technology to Globe Runner and to our clients so we really look forward to talking to you more about it. It’s very nice to meet you, James.

James: It’s nice to meet you, too.

A = Amazon
B = Bank of America
C = Craigslist
D = Dictionary
E = Espn
F = Facebook
G = Google
H = Hotmail
I = iPhone 5
J = JC Penney
K = Kohls
L = Lowes
M = MapQuest
N = Netflix
O = Old Navy
P = Pandora
Q = Quotes
R = Redbox
S = Southwest Airlines
T = Target
U = USPS
V = Verizon Wireless
W = Walmart
X = X Factor
Y = YouTube
Z = Zillow

When Google introduced Instant Search, their goal was to deliver more relevant searches faster. This came in the form of autocomplete and instant hints which use both personal browsing data (what you’ve previously searched) and the browser’s physical location (IP address) to deliver search results. Autocomplete, as you may be already familiar, automatically completes your search phrase by delivering educated guesses in the search bar. Instant Hints appear in a short drop down list of phrases that relate (in theory) to your query. With this technology, Google has enabled the searcher to browse and click through results without having to finish typing a query or even clicking on the search button. Below is a list that I generated simply by typing in the following letters A-Z… this was more of a fun exercise rather than something we took seriously. However, as marketers who live, eat, breathe, sleep SEO, we couldn’t help but discover a few things…

It never hurts to be an established brand. If you already are attracting thousands of new visitors to your site every month, such as Amazon or Craigslist, Google may just include you as an Instant Hint automatically. This is perhaps the least actionable of my points, since Instant Hints are based primarily on the searcher’s history and recent trends, which brings me to my next point…

Online follows offline. For all you students of psychology, herd theory—the desire to be one with the crowd—does play out in the search engines. Google says that every Instant Hint is a term or phrase that someone (in your geographic area) has already typed in. Thus, Google assumes that what other people are searching is probably what you will likewise want to search. Ergo, herd theory, or the influence of “the crowd” on human decisions, is powerful for getting ranked well in search engines (especially Bing which has begun to exclusively use social media to deliver more relevant search results).

Trends are friends. Adding to my last point about Google displaying Instant Hints based on previous search behavior, trends or events that happen at a certain time of year can generate addition impressions (or better yet, traffic) for your business. Holidays and current events all can help to bolster your website or blog if you pick corresponding keywords and write great content. The higher quality content you have, the more likely you will be to actually generate traffic from these trending keywords and convert your site’s visitors.

It’s good to be Google or any of Google’s content networks: Wikipedia, YouTube, Plus, etc. This point is really more of a pun, since Google displayed itself under the letter “G” (actually displayed Google and Google News as the first two Hints). Nothing wrong with a little self-promotion.

We plan to discuss more about Google Instant in the days to come so keep in touch.

Once again, Overstock.com is suspected of playing dirty.

Last February, Overstock.com was penalized by Google for manipulating the search engines. The online retailer offered students and faculty discounts in exchange for posting links from college and university websites to Overstock.com. Their motivation? Ranking in search engines are, in large part determined by assessing the number of sites that link back to the site being ranked. In order to avoid artificial influence on search engines, Google forbids sites from paying other websites to embed links on their pages, and penalized Overstock.com for this unethical (“black hat”) practice. The Wall Street Journal quotes Patrick Byrne, Overstock’s chief executive, as saying, “We understand Google’s position and have made the appropriate changes to remain within Google’s guidelines.”

But they might be at it again.

I made this discovery while working on a competitive analysis for a client who wanted to rank for the keyword “kids’ bedding”.  The top organic position was held by Overstock.com with this page: www.overstock.com/Home-Garden/Kids-Bedding/5389/subcat.html. My browser tools indicated the page had a large number of backlinks, an unusually large number for even a large retailer. I looked further. Using Open Site Explorer I found they had some very suspicious backlinks, including:

• http://stevesloanmusic.com/3comp_.html
• http://essencenet.ca/mainp.html
• http://dvihome.com.au/wp-admin/includes/co_mma.html
• http://readmaura.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/efooter.html

All of the above pages follow the same basic format. They’re branded to look like part of Overstock.com and filled with anchor text links that guide users back to the Overstock site. The pages themselves, though, are hosted on sites that are unrelated to Overstock or its products, including the websites of a writer, a musical composer, and an Australian photography and printing service.

The pages listed above are not the only suspicious-looking ones. Many of Overstock.com’s top-ranking pages have similar backlink profiles. You can check them out yourself using keywords like “Egyptian cotton sheets”, “sateen sheets”, “bedspreads”, “kids’ bedding”, and “bathrobes.” You’ll find many more.

Based on my years of industry experience, this type of activity seems to be as “black hat” as it gets. I can imagine two scenarios that might explain these links:

1. These are paid links, and the sites’ webmasters allowed Overstock.com to post the pages.
2. The sites were hacked, and the pages were placed on the sites without the webmasters’ knowledge.

Either way, the Overstock pages on these sites appear very suspicious. Overstock.com, whether intentionally or not, is clearly violating Google’s webmaster guidelines again. Based on these guidelines, I am curious to see how long it will take Google to serve up another penalty.

Overstock.com may or may not be aware of these pages. The world of Internet Marketing is full of miscommunications, implementation errors, and newly developed techniques that might be considered “grey hat”. We don’t want to accuse Overstock of trying to manipulate search engines again, but only bring attention to these questionable SEM tactics.

What’s your take on this issue? I’d like to hear your viewpoint. Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

Transcript

Eric: Hi, it’s Eric from Globe Runner SEO, and tonight we’re at DFW SEM. We love coming to these events because of the great speakers that they bring, and to tonight I’m talking with Brian Massey, the conversion scientist, one of the smartest guys I know. Brian and I have actually known each other for about a year now. I originally saw you at PubCon. We scheduled a phone call. You helped me out with one of my websites, and you gave me a lot of great insight. I thought I’ve got to pull Brian aside, take a few minutes to talk to you.

One of the things that I know you’re really great at is email marketing. We have several clients right now doing email marketing campaigns, and I wanted to get your advice on that.

Brian: OK.

Eric: I wanted also to kind of let everybody out there know that we love to use you for conversion optimization on either email or website optimization campaigns. If you guys are already a client of ours, call me, talk to me about working with Brian because if you want to convert your website better, this is the guy to talk to.

Brian, let’s focus a little bit on email marketing. I know you like to do it. I subscribe to your email list. I get it all the time. It’s got great content in it. How do you make that work? What’s the secret sauce to emails?

Brian, I’ll tell you the problem with email is there’s a recipe that the Wizard Academy which is an interesting and enigmatic business communication school talks about, Roy Williams says that salience equals frequency times relevance. Salience is that magic moment when somebody gets what you’re saying. They move your brand into their chemical memory as opposed to digital electrical memory.

Eric: OK.

Brian: Salience is important. It’s what builds brands, relevance and frequency. These are the challenges in email, relevance and frequency. To be relevant, I have to understand something about my folks, my higher subject matter experts who write that content.

Eric: Right, right.

Brian: What we end up doing is getting into this monthly newsletter that has three fully written articles, and that doesn’t give us the frequency that we need. I think blogs are where it is, and this has really worked for me. Every time I have an article some place else, I do a little blog post about it, and my blog drives my email marketing.

Eric: You mean, you write an article somewhere else, or you read an article somewhere else?

Brian: I’ll write an article on Search Engine Land or Clicksy. Rather than link to that, I will write a blog post summarizing one of the things or excerpting. I’m using my blog as the content source, and then I have what is called a RSS to email service. Mail Chimp, AWeber offer these things.

Eric: Yeah, we like Mail Chimp actually ourselves.

Brian: Once a week, weekly I would consider the minimum for effective email.

Eric: OK.

Brian: Once a week, Mail Chimp goes and looks at my RSS feed. If there’s new blog posts, it puts them into a template and sends it to my list. It manages my opt-outs and everything for me, and it’s hands off. I write the blog. I go about my business, and Mail Chimp takes care of that once a week. I’ve got relevance because I’m dealing with articles that I have written specifically for my audience. I’ve got frequency in getting something out once a week.

Eric: Right.

Brian: That’s creating that salience where people get what I’m about, a thought leader in my space.

Eric: And they think, conversions, Brian.

Brian: That’s exactly right, and it works very well for me. Don’t get wrapped around the axle on doing your monthly newsletter. Do your weekly blog post and summary.

Eric: Do you like doing it once a week where it aggregates your one to three posts, or however many you needed, or the other option at Mail Chimp is, I know, that you can have them do it every night. Every time that you do a post, it’ll pop. What do you think of that? Is that too much?

Brian: The rule of email is this. You send as often as your content allows. As an extreme example American Airlines sent me five emails within the space of an hour.

Eric: But you were going to miss your flight if you didn’t get it.

Brian: They were giving me flight updates, so I wanted that. That’s high relevance.

Eric: Right.

Brian: If you can’t write, I know some entrepreneurs who can write a daily email. They’re short. They’re punchy, but they’re interesting, and they keep people on their list, writing daily.

Eric: I wish I could do that.

Brian: Every one of them has an offer in it. It works for folks like that. You decide.

Eric: OK.

Brian: A blog is usually a wide range of topics, so I think once a week or twice a week is probably sufficient. If you try to do that daily, it’s probably a little more hit, miss and less relevant. A daily thing might be a little stretching it, but I did a test last summer which I had four, eight days sent an email every day.

And so, I got to study what we call list shake. People who don’t want that are getting off, but they’re probably not buyers anyway.

Eric: Right. Maybe, that was OK. Let’s talk about a couple of the high sticky points in emails that I think about a lot is the headline in the email, and then also the call to action email. Do I need to have a call to action in my email, and then, if so, do I need it at the top?

Do I need it at the bottom? How strong does it need to be? Should it be like my landing page, like a PPC landing page where I have a really clear button that says Do This Now? Or do you suggest, like your emails, in fact, are probably a little softer where they’re a little more on content, and I’m not driving you to buy something right now. In email, it depends on what you’re selling.

Brian: Email is a promotional… We’re marketers. It is a promotional medium. We do want to promote.

Eric: Right.

Brian: I recommend the best place to put offers is in the copy. You write your email or you write your blog post such that it ends up going in with this offer, that offer you can have what we talked about.

Eric: Right.

Brian: That’s the most important place. If you put it in the copy, you’re going to have higher click-throughs.

Eric: OK.

Brian: There’s a little blindness. I use a two column thing. There’s an offer blindness on the right column, if you see a two column newsletter, but I’ve had good luck with them. I suspect that I could have better luck in stream ads.

Eric: Right.

Brian: In a one column format which is what I’m seeing more of from the informational newsletters, but yet, you need to be promoting. You need to be letting them know you have products to offer, and I don’t have a lot of products to offer because I sell mostly services is why I don’t push it a lot.

Eric: Yeah. Well, we’re in that same business, but most of my clients have something to sell so it’s good to know both. Well, good. Thank you, Brian. That is always informative. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us a little bit.

Brian: I appreciate the opportunity.

Eric: I want to repeat here at the end. If you guys want to improve the effectiveness of your site and we’re building traffic to the website and you’re one of our clients, call me. Let’s talk a little more. I’d like to get Brian involved in your campaign and really improve the conversion rate that you’re seeing on your site or in your email campaign. If we’re going to work with anybody, it’s going to be Brian on conversion optimization. I really appreciate your time, Brian.

Brian: Thanks for having me.

Eric: Thanks.

Transcription
Eric: Hi. I’m here at Globe Runner SEO and I want to talk about some big news in the world of search today. We’ve got new TLDs. So new domain level extensions, so instead of just .com, .net, .org and the other 26 extensions that are out there right now, the organization that controls the domain names has announced that next year they’re going to allow companies to start buying and producing their own domain name extensions.
So a brand could have their own domain name extension. You could have google.google if you really wanted to.
But here at Globe Runner we thought what is the real business potential behind this? Who would actually do this and why? Now first off, it’s not cheap. It costs $180,000 to register your new TLD. In addition to that you’ve got to have a support team in place. There’s legal work that needs to be done.
I’m actually estimating that it will probably end up costing closer to a million dollars a year for all the overhead that goes into this. It will probably be about a million bucks a year to get this thing rolling.
So if I’m right and it costs about a million dollars a year, who would want to spend that kind of money on a domain extension. Here are some ideas. Here’s some really good business opportunities out there that I think should be explored.
First off, companies like GoDaddy and other large hosting and domain selling companies would want to get into this business. Essentially they’re buying a vertical. If they could buy .shop, for instance, or .web or something that isn’t out there right now that gives them a new extension. This would just be like GoDaddy running that commercial on the Super Bowl this last year for .co.
.co was a way that they could sell lots of new domain names under a new extension. It gave them a whole new vertical. Millions and millions of people registered domains.
So even if it cost you a million dollars a year, if I can sell these for $20 a year or $10 a year and I sell a million of them that’s a $10 million sale, pretty easy ROI case to make there.
Other companies that might use it are large companies that have a large number of websites they want to tie together through an extension. A way that I see this going is like Warner Brothers. Maybe a movie company might want to buy .mov, .movie so that they could tie their network of websites together through this extension and they’re a large enough operation, a large enough organization that it makes sense for them.
Another good example would be sports leagues. So I definitely could see the NFL would want .nfl. You’d have cowboys.nfl and all the other NFL teams would have a .nfl official website. And they could control that and guarantee that when a viewer goes to their website they’re looking at the official website for that particular team. So I see those as two particular ways that this can be used for a business advantage for a company.
The other one that we see potential for is any kind of website that has a large number of sub domains. So a good example is WordPress. If you set up a WordPress website you can set them up two ways. Obviously you can do a self hosted WordPress, but a lot of people just go to wordpress.com, create an account, instantly have a website up, and it’s yourwebsite.wordpress.com.
Well now you’ve got a sub domain. Well I think WordPress might register something like .wp and then you would have yourwebsite.wp instead of yourwebsite.wordpress.com. So there’s those types of opportunities too. I could definitely see somebody like Google trying to make their blog platform more effective and get .blog for instance, instead of .blogger.com.
So there’s a lot of opportunities here for business to really expand the marketplace. I think it’s a good shift. It certainly will reshuffle search some. We’ll see, over the coming few years, how this affects search going forward. If these get preferential treatment or if they’re a little harder to rank. I think there’s arguments to be made for both.
Certainly your TLD having an effect on search today. A .edu will rank differently than a .org or a .com or a .biz. Those differences are less and less important, I think, than they used to be. During the original rollouts of the web we saw that .coms got preferential treatment.
Today I think that if you have a really good .net and it’s got good information it can rank just as well as a .com. So we’ll be interested to see how that rolls out and how those changes make.
But if you’re in the business of buying TLDs, you’re in business now.

Transcription
Eric McGehearty: Hi, it’s Eric with Globe Runner SEO, and I’m here today, I’m excited. I’ve got Chris Smith; he’s the director of KeyRelevance, which is a great SEO company here in Dallas, just like Globe Runner. And I’ve actually heard Chris speak before and I was pretty impressed with his knowledge of local search. You were citing patents, bringing out all the facts and really referencing everything you had to say.
So, I thought this was a good opportunity, I cornered Chris. And, Chris, can you give us some insight in what you see going forward in local search? What’s big right now that, as a small business that’s trying to get a presence or even a large company that needs to worry about local, what’s the big things we need to be thinking about? And then what’s coming out next? What do we need to be watching out for?
Chris Smith: Sure, thanks, Eric. Yeah, Google’s changing local almost daily. They’re deploying lots of different little iterations to their interface and how listings and businesses can show up on Google and under place search as well as in Google Maps, and on mobile. And all of those little iterations in how businesses are displayed and presented are areas of interest for businesses, because it impacts how they’re interpreted by consumers, how they’re selected.
And we have only limited ability to be able to affect some of that, how that’s displayed. The areas where you are able to make changes, primarily in Google places, you’re able to associate images with your listings, such as logos or photos of your product, services, and your business place. You’re able to add in descriptive terms, description of the business. Make sure that your address is correct. And some other criteria, like products, services, add in particular lists, make sure you’re categorized correctly.
Those are fairly straightforward things. Behind the scenes, though, there’s stuff that you can do, also, to insure that your business appears to begin with. And that’s kind of the big thing for most businesses.
Eric: But just trying to put this on the front page for them, it’s their major selling points.
Chris: Exactly. And so, there are lots of people that are very focused on that. It kind of boils down to making sure that you have a lot of links or what we call citations, which are mentions of your business or mentions of your location. So, a mention of your business name plus your address, or business name plus phone number.
And then the classic search optimization criteria, how many links do you have pointing to you and what sources they’re coming from. All of those things are things that businesses have to be paying attention to in order to rank well in local.
Eric: Well, that’s a good question that I think is always something that we’re interested in, and I’d like to talk a little bit more. How does your backlink profile to your website affect your local listing? Or does it?
Chris: It does affect it, and in fact I believe it’s become more influential with the changes that they’ve made over the last year or two put forward place search, which kind of changed how local was presented to the regular web search.
Eric: So, it’s almost co-mingled.
Chris: Exactly.
Eric: It looks like a regular web, yeah, it looks like a regular web result, but it’s got some local information, it’s got the star review, there’s a little more space between listings.
Chris: Right.
Eric: Yeah, so, yeah, that made me feel like I was probably going to be looking at a backlink profile.
Chris: Yes.
Eric: But I’m tied to the local page.
Chris: Well, we know that it became… Links, backlinks became more influential as a side-effect from that change, because when they merged business listings, which were all part of just a little inserted map listing, you know, widget, essentially.
Eric: Like a 10-Pack or whatever.
Chris: They integrated those business listings with actual web listings. And before the change, if you had a business that didn’t have a website, it still could rank within what we call the 7-Pack or 10-Pack. After the change, those businesses that don’t have websites aren’t showing up. And so we know that they had to integrate regular web search results with those business listings in order to make them appear within the regular search results.
And so, like you said, they’re co-mingled and I believe that after the change, links and backlinks became more influential than they already were. Now, as part of the total ranking algorithm, the usual traditional SEO criteria, how many links you have pointing to your website, in addition to key-order relevancy stuff, you know. The link text pointing to your site in those links, the titles that you use on the web pages, the text content, images, all of that goes together and it’s part of the ranking criteria.
A really great resource to look at is David Mihm’s “Local Search Ranking Factors” survey, which has a number of us from the industry that have been watching how rankings work within local. We all contributed to it, and voted for what criteria we thought ranked higher. And it’s kind of amazing how similar our perspectives are just from, you know, all over the country, in all different industries that we’re doing optimization for.
Eric: I’ve got one last question. I know we’ve gone long, I try to keep these really short, but Chris is such an intelligent, knowledgeable guy, I’m going to go long.
So, my last question for you is, in Webmaster Tools I can go in and I can actually say, “Hey, this website is intended for a local audience.” I can pare it down to the United States; I can pare it down to Dallas/Fort Worth. And I can tell Google Webmaster Tools that my website itself is intended for a specific geography.
Does that play a…? How much of a role do you think that plays in local search? Do you recommend that as a strategy? What are your thoughts there?
Chris: I don’t think that that’s all that critical for local websites.
Eric: OK.
Chris: I think, eventually, it becomes [unintelligible 06:36] based on the business’s address and the type of industry it is. So, I wouldn’t set that. I know, in a lot of cases where people were very concerned about which country their website is associated with or whether it’s considered national or international, people would make their settings. I think it makes more sense if you’re here to do some very country-oriented content, or if your content is illegal in other localities and stuff.
You know, gambling comes to mind; they try to limit it from showing up in their different, in some other…
Eric: If you’re a multinational and you have different websites for different countries, you might want to leave those.
Chris: Right. Like, that could help to specify to Google which ones you should show for, particularly if you’re a dot com trying to show up in a foreign country, you don’t have that top-level domain name that’s going to be an incubator for… that you’re specific to that particular country.
Eric: That’s a way to go in and just kind of say, “We really are here for a reason.”
Chris: And I think if you’re a dot com trying to… a dot com, but you’re a company located in Canada, it could be useful in that case. But for most cases, I don’t think it’s necessary [unintelligible 07:51] to set that.
Eric: Good. Well, thanks, Chris, this was great information, I really appreciate your time.
Chris: Sure, yeah.
Eric: And again thanks for taking a minute and letting me hijack you.
This was Eric with Globe Runner SEO. Once again, a great interview, Chris was really knowledgeable, and take what he had to say for it with a lot of seriousness, because this guy really knows local search and he’s impressed me and that’s sometimes hard to do.
Chris: Thanks very much.

This extended markup allows webmasters to add additional markup to their site to help search engines better understand their content.

The elements of your site that you can use the schema.org markup on are:

• Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries …
• Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
• Event
• Organization
• Person
• Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant …
• Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
• Review, AggregateRating

Google has a rich snippets testing tool that will validate the code on your site.

We here at Globe Runner SEO anticipate that sites which utilize the schema.org markup will see increased traffic as the search engines more accurately place pages in search results. Search engines will give natural preferences to pages that give a clear window into their content.

Transcription
Eric McGehearty: Hi, it’s Eric with Globe Runner SEO, and I want to talk about something new, it’s Schema.org. Today Google Bing announced jointly that they were going to use Schema.org. Schema.org is basically very similar to what I’ve talked about before, which is microformats.
It’s a language system, it’s an add on system to an HTML markup that you would have on your page and your website page that Google, Bing, Yahoo have all agreed to use. It’s going to continue to grow, it’s going to be a library of markups that we can add to a webpage. The whole idea is to make search engines smarter so they can better engage with your content.
Honestly, it’s really not that complicated. There are extra codes, extra tags that I can put next to specific types of elements that allows a search engine a greater depth of understanding. So for instance, the example that they give on Schema.org is “Avatar”. If I put in my website a headline that said “Avatar”, how does the search engine know that I want to talk about the movie “Avatar” or if I’m talking about an avatar for representing a person’s face, right? How do they know?
Well, I could put in, from Schema.org, these additional microformats that would then tell the search engine, “This page is about the movie ‘Avatar’.” I want to also put in some extra text in there and I could in a person’s name and I could specifically label that name using the microformats and say, “And the director is,” right? So I’m able to actually tell the search engine all the nitty gritty details about the pieces of content on my page.
Here’s what’s neat microformats have been used been used for a little while, but the initial push of microformats was, for instance, reviews were a big push on microformats so that the search engine could put star ratings next to search results. That’s certainly still part of it, but now there’s an emphasis on people, places and things as well. Events are still part of it, that was part of the initial microformats rollout.
Today, if you have a company page and you have your employee page, you can add microformats in there to say, “This is a person. Here’s their email address, here’s their contact information,” things like that. If you’re a small business, a local business, or if you have locations of any kind, this is a really great opportunity to tag your location. You can tag your phone number, you tag your address, tag your business name, and you can really optimize that content so that the search engine really understands that you’re referring to yourself.
Also, let’s say that you had your address and then an alternative location on that same page. Well, you want to make sure that you tag your address properly so in local search results you come up, but that other addresses on the page are tagged differently to represent that those are representing other places on web, other things that you’re listing on your page. So there’s a lot of ways you might think about using it.
There was one that I found particularly interesting as an SEO person. There’s actually a way, using these microformats, to indicate a link without having a clickable link on your page. So, for instance, if I was referencing something, and I wanted to reference the Wikipedia article so Google knew that I was talking about this specific thing that Wikipedia is talking, I could do that without linking to Wikipedia.
I don’t actually affect the user experience, the user doesn’t even see a link, there’s no clickable text on my page, but Google sees that there’s a link out to Wikipedia. That would almost certainly affect search results in the same way that links now affect search results as a vote or passing credibility.
So Schema.org, visit it. If you’re a web developer and you’re interested in SEO, it’s a must have. You must learn this stuff if you want to stay on the cutting edge. Here at Globe Runner, of course, we’re staying on the cutting edge for our clients, and we’re excited to start integrating this in. It was announced this morning and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Connect with: Ryan on LinkedIn or Eric on LinkedIn

Transcription
Eric: Hi, it’s Eric with Goldrunner SCO and I’m talking to Ryan here with The BOSS Group. We were just chatting a little bit about using social media for recruiting. The BOSS Group is a recruiting agency and, Ryan, what insights do you have? What kind of social media tools you like? What platforms do you like?

Ryan: We’ve mainly used two different things. LinkedIn is, obviously, the best resource for us for a couple of different reasons. It gives us breadth of how many people we can go and extend our network to. So, not only who am I linked in to, but who those contacts are linked in to.

You can also read the recommendations that people have and, being inside of groups, we’re able to go and post questions and instantly have answers to who is the best iPhone developer in all of Dallas. Instantly, there’s people saying “This is who it is” and it gives us a good starting spot to go and find candidates on who to call.

The second thing would be, in Twitter we’re able to go and, not only see and find out about candidates, but, from a client perspective, we’re able to see who’s looking. Just last Friday, we had a client that didn’t even think about reaching out to us that said “We need a developer for 48 hours over the weekend.” It was at 4:30 on Friday and we had someone to him by five o’clock.

If it wasn’t for Twitter, then we would’ve never known about the opportunity. So, both from a candidate perspective and a client perspective, we’re able to go and access information through listening, kind of what we’re talking about today, and going and just actively posting content and trying to get feedback.

Eric: On LinkedIn, do you find that you can do most of what you need with the free version of LinkedIn or do you really rely on the paid recruiting tools on LinkedIn?

Ryan: Well, I don’t rely on a super heavy recruiting tool. We do have a beefed-up account, mainly for two things. One, it allows me to go in and send a lot more in mails. The people that don’t want to be contacted, then it allows me to access people. As long as my feedback is good, which it traditionally always is because I’m looking for jobs for people, and I’m constantly using the in mail feature.

The second thing is it allows me to categorize where people fall in place. I can instantly go and say “Hey, here’s an SCO person” so I’ve got 50 people that I know that I can rely on.

Then I say “Oh, I know Eric. I can go pick up the phone because I know he’s an SCO go-to type guy.”

So it allows me to categorize where all the people, because I started gathering some so many contacts.

Eric: You can organize through the thousands of people that go.

Ryan: Yeah. That’s the biggest thing with the beefed-up version of LinkedIn. It allows me to organize as opposed to just doing keyword, like SCO, than I may have 1000 people in my contacts show up. I want to know who are the 50 that I actually want to pick up the phone and talk to or send an email to.

Eric: Those are fantastic tips. Thank you so much, Ryan. Those were great tips. I appreciate you taking a moment to talk to us. Check out The BOSS Group’s website. If you’re looking for a job or if you need to hire somebody, these guys can help you out.

CEO Eric Mcgehearty interviews Jerod Morris from Midwest Sports Fans, who explains how stumble upon can be an asset to drive visitors to your site.

Transcription

Jerod Morris: The question you’re asked in accounting or in law, what are you going to write about? There’s something that everybody can write about. You can get real simple and just do a links post, or you can really get creative with how you provide value.

At the end of the day, that’s key. What’s going to provide value to the people who are coming to my website and to the people that I want to attract to my website. Sometimes it’s about thinking forward strategically, down the line. These are the kind of people I want to come to my website, or this is the person that I want to influence. How do I create content that’s going to get in front of that person?

I just, sometimes, have to… You do it once and it kind of misses. No one comes and no one retweets it. But if you keep doing that, you get better at creating content and you get a little bit better at figuring out what is going to have that impact with people. That’s really going to impact so many different things that you want to write.

Eric: Some of the techniques that you talked about… And let me introduce you real quick. Everybody, I want to introduce you guys. This is Jerod with MidwestSportsFans.com, one of the most popular sports blogs on the web. A great guy. A lot of insights on how social media and content strategies can build traffic. One of the things you mentioned was StumbleUpon.

Jerod: Yes.

Eric: StumbleUpon, a neat little social network. I think a lot of us use it a little bit, but you talked about really making it into more than just a little bit of usage. How do you make that drive traffic for the website?

Jerod: Number one, I’ve spent time on it. I think that’s… The key with any social network like that is you have to spend time. I think sometimes people think, “I’m going to open up a Twitter account and start tweeting stuff, and it’s just going to blow up.” It doesn’t work like that.

Or, “I’m just going to get an account at StumbleUpon. I’ll start driving thousands of visitors.” It just doesn’t really work like that. You have to… On any social network, you have to put time in to curating your network, building a network of people that know you, that you know them, so that when you put something out there they’re going to be interested in it.

Because at the end of the day, everything is about sharing. I can put something out on StumbleUpon, and if it stinks, it’s not going to go anywhere. You can’t… What I love about StumbleUpon is you can’t really game it. There’s sites that people talk about gaming them, and you can’t really do that. There’s specific kinds of content that will work well, and you have to tailor that content to it.

At the end of the day, it comes back to the network. If you spent time there, and built a network of people that are going to receive the thing that you share and then be willing to share it out, that’s where things can really blossom.

Jerod: Is there any way on StumbleUpon to engage with people outside of sharing your link? Is there any conversations that happen outside of sharing your content with them?

Eric: You can email people. I typically… If I find someone that I like on there, that I like their content, I’ll just email them and say, “Hey, I’m following you. I like your content. Keep it up.” I do that just as an introduction and because it’s going to give them more of an impetus to come check out my profile and see what like. And if they like me, now we can do some two way sharing.

That’s the other place where conversations happen is when you share. So if I share something, or I see something that you share and I can comment on it if it’s interesting. So I look at it. Thumb it up. Thumb it down. If it’s interesting, I can comment on it. Sometimes you can get a little conversation going that way, too.

Eric: OK, great. Jared, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. You guys check out his website. This is Eric again, with Globe Runner NCO. We’re always excited to meet really great people here today at DFWSEM. We look forward to talking to you again next time.