Latest Posts (139/167)

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week, we look at a new feature by Instagram that models itself on Facebook; moves by Google to tackle ‘non-authoritative’ sites which rank too highly; and an upcoming change which will make AMP content easier to link to.

Retailers struggle with the post-Black Friday lull

Just two weeks ago in our Friday search news round-up, we established that record-breaking levels of sales and spending mean Black Friday won’t be going anywhere for a while. But now, new figures from the NPD Group have cast doubt over whether retailers will make this holiday shopping season a success after all.

Al Roberts reported for Search Engine Watch this week on how heftier discounts and more abundant week-long deals than in previous years mean deeper holes for retailers to climb out of in order to match last year’s sales numbers.

The record-breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales figures are evidence of the fact that more and more of consumer purchasing activity is taking place through digital channels. But it’s important to remember that despite the growing importance of their websites and mobile apps, many retailers still operate as multi-channel businesses, so the online sales figures only tell part of the holiday shopping story.

The question remains whether retailers can regain lost ground during what’s left of 2016, or whether discounts have been too heavy for them to make up the shortfall.

Instagram introduces saved posts

It seems that Instagram is introducing new features almost every week in a bid to keep up with other popular platforms. This week, we see Instagram taking a leaf out of Facebook’s book by introducing saved posts.

It’s easy to lose a post you like in a crowded Instagram feed, but now Instagram has developed a feature that allows you to quickly and easily collect your favourite posts together all in one place, by tapping the bookmark icon beneath the post.

Tereza Litsa looked into the feature over on our sister site, ClickZ, and analysed what the change could mean for brands vying for the audience’s attention on Instagram.

Google makes a move to tackle ‘non-authoritative’ information with Holocaust denial site

Amid an ongoing storm of fake news controversy and a debate about how far sites like Google and Facebook are responsible for the information we encounter online, Google recently came under fire for ranking a Stormfront Holocaust denial article as the top result for the search, “Did the Holocaust happen?” Carol Cadwalladr, writing for the Guardian, observed that “according to Google, it’s the most authoritative source on the internet on the “question” of whether or not the Holocaust actually happened.”

This week, Danny Sullivan reported for Search Engine Land that Google has made changes to its algorithm in a bid to tackle ‘non-authoritative’ information ranking too highly in its search results, bumping the Stormfront article down into second place. Danny Sullivan wrote an in-depth exploration of the change, and considered how Google can develop policies to cope with the growing proportion of “post-truth” content on the internet.

Google plans to makes it easier to share AMP content with URL change

In last week’s search news round-up, we reported on Accelerated Mobile Pages results showing up in Google Image Search, expanding the AMP experience beyond the Top Stories carousel and core mobile search results. Now, Search Engine Land has word of another upcoming change to AMP that will make it easier to share them.

One of the key features of AMP, and a big advantage for Google, is that users browsing Accelerated Mobile Pages stay within Google. While they are viewing content created by a separate publisher, the URL for that page reflects that they are still on Google. However, this fact makes it more difficult for users to share links to AMP content, as they may find the Google URL confusing; and has led to concerns by publishers that Google is making it harder to share and bookmark their content.

But this could change in early 2017. Google has told Search Engine Land that the header which appears above AMP content will soon allow people to more easily select and copy the URL of a publisher’s story.

Image: Search Engine Land

The header may also include options to share the article on social media. Given that Accelerated Mobile Pages were designed to speed up the web, this change would make it quicker and more convenient to share AMP content, and could lead to a wider embrace of AMP by publishers and webmasters in the process.

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It can be hard to stay focused in a busy office. There’s always something going on–meetings, conversations, or donuts to eat in the kitchen. Not to mention your coworkers coming up to you to ask about your job. The nerve people have! Fortunately, you don’t actually have to be available to your coworkers all the time. There are proven ways to keep yourself on task while keeping others away from you at the same time.

You’re not wrong if you think you might be spending a bit too much time on non work related tasks. A study found 89% of employees admit to wasting time at work, and of those, 2% waste 5 hours a day. There’s a chance there’s a guy hanging around your office getting paid to pretend to work.

Before we discuss how to keep yourself on task, you might be wondering what people are doing all day if they aren’t working. The study also uncovered that:

A married employee was looking at a dating web site and then denied it while it was still up on his computer screen
An employee was caring for her pet bird that she smuggled into work
An employee was shaving her legs in the women’s restroom
An employee was laying under boxes to scare people
Employees were having a wrestling match
A sleeping employee claimed he was praying
An employee was changing clothes in a cubicle
An employee was printing off a book from the Internet
An employee was warming her bare feet under the bathroom hand dryer

So, in an effort to protect you from yourself and those around you, here are some ways to stay focused.

1) Put On Headphones

Headphones tell the world, I am too busy for other people’s noise. Become visibly annoyed if anyone requests you remove them. Bonus points if you play them loudly enough that it sounds like your own personal desk concert.

2) Grow Plants

Try creating a forest around you made of various plants, or perhaps grow a hedge. You won’t be able to look out, and no one will be able to look in. Is she or he in the office today? Everyone will wonder, no one will know.

3) Practice Quiet Hours

If you can’t beat ‘em, set strict rules they must follow. Enforce quiet time for a few hours a day to give everyone the chance to listen to Jerry’s heavy breathing. No chips or crunchy snacks allowed. Be very fanatical about it so people know you’re serious.

4) Change Your Environment

Outside influences like air temperature, air quality, smells and colors can affect your focus. Take it upon yourself to make office updates. Purchase air filters, light Pine scented candles (the scent is proven to increase alertness!), and paint the walls around you a productive shade of blue.

In an effort to not cut into your work time, make your renovations at night when everyone else has gone home for the day. What a surprise when they show up in the morning! Don’t worry, your company will surely foot the bill.

5) Use Privacy Accessories

Pick up a computer privacy hoodie. This guarantees no will try to talk to you – not now, not ever!

6) Write a To-Do List

And then throw it out the window! Clients and coworkers will ask you to complete other high priority tasks that they need RIGHT THIS MINUTE PLEASE. This is okay. The point is, for a few moments while writing out your list you will feel in charge of your life.

7) Keep Your Desk Organized

Keep your desk clean and your mind uncluttered. Take a few minutes at the end of each day to clean your desk just so and to put things back where they belong. Inspect each item’s placement carefully. If they are moved the next morning, you know Susan has been messing with your things and she had better stop calling you paranoid.

8) Drink Coffee

Drinking coffee helps you concentrate and keeps you alert. Just be sure not to drink it within the first two hours of waking up, as this is when your body’s natural adrenaline keeps you awake and coffee can interrupt this cycle. Also avoid drinking it before any big meetings or on an empty stomach – you don’t want to be running to the bathroom all meeting, or coming across as a jittery or anxious. Never drink coffee after 1pm, it can keep you from falling asleep at night and cause a vicious cycle of becoming exponentially more tired with every day that passes!

If you really are looking for some ways to stay productive, Hubspot Partner Big Sea put together the tips their team of designers, developers, and marketers uses to get stuff done.

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Google has created two versions of the doodle – one for the Northern Hemisphere and one for the Southern Hemisphere.

The post ‘Tis the season! Google spreads cheer with its Holiday 2016 Day 1 doodle appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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As an agency leader, do you have a plan for what you’d do if 30-50% of your employees quit?

You might be at risk right now, according to the latest Campaign US survey on agency employee morale.

To summarize from this recent HubSpot article on the growing agency morale problem:

Nearly half of all agency employees report having “low” or “dangerously low” morale in 2016 — up from one-third in 2015.
Roughly 30% of agency employees are actively looking for new jobs. (I venture that even more would leave if approached with a strong opportunity.)
The top three causes of low morale were company leadership (73%), lack of advancement (45%), and dissatisfaction with work (38%).

Now that we know there’s a problem, how do we solve it?

The good news is that the top causes of low morale are primarily within your control — so you can fix them at your agency.

How to Fix Your Agency’s Low Morale Problem
1) Assess your own management and leadership skills.

As Manager Tools notes: “The definition of an Effective Manager is to achieve results while retaining your team members.”

Be honest with yourself — are you getting results and retaining your team? If you’re seeing only one of those (or neither), you probably have gaps as a leader and manager.

According to Glassdoor, a former agency owner spent most of his time at the race track instead of leading his agency. That’s not a good message for employee morale.

You may need to get perspective from someone outside your agency — we often lack perspective on ourselves. You can reach out to a business partner, your romantic partner, a business coach, or a “frenemy” at another agency. But you have to make it safe for them to share honest feedback, or else you’re defeating the purpose.

Be aware that their perspective may hurt at first. In my first 360 review as a manager, current and past colleagues said I was good at getting things done… but not at making it fun for everyone else. That wasn’t fun to hear, but taking it to heart meant I could start improving.

2) Hire people to fill in your gaps as a leader.

Improving your weaknesses only goes so far. I believe managers should focus on maximizing their strengths, and then recruit others to balance out their weaknesses.

If you’re great at sales and big-picture thinking, but you struggle with operations, you’ll probably never become great at operations. And you’re also unlikely to enjoy operations anyway. Instead, hire a great operations person — someone who excels at the things you don’t enjoy.

If you’re great at operations but struggle at people-related nuances, get help. At the very least, seek out insights from someone with better people skills before you roll-out an agency-wide initiative that might make people unhappy.

Reflect for a moment: What are your gaps as an agency leader? How might you ask current and future team members to help you fill those gaps?

3) Help your middle managers upgrade their management skills.

When I speak with front-line employees at agencies, I see a pattern of problems around middle management. Often, the executive leadership team is good at managing people — but the middle managers aren’t always as competent.

Part of the issue is usually the agency’s fault. If you promote people who aren’t ready to manage others, it’s not surprising that your new managers will struggle. Give your middle managers the tools they need to succeed, and be ready to coach them on coaching their employees.

Don’t assume they know what you’ve learned over the years. I share 31 tips for managers in my book Made to Lead, but knowing is only the beginning — people still need to practice management every day.

Find ways to observe your middle managers as they manage. Management is a “learn by doing” profession. You want to provide spot feedback (privately) to help people improve while situations are fresh.

4) Show employees how they fit into your agency’s future.

When I do anonymous Employee Culture Surveys at agencies, I often get feedback that employees feel confident about their agency’s future… but they’re unclear how they fit into that future.

Alleviating employee stress around the future depends on your agency’s headcount and your growth plans. When an agency has 10 people, there’s not much room for promotions — everyone’s doing a bit of everything, and it doesn’t make sense to have a large layer of middle managers. In contrast, a 50-person agency typically has plenty of room for employee advancement.

If you’re currently small and likely will be for the immediate future, be honest about your plans. Some people will choose to leave, but you can turn it into a controlled departure instead of a sudden departure.

If you’re growing, map out the future org chart and team structure. Identify where you’re going, and what the transition roles might look like. Then, speak with employees about the agency’s future, along with each person’s individual professional goals.

5) Commit to improving work/life balance.

Work/life balance was the key factor among high-morale employees in the Campaign US survey. Improving work/life balance won’t fix morale if you’re also a terrible manager, but it’s the next place to look once you’ve started to improve yourself.

How many hours are your employees working? According to my research on agency workloads via Inbound.org, most agency people are working less than 50 hours a week. A significant minority (23%) are working more than 60 hours a week, but that’s not the norm.

Apart from occasional spikes, long workweeks may be a sign that you’re understaffed, that people aren’t billing enough, or that you’re doing a bad job at project management.

Work/life balance is about flexibility, too. Are you focused on results… or expecting butts-in-seats facetime? The workweek can feel longer when employees feel unnecessarily chained to their desk.

6) Send (and act on) employee satisfaction surveys.

If you don’t know how your team is doing, it’s harder to improve. Keep in mind that perception is reality — employee morale is about what employees think and feel, not what you think and feel as an agency leader.

Because I want my team to be happy, I regularly check-in to ask how things are going by sending a “satisfaction check-in.” I ask team members the following five questions to find out how happy they are with their work, and what I can do better as a leader.

What’s working?
What’s not working?
What should I do differently?
Do you see any opportunities or gaps in the business that I am (or might be) missing?
Anything else you’d like to share?

Based on their answers, I can improve my leadership and management, as well as improve the business overall.

You can conduct simple employee surveys yourself, or you can use an employee engagement tool.

7) Invest in professional development.

Spending cash and time on professional development pays off in two ways. First, it helps employees improve their skills — which means they’re better at helping your agency’s clients. Second, it shows employees you’re investing in their future — whether they stay or go.

The right budget and time allocation will depend on your agency’s lifecycle. But regardless of the amount, I typically see a strong payoff for agencies.

Don’t forget to include management and leadership coaching. Once you equip your team with more skills and experience, it also makes it easier to promote from within — which helps solve the “lack of advancement” morale problem.

8) Conduct (and act on) exit interviews.

Your best efforts won’t keep everyone — and that’s okay. It’s normal to have at least some employee turnover. (You might expect 10-25% annual employee turnover, depending on the size of your agency.)

When someone says they’re leaving, don’t try to convince them to stay — they’ve already made up their mind. But you can use their experience to prevent other good team members from leaving.

Use exit interviews to find what you’re doing wrong, and fix whatever the problem is as well as you can.

It’s important that you act on what you learn. If you tend to take things personally, you should delegate the exit interview process to another member of your leadership team.

Applying These Tactics at Your Agency

If you’ve observed an employee morale problem — or suspect one is festering — you can solve it.

To do this, you need to identify the underlying cause(s) and then take action. The solutions are often free or inexpensive, but they require you to commit to improving as a leader and a manager.

Don’t underestimate the time it will take to fix things — some changes can happen immediately, but others can take months of consistent action, especially when it involves regaining employees’ trust.

Leadership development can feel painful at first, but it pays off with better employee retention and results. Ultimately, you’ll enjoy work more — and you can see a higher payday if you ultimately choose to sell your agency.

What will you change first at your agency to boost employee morale? Let us know in the comments.

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This short overview is introduction to popular PHP frameworks for beginners who struggle to decide from which one to start and how do they perform against each other. By reading this article you will have an initial understanding about PHP frameworks.

The post A Guide to Popular PHP Frameworks for Beginners by @vahandev appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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With the recent release of Google Home in the U.S., voice-activated devices are a big topic du jour lately. But which personal assistant tools are the most helpful? What do you need for each one? And how much do they cost?

While a simple search for “personal assistant apps” seems to yield countless results, shifting through them can be a task.

Today, consider us your digital personal assistant. We narrowed the options down to our very own top five. Read on, and discover which ones will best fit your needs.

5 Personal Assistant Tools That Actually Make Life Easier
1) Operator

Price: Free
Requirements: iOS

Vacations are great. Holiday parties are, too. But scheduling the former immediately after the latter? Well, it’s a prescription for stress. There are people to feed, wines to buy, and bags to pack.

But wait. There’s an app for that. With a packed work schedule, who has the time to deal with the aforementioned items, let alone to find special decorative lights? The experts at Operator — that’s who.

Once you download Operator, you’ll see a blue dialogue bubble in the lower right corner of your screen. Tap that, then choose where you need help.

From there, you’ll be asked a series of questions about what exactly you need. Here’s a chat that I had with a real person — Holly — when I needed help finding some decorative lights for that party.

Holly later went on to ask me about my price range, shipping preferences, and sent me several lighting options. And look, she even laughed at my joke.

2) Charlie

Price: Free
Requirements: Google Calendar, iOS

Knowing your audience is something on which we place great importance. That’s why we do things like create buyer personas and perform other user research.

That’s important in marketing — and in meetings. After all, if an important contact with whom you’re not completely familiar agrees to meet with you, it’s best to avoid walking in without any knowledge of what the person does. That’s where Charlie comes in.

Charlie connects to your calendar to see who you have meetings with over the next week. Then, it identifies the person and asks if you’d like some background information on them.

It’s not as creepy as it sounds, though. The only information it finds is what’s publicly available online, like on LinkedIn and Twitter. For example, here’s what it would look like if someone had a meeting with me:

Notice that there’s a section on “ways to start the conversation.” That contains news pieces about the person that can help you open a dialogue with the person. Plus, in case you’ve been in touch with this contact before, Charlie allows you to review any previous communication you’ve had with him or her.

3) Google Home

Price: Allo (free), Google Home ($129)
Requirements: Android 4.1 and higher, iOS 8 and higher (only available in English and for purchase in the U.S.)

When I asked my team for personal assistant app recommendations, HubSpot’s Web Team Tech Lead, Dmitry Shamis, immediately pointed to Google Home.

What does he love about it? Well, it does the same thing that a lot of similar devices on the market do — things like responding to hands-free voice prompts, for example — but it also incorporates many elements of Google that many we use day-to-day, including search.

“The real benefit is how it integrates into my Google life,” Shamis told me. “My trips, my calendar, my shopping list.”

Google Home is less of an app, however, and more of a device. It’s powered by Google Assistant — the technology used to answer questions in the search engine’s Allo app, which is configured to respond to search queries, set reminders, and engage in everyday chit chat. Have a look:

Imagine if I could have that entire conversation without all the typing. Sure, the Assistant technology alone is great, but the whole hands-free help thing offered by Google Home? That’s just awesome. I mean, just look at its list of features.

4) Amazon Echo

Price: $179
Requirements: Wi-Fi. Compatible with Fire OS, Android, and iOS devices and accessible via web browser.

Before there was Google Home, there was Amazon Echo — which Shamis tells me is what he used first. The Echo is powered by Alexa, Amazon’s voice recognition technology, which is used less for search engine capabilities, and more for instant information like sports scores, weather, and news.

Despite his happiness with Google Home, there are still some things about the Amazon Echo that Shamis misses. He’s particularly nostalgic, he told me, for the ability to quickly buy things with the Echo. For example, he told me, “Things like, ‘Alexa, buy more dog food’ were extremely helpful.”

And another key differentiator for him? Echo’s Spotify integration. “‘Alexa, play Spotify’ would pick up where I left off on my phone,” he explained. “‘Hey Google, play Spotify’ will play something completely random.”

But when I asked Shamis if he’d advise someone to get both, his answer was a resounding “no.”

“It’s one or the other,” he said, since “there’s enough overlap that you don’t need both. I think it becomes a personal preference.”

That’s not to say it’s impossible to use both, especially for one’s personal entertainment — like in this video of the two devices speaking to each other.

 

5) Julie Desk

Price: Pro ($99.99 month/per user), Manager ($149.99 month/per user), Executive ($199.99 month/per user)
Requirements: Any email client

Visit the official website for Julie Desk, and you’ll be faced with a question: “Want to get back 1 hour in your work day?”

Um, yes. That’s what Julie Desk was created to do — to save us the countless time we spent on managing our respective calendars. And admittedly, for me, that’s a lot.

But starting with that question, Julie Desk’s website is a compelling example of great user experience — which hints at its capacity to work on behalf of, well, you, the user. Have a look:

There are are few things about Julie Desk that delight us. To start, there are no downloads required, since Julie — as she’s casually called — works with your existing email client.

When you first sign up for the service, you’ll be asked for your meeting preferences, like time of day, location, and mode of transportation.

It takes about 24 hours for Julie to get you completely enrolled in the service, probably because there’s a human element — the service is constantly monitored by actual people to make sure nothing goes awry. But once you’re set up, that’s when the fun begins. Every time you receive an email requesting a meeting, just copy Julie on your reply — she’ll take it from there.

Here’s more on how it works:

 

Appy, Healthy, More Productive

From online human interaction, to digital voice recognition, to a virtual meeting scheduler, these apps might not cover everything, but they certainly make life easier.

Sure, it would be nice if there was a tool out there to, say, virtually clean the entire house. Until that becomes available, we’re not entirely far off. And some of these resources could at least provide information on home-cleaning-made-easy hacks — but only if you ask.

Remember when any of these tools seemed like “a thing of the future”? They’re here — and we can’t wait to see what’s next.

What are your favorite personal assistant apps? Let us know in the comments.

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As host of Janes of Digital and part of the Bing Ads Global Community Engagement team, Frances Donegan-Ryan speaks with Kelsey Jones on how talking about issues in race, gender, and diversity in our industry can make us stronger, as well as what to do when you see harassment happening.

The post Raising Awareness for Diversity in Tech With Frances Donegan-Ryan [PODCAST] appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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Posted by randfish

At risk of sounding cliché, we’re right smack in the middle of the season of giving. And when it comes to giving, there’s no better example in our industry space than the topic of communities. Moz itself is a great example: You — the reader, the commenter, the Q&A inquisitor, the subscriber — are what sustains and inspires us. What kind of value does your community add to your site, and how can you provide incentive and value to your site contributors, social media fans, and influencers?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores ten fresh, actionable strategies you can use to encourage and promote an exchange of value with your contributors to feed your content and community efforts.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This is a special Whitebeard Friday edition of our show. We, of course, have the annual tradition where I wear the beard, but you know the beard gets in the way of a lot of me talking to you. So I’m just going to wear the hat for today. I hope that’s all right. And I hope you’re all having a wonderful holiday season. Christmas and Hanukkah start the same day this year. New Year’s, of course, Kwanzaa, whatever you’re celebrating, a very happy holiday to you.

So let’s chat about exchanging more value with the contributors to your content and community efforts. So basically, I think, in the holiday season, we talk a lot about exchange of value and exchange of gifts and of giving, and that’s wonderful. We do this on our websites as well.

So you’re watching Whiteboard Friday. You might leave a comment in our comments section. You might tweet about this. You might put it on Facebook. You might share it on LinkedIn. There’s sort of a community of things going on here.

Most of the ideas that I have for Whiteboard Friday come from people like yourself in the community who have ideas and questions, concerns and issues, and that’s a wonderful thing. But what I found is that 99% of the time we all follow exactly the same patterns in our content and our community efforts with how we basically use each other’s value and exchange value with each other. So here’s the challenge.

(The hat’s just swinging around and hitting me. It’s great.)

3 major groups make up your community exchangers of value

So you have kind of three groups, three major groups that I would consider community exchangers of value. Those are people like commenters and on-site contributors, your social media followers and fans and people who engage with you through social, and then influencers and experts and, broadly speaking, amplifiers, people who do this.

Look, lots of the people who might be commenters are also influencers. Lots of the people who are social media followers may also be on-site commenters. That’s definitely the case.

1. Commenters and on-site contributors

But traditionally, the contributions look like this. For these folks, when they leave comments, they are seeking answers and visibility. So they want to show maybe something that they have done, and they also want an answer or a reply from you or from someone in the community. They have questions about it. And for you, you know they’re creating — well, I promised myself I was going to do red and green so I’m a very Christmassy Jew this year — more content and SEO for you, which is great.

That’s one of the big values of comments, absolutely speaking. That’s one of the reasons we try and render comments on the page so that the engines can crawl them. It can help you rank for more long tail stuff. It can certainly help you with engagement metrics and all those kinds of things.

Now, for guest content, which a lot of folks do create and allow, Moz certainly has historically through YouMoz and soon we’re going to be allowing that through the main blogs, so you might be seeing more guest contributions there, visibility for them and content and SEO for you. Same story there.

2. Social media followers and fans

Now, shares and replies on social, it’s essentially you are helping to … when you create content and when you, whether that’s content on the social media platform or on your own website, that you’re amplifying, when other people share that content or they like it, they reply to it, they amplify it, that’s new fans and followers and content for them, hopefully, and it’s more reach and visibility for you.

3. Influencers, experts, and amplifiers

With influencers, experts, and amplifiers, pretty much the story is like more influence for them through contributing to your content or promoting your content, and more reach for you through those influencers and experts’ audiences. This is certainly powerful and useful too with roundups, which I think, unfortunately, have become the default style in which people use influencers and experts in many, many fields. It’s more visibility for them, hopefully, because they appear in that roundup. They have their names cited and all that kind of thing. You’re hoping that they’re going to share it and amplify that content so that you get more reach to their audience. Maybe they’ll even link to it, which will get you links.

How to exchange value by thinking broadly and daring to be different

I want us to think broader. What I believe is that being the exception to this rule can be hugely helpful. Essentially, if everyone else is doing something in one way, doing it another way, doing it a different way will fundamentally add more value to your content and SEO efforts.

Personal profiles

So if we’re talking about these commenters and on-site contributors, I want you to think about profiles. This is something that most comment plug-ins don’t allow by default. Disqus creates a profile, but that profile lives on Disqus’ site, not on your site. Think about your Moz profile. Think about your LinkedIn profile. Think about the profile that you create on lots of community-focused websites, like an Inbound.org or a Hacker News or something. Like there’s fundamental value to having that. You can own that content. You can now promote that page. You can rank in search engines with it. All those kinds of things.

Edit/citation suggestions and highlights

Edit and citation suggestions like places like Wikipedia have. Others have notable ones. Medium, obviously, has the highlighted section. It’s a little more creative.

Featured comments

Featured comments, which places like The New York Times do, I think if you are an editorial content creator and you want to amplify the visibility of comments and encourage people to share great comments, a featured comment system is a valuable one. Here on Moz, we used to show comments ordered by the date in which they were left or the timestamp of when they were left, and now we order them based on thumbs, which encourages people to have a great comment because it will have the most visibility because it got the most thumbs up.
With social media folks, I would think about some of the content. You can create content that features social contributions, thus encouraging people to follow you and contribute and reply to and amplify your tweets or Facebook shares or LinkedIn because they will get additional visibility from that.

Data via polls and surveys

You can think about collection and amplification of data that you collect through polls and short surveys. Facebook and Twitter are great about allowing those.

Sharing others’ social accounts

Promotion of other people’s social accounts. One of the things that I think far too few social accounts do is actually call someone out by name and say, “Hey, this is another really valuable page on Facebook that you should check out.” Or, “This person did this wonderful thing.” I see too few Twitter accounts, including the Moz Twitter account doesn’t call out as many people, in non-reply tweets, as we probably should or could, and I think that’s another wonderful thing that we can do.

Using social for testimonials and promotional content

Use of social, of course, in testimonial and promotional content. We started doing that where we actually said, “Hey, someone said something really nice about us on Twitter or on Facebook or on LinkedIn. Let’s reach out to them and say, ‘Hey, could we use that on our website, on our product page, to help get you visibility and show that you’re an expert in this field, but also to help us sell this product that you apparently love?'” Win-win there. Again, a wonderful way to creatively use that same type of content.

Smart influencer roundups, such as helpful email lists

And last, with influencers, with experts, with amplifiers, I think there’s vastly more ways to do this in roundups. First off, I’ve seen some folks create some great email discussion, the help-each-other type of lists. I’m part of a few of those. I love them. There’s great content on there. I think this is a wonderful way to get influencers and experts on your side in the long term and to help them help each other as well as you.

I’ve also, just recently, become part of a few BCC email lists, where a couple of content creators in the technology and entrepreneurship space, when they have new content to share, they share it first with this BCC email list before they even promote it to their regular audiences. That’s awesome. That gives me a chance to be one of the first people to show it to everyone. I, of course, benefit from that through sharing with my audiences, and they benefit through the additional visibility that I give them.

Focus on data above quotations alone

Surveys and data gathering, I’m a much bigger believer in surveys and in showing data than in roundups. I think roundups that just are text only and have a bunch of text, rather than show data from a lot of influencers and saying, “Hey, you know, we interviewed 100 startup CEOs and we got these 5 data points from each of them, and here are the distributions.” Vastly more interesting than, “Here are the two sentences of advice that every startup CEO gave about how to hire your first engineer.” That kind of thing.

Featured commentary

Featured commentary and input on content is another way to do this. So, essentially, you share content with influencers. You say, “Hey, if you have some featured comments or some ideas around that, send that back and we will include it in the launch of that content.” Lovely stuff there. I’ve been part of a few of those and I love those.

Discussion and debate as content

Discussion or debate as actual content. The FiveThirtyEight folks have been brilliant about this, where they invite on guest contributors and experts and then they feature that discussion. Some other political sites and places like The Stranger have done that. Wonderful stuff.

Getting creative with how you exchange value with your content and community contributors is an awesome way to go. I hope, in 2017, I see a lot more of this stuff and maybe even a little less of this stuff.

All right, everyone. Hope you have a great holiday season and a great year. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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If you’re anything like me, there’s been a time in your life when you’ve asked, “What the heck is https?”

What’s that extra “s” for? Well, it turns out that the “s” stands for “SSL,” which stands for Secure Sockets Layer — the technology that encrypts your connection to a website, so that hackers can’t intercept any of your data.

The whole concept of https is a pretty interesting topic on its own, and my colleague, Jeffrey Vocell, talks more about it here. But in addition to what it actually means, why is it so important? And why do you need it on your website? <img class="hs-cta-img " style="border-width: 0px; /*hs-extra-styles*/; " alt="Download our free introductory guide to A/B testing here.  ” src=”https://no-cache.hubspot.com/cta/default/53/807e151a-1fb0-4227-8f3b-a9b80a03192d.png”>

Well, there are many reasons, but with the help of my aforementioned colleague, we identified five of the more important ones. (Spoiler alert: A lot of them have to do with your search performance, so have a good look at what they mean for you.)

HubSpot Marketing customers: SSL is included free of charge with the Website Add-On, and the number of domains on which you can enable SSL depends on your subscription type. Learn more here.

5 Reasons Why HTTPS Should Be Enabled on Your Website
1) It’s good for search.

Every minute — no, second — Google’s algorithm requires sites to essentially battle it for top search rankings. I love that visual: two websites that could both rank for a user’s query, essentially running toward the finish line of top results. But what happens if there’s a tie? Do the sites battle it out in a “sudden death” round?

Kind of — there is a tiebreaker involved, and it’s https. The way Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes explains it, “If all quality signals are equal for two results, then the one that is on HTTPS would get … or may get … the extra boost that is needed to trump the other result.”

It all goes back to the idea that Google is constantly solving for the user, and makes frequent changes to its algorithm that create a better experience. Which is why our next point makes sense.

2) It’s better for users.

I couldn’t tell you the last time I heard about a hacking incident in which thousands of records were stolen — because they seem to happen so frequently. In fact, such data breaches jumped 29.5% between 2014 and 2015.

But SSL helps to prevent these “man-in-the-middle” attacks — “a form of eavesdropping where communication between two users is monitored and modified by an unauthorized party” — and keeps user information secure.

That makes https especially important if your website accepts credit cards or has a login functionality. With so many of these hacking incidents making headlines, users want to know that your brand is making an effort to protect them from their private information being stolen or compromised.

We could also get into a debate about the ethics of protecting your users from that kind of privacy breach, but you get the point:

user privacy = important
https = good for privacy

3) SSL is required for AMP.

A few pieces of vocabulary to break down here:

“AMP” stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s the technology that makes certain pages load almost instantaneously on mobile. So, when you search for something on your mobile device through Google, you might notice that some results have a lightning bolt icon next to it, that means that it’s AMP-ready.

Look at what happens when I search for Doomtree, my favorite hip hop group, on my phone. On the first page of results, one has the lightning bolt icon next to it. And when I click on that result:

… it loads instantaneously.

AMP is going to play a major role in SEO in the coming months — Google is making it a priority for 2017, which implies that AMP-ready pages will have better rankings. But in order for something to be labeled as AMP, it requires SSL.

We’ve covered the importance of optimizing for mobile quite a bit, and preparing for the special attention that will be paid to AMP is now part of that optimization. But in order for webmasters to be as web-friendly as possible, all of the requirements behind AMP must be closely examined — including its https criteria.

4) Google is indexing mobile.

So, that thing we just said about the importance of mobile? It turns out, Google is actually going to start indexing mobile, which means that its “algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site.”

But in order for a mobile site to be indexable, Google recommends several best practices, one of which is to “start by migrating to a secure site,” especially “if [you] don’t support HTTPS yet.”

And bottom line, says HubSpot SEO Senior Marketing Manager Victor Pan, “HTTPS is preferred over HTTP in the index, with all other things being equal.” So get secure — you’ll be glad you did.

5) “Not secure.”

To elaborate — In January 2017, Chrome 56 will start displaying “not secure” in the browser bar for any http (notice it’s missing the “s”) sites that ask users for login or credit card information.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m about to make an online purchase and see that the site isn’t secure — for example, that the padlock icon in the browser bar is broken — I navigate my business elsewhere. And I’m not alone. In fact, only 3% of online shoppers say they would enter their credit card information on a site without the green padlock.

Imagine if Google starts doing that work for users before they can even get to checkout. If the number is as low as 3% now, before search engines start doing the legwork to label sites as “not secure” before anyone even visits them, you can see how traffic to those sites will suffer a huge blow — as well as its digital sales revenue.

Create a Safe Space

There you have it. If you want your SEO to stay strong — on both desktop and mobile — and you don’t want to lose digital sales revenue, it’s easy to see why https should be enabled on your website.

These are just a few reasons why https is so important. What are yours? Let us know in the comments.

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Instagram has just released two new features for Stories. The ephemeral photo and video sharing feature has added stickers and hands-free video recording for its 600 million users.

The post New in Instagram Stories: Stickers and Hands-Free Video Recording by @rinadianewrites appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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