Heading for an SEO Interview?A few Ideas to Help You Along…

Heading for an SEO Interview?A few Ideas to Help You Along…

 On the back of all these interviews, I thought what better chance to share a little empathy (considering how tough the interview process can be at times!) and a couple of observations that might help SEO folk prepare for the opportunity of their dreams!  So here goes; a few ideas to help get you SEO interview fit…

Prepare and plan ahead

An easy area to start the preparation process is by getting a few gazillion responses to typical SEO interview questions – firstly, to highlight academic understanding of the area, and secondly demonstrating technical and experiential understanding.  Constructing those thoughts/experiences and putting them in to some sort of order and shape can really help to answer questions comprehensively.
I think sometimes SEO’s learn and talk about SEO as if it was a dictionary of industry terminology to be recited at each and every opportunity.  Really, it’s about the application of technical and creative ideas.  This really shouldn’t be underplayed in my opinion as this is where the true value to your employer and/or clients is derived from.

Practice Articulating SEO

Developing the previous point further, try practising explaining previous work and complex areas of SEO. When you know something in your head, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can articulate it in layman’s terms to less knowledgeable – something that SEO’s have to do on occasions when speaking with clients.  Taking this further, can you then build on this layman’s explanation and then provide additional higher-level detail?  It’s certainly worth practising if you’re not used to doing this already.  Maybe even consider chatting those SEO interview questions through with a friend to see how well you can communicate some complex areas in an engaging way.
I consider myself fairly competent at talking about SEO, but recently I stumbled over the explanation of the process of tokenising a web page by search engines.  I could visualisation what it might look like and explain the process in detail but not summarise it at an entry-level SEO training session.  I was, however, kindly helped by a non-SEO colleague who reiterated my stumbling explanation with the anecdote that it could be that a search engine captures the key elements of the page / meaning of a page in the Times newspaper and condenses it down to a column or headline in the Sun newspaper…a clear, succinct explanation that people can relate to.
One of the things that we encourage across the SEO team at MEC is that all team members must regularly run training sessions for other members of the Interaction team.  This, we have found, has really helped their confidence in clearly communicating complex issues in SEO and search marketing in general.

Read the latest

There is nothing worse than someone saying that great SEO consulting requires keeping up-to-date with the latest SEO news and developments, and then not be able to demonstrate that they, the interviewee, do this themselves.  Nothing worse than shooting yourself in the foot now is there?!!
When reading though, don’t simply passively read – test and apply what you are reading – where are the opportunities?  Remember the 5 bums on rugby posts image (5 W’s sat on a big H) which stand for: what, why, when, who, where and how?
As a result, this should give you a much rounded and analysed opinion around these topics, provide you with a stronger view of what you are reading, who’s writing it, where it can be applied to your websites, etc, etc…

Company’s blog

When preparing for an SEO job interview, a little understanding of what’s big on the agenda for the company in question, and where you might fit in could be a great start.  Asking a few questions about the history of activity and upcoming marketing plans for the company or clients might be great area to cover off too.  That said, there are a whole lot of questions to ask to see whether the role would be suitable to you…

Show an interest: prepare some questions

I’d expect a whole lot of information to be shared by the interviewer themselves, but asking questions helps to show real interest in the role, and the potential for you to confirm that the role is indeed right for you.  As SEO activities by teams around the UK are likely to differ quite wildly, it’s certainly a great opportunity to learn about the team, how broad or clearly defined their roles are, and of course how you might fit to what currently exists.  
If asked a question on current SEO affairs, then to turn it around and ask the interview for their opinion too – this can be a great way to provide more of a two-way conversational format to the process, and get a feel for their thinking too. After all, you don’t want to be stuck in a new role thinking what ridiculous procedures and management are in place now do you?!

Every SEO is unique

People interviewing SEO’s in the UK are quite likely to meet a huge diversity of people with different experiences and stories to tell, so make sure you make clear where you can add your own areas of expertise.
So for instance, have you got experience in the sector that you’ll be working in?  Do you have your own blogs, affiliate sites, highly sociable online?  What can you bring to the role from a previous career (e.g. PR, offline marketing, IT, etc)?  Put all these areas to the top of your mind before meeting your interviewer, and make sure you show them all off!

Wild Card

One of my favourite questions that I like to ask candidates, which has given me some great answers previously, is asking whether there is anything that the candidate has prepared for the interview that they haven’t had a chance to cover off from the areas covered in the interview.
The idea behind this question is that SEO candidates aren’t like typical marketing role candidates or IT candidates.  The SEO industry has such a diverse range of entry points so that in itself means that people’s experiences and talents are going to be far more diverse.  As such, this should help to capture some of these extra little bits.

Different roles

Prepare appropriately to demonstrate the competencies that you can apply to the role!  Of course preparing for an SEO job interview can vary quite a lot if you are going for a graduate role, an SEO Exec role to a more managerial role.  Again they can differ depending on whether the role is more focused on analytics, link-building or account management?  Unsure about the role, give them a call in advance of the interview – a great way to show confidence and initiative in the role you are interested in.
Tips for SEO interviews, feel free to leave a comment!  :)

Link: Heading for an SEO Interview?A few Ideas to Help You Along…

Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan : Part 1

Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan – Part 1: Defining KPIs

Last week I spoke at PubCon South on the Analytics Strategy panel on the topic of social media. This is something I’m very passionate about and during my preparation for the presentation I uncovered some scary statistics.

According to a survey conducted by BazaarVoice in 2009, on average businesses have no idea what their ROI is on any type of social media activity:

                    

Here are a few of the lowlights highlights:

• 53% of respondents are unsure about their return on Twitter
• 50% are unsure about the direct value of LinkedIn
• 50% are not sure how to measure the impact on business metrics from blogs

And yet, companies now-a-days have no problem investing thousands of dollars into social media marketing even if they have no idea if they’ll profit from it. Why have companies gotten so lazy when it comes to marketing spend?

Part of the problem is they aren’t properly analyzing their data. Social networks are giving us more and more insight into visitor and performance metrics, but most of us aren’t properly setup to find actionable insights on the campaign’s performance.

This series of posts will explain how to properly setup your social media strategy so that you can make better-informed decisions, understand your ROI and adjust your strategy according to the numbers.
Let’s get started. Before you do anything else, you need to have a clear understanding of what your goal will be and how you will measure the success of your social media strategy. In other words, we need to define KPIs.

There are a couple of guidelines you should follow when definining KPIs:

• Choose metrics that actually translate into business context (e.g. sales, new leads, customer satisfaction, customer interaction, etc.)
• Define more than just attention metrics
  (You want to look at more important metrics than just your fan/follower count)
• Define KPIs that are actionable
  (How does knowing what your retweet reach is help you adjust your Twitter strategy?)
• Create specific KPIs for each social network and specific elements of your website

 The most important guideline above is to define actionable KPIs. Obviously these types of KPIs are going to be unique to your business, but here are a few examples of what I would consider good actionable KPIs:

• Number of people in a specific location who follow your company on Twitter
• Reduction in sales cycles
• Reduction in support costs
• Increase in product reviews
• Product improvement suggestions from [specific social network]

Now that we have your KPIs established, we need to configure your analytics.Now lets walk you through that process in part 2 of Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan.

 Source:
Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan – Part 1: Defining KPIs

6 Ways to Optimize Your Site for the iPad

6 Ways to Optimize Your Site for the iPad

The iPad is no Apple Newton. It truly is a revolutionary device. The whimsical blog of “Fake Steve Jobs” calls the iPad a “life-changing, mind-altering product”. Although that may be an overstatement, the iPad is certainly important — to the computing industry, to computer users, and to online marketers.

The launch of the iPad marks a significant step forward for mobile computing, and for computing in general: one’s productivity can finally be as high as when they are in front of their laptop or desktop computer. The iPad user can efficiently and effectively do their shopping, banking, email, YouTube video watching, and general web surfing. It is also surprisingly easy to use the iPad for more complex, input-intensive tasks, like writing term papers, building slide decks, and manipulating spreadsheets — particularly when also equipped with a Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, the iPad just may be versatile and powerful enough for the road warrior to travel with sans laptop. Conversely, smart phones and other handheld mobile devices, really only serve as a complement — rather than a practical replacement — for the user’s laptop or desktop machine.

Technically speaking, the iPad’s operating system is the iPhoneOS, but practically the OS is the Internet. Just upload your documents into “the cloud” (e.g. MobileMe, Dropbox, Xythos) and you are off and running. For the multitude of Google Docs users this is an unnecessary step, as the documents already live in the Cloud, not on any local hard drive. The iPad will undoubtedly speed adoption of this trend towards Internet-based file storage.

Overall, it looks like this launch is going to be a success and the iPad, like the iPod, iPhone, and the iMac before it, will gain significant distribution among consumers globally. And, since it includes a browser with a different set of specifications from either the standard mobile devices, the question for advertisers becomes a practical one – “will my web pages come up on this browser?”

With the iPad’s Safari browser, the Web generally looks and works like one would expect on any traditional laptop or desktop computer. However, there are important differences in the browsing experience and these differences could thwart your web visitors, stopping them in their tracks. As a site owner, you must compensate for these differences, or risk losing the conversion, and more importantly, the customer.

“Mobile-Friendly” Does Not Equal “iPad-Friendly”

If you created a mobile-friendly version of your website, you are probably seeing the fruits of your labor in customer adoption already. That mobile site, however, is not suitable for iPad user consumption. Mobile sites are designed for a teeny-tiny screen and translate to a deficient user experience on the iPad. Consequently, your mobile site should never be served up automatically to the iPad user. This can happen inadvertently when your web server’s “user-agent detection” is overly broad in its matching of mobile user agents (the user-agent strings for the iPhone and iPad are very similar; the iPad’s even includes the word “mobile”). This is the case for Walmart.com and Officedepot.com (screenshots photo-2 & photo-21). Thankfully this is easy to correct.

Avoiding the mobile-friendly version is one thing, serving up a site that offers an iPad-optimized user experience is quite another. It can involve overhauling page layout, recoding CSS, redesigning navigation, and adding alternative non-Flash elements.

Layout and Formatting

Your website design should lay out correctly whether the user is holding the iPad in landscape mode or portrait mode. Furthermore, when in landscape mode the primary call-to-action should still be visible without scrolling.

Even if the page renders properly on the Safari browser for the Mac or Windows, it will not necessarily render the same on the iPad. Case in point: Homedepot.com, with overlapping text where the breadcrumb navigation displays. This anomaly does not occur on Safari for the Mac. (screenshots photo-26 & screen shot 1)

Bear in mind that the browser window cannot be resized on the iPad. This means you cannot force elements to stay in a specific fixed position on the screen like you can for desktop browser users. Fixed positioning should not be used, if at all possible.

Retool Your Navigation

The multi-touch display provides an elegant and intuitive interface for users, but it also presents some unique challenges to web designers who are use to designing for the desktop. The biggest one is that iPad users cannot hover their cursor, potentially rendering any mouse-over navigation unusable. On the iPad, holding your finger down invokes the copy-and-paste function rather than creating a hover state.

On Officedepot.com, once you manage to get off of the mobile site, you will find that the sub-navigation items underneath the main navigation tabs are practically inaccessible. When you press on a tab (e.g. Furniture), the sub-navigation is displayed, but at the same time you are taken to the Furniture category page. So there is not enough time to select a sub-item (such as Modular Collections) before you are whisked away to the top-level category page (screenshot photo-18). The aforementioned sub-section (Modular Collections) is not accessible elsewhere on the page, like in the footer. It is not in the sub-navigation directly under Furniture on the mobile site either, curiously.

On Homedepot.com, pressing on a top navigation button caused its sub-items to display — without loading the top-level category page. Clicking on the top navigation item a second time takes you to the top-level category page. Unfortunately, you have to click twice on the sub-item before it will load the requested page. (e.g. to get to the Light Bulbs page from the navigation requires pressing on Electrical once then pressing on Light Bulbs twice (see screenshot photo-24). That was not at all intuitive.

The CDW.com top navigation and MacConnection.com’s left navigation both functioned beautifully on the iPad. Press on a category, and the sub-categories are visible and accessible with one click (screenshots photo-9 & photo-8). You are not whisked away to a top-level category page before you made your sub-navigation selection. On MacConnection.com you can go to the top-level category page by clicking that item again; on CDW.com you cannot, presumably, because there is no corresponding top-level category page for Products, Services, etc.

Lack of Flash Support

This is one of the main complaints with the iPad. No, this was not an oversight. The lack of Flash support was intentional. The company line at Apple is that Flash is prone to crash and is too resource-intensive. Just ask the helpful employees at the local Apple Store and that is what they will tell you. I do not buy it. If Flash really were that unstable, wouldn’t we notice it on our desktop machines? Speaking for myself, this is not something I experience regularly. Google’s Chrome browser, which I now use as my default, even calls it out when Flash crashes and displays an unhappy icon in the place of the Flash animation. Note that in Chrome, Flash does not crash the browser or even the tab/window. Surely Apple can follow Google’s lead and build this same capability into Safari? I feel this is more a political/competitive issue than anything else.

What are the implications of not having Flash? For one, you will find a content-less hole in many home pages across the Internet. Some sites will display a blank space where the Flash animation would have been (photo-20 and photo-5 screenshots). If on your website this represents a large amount of the screen real estate, that void could cost you a conversion. Other sites fill that void with a message urging the user to download and install the Flash player from Adobe’s website (photo-23 screenshot), thus sending the user on a wild goose chase that will ultimately end fruitless. Still other sites discretely display a warning that the lack of Flash makes their site inaccessible or somehow unusable. (photo-10 screenshot)

The workaround involves a mix of user-agent detection and HTML5. First, detect the iPad Safari browser, then selectively serve up a version that eliminates the dead space and compensates for the loss in content/functionality. If the Flash was navigation or a rotating carousel, this can be accomplished with HTML and CSS. If it was a video (the majority of video on the web is Flash-based), then develop an alternative HTML5-based player or utilize a solution like BrightCove’s (examples: eBags, onlineshoes.tv, screenshots photo-1 & photo-4). If your Live Chat function relies on Flash, then you have a very big and immediate problem. MacConnection’s customer service chat (screenshots photo-7, photo-6) is fully functional on the iPad. Is yours?

Expect Glitches

It’s still early days for the iPad. This is version 1, with many more revisions to come. There are still many kinks to be ironed out, including in the iPad Safari browser rendering engine. So do not be too surprised if Safari for the iPad mangles your website with browser rendering bugs and inconsistencies. For example, notice in the figure below (insert photo-11 screenshot) that the “New Account?” checkbox partially overlaps the input field, the combination of the two resembling a pull-down list. User confusion could result: if the user doesn’t recognize the checkbox, then they are liable to mistakenly expect the “New Account?” label to be a clickable link and find themselves unable to proceed to checkout.

Bottom line: expect to compensate for Apple’s bugs and glitches, and develop workarounds. The process starts with good old-fashioned QA. Without rigorous testing, you may never know that your site does not work on the iPad. Please do not rely on your users to tell you. Broken websites can happen to anyone. Even to Apple, ironically. Parts of Apple’s Safari Dev Center are un-navigable when accessed from an iPad, including their “Preparing Your Web Content for iPad” technical note in their Safari Reference Library, which does not scroll (screenshot photo-0).

A Simple Solution

If implementing an iPad-optimized version of your website quickly is not feasible or would be a struggle, there are a number of vendors that provide real-time site translations – one such solution is our own Mobile Site Optimizer. These solutions can be implemented quickly, cost-effectively, and with minimal IT involvement. See our product overview at http://www.covario.com/what-we-do/deployment-software/mobile-site-optimizer

Types of Site Changes That Can Affect SEO

Types of Site Changes That Can Affect SEO

Organizations make many changes that they do not think will affect SEO, but they have a big impact on it. Here are some examples:

• Content areas/features/options added to the site (this could be anything from a new blog
  to a new categorization system).
• Changing the domain of your site. This can have a significant impact, and you should
  document when the switchover was made.
• Modifications to URL structures. Changes to URLs on your site will likely impact your
  rankings, so record any and all changes.
• Implementing a new CMS. This is a big one, with a very big impact. If you must change
  your CMS, make sure you do a thorough analysis of the SEO shortcomings of the new
  CMS versus the old one, and make sure you track the timing and the impact.
• New partnerships that either send links or require them (meaning your site is earning new
  links or linking out to new places).
• Changes to navigation/menu systems (moving links around on pages, creating new link
  systems, etc.).
• Any redirects, either to or from the site.
• Upticks in usage/traffic and the source (e.g., if you get mentioned in the press and receive
  an influx of traffic from it).

When you track these items, you can create an accurate storyline to help correlate causes with effects. If, for example, you’ve observed a spike in traffic from Yahoo! that started four to five days after you switched from menu links in the footer to the header, it is a likely indicator of a causal relationship.

Without such documentation it could be months before you notice the surge--and there would be no way to trace it back to the responsible modification. Your design team might later choose to switch back to footer links, your traffic may fall, and no record would exist to help you understand why. Without the lessons of history, you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.

Factoring Time into SEO

Factoring Time into SEO

We all know that it takes time for your rankings in the SERPs to change. Although they do fluctuate frequently, long-term improvements in your SERPs rankings take time to produce.

Some time needs to pass before the Search Engines are confident you deserve increased rankings. Things that can happen during the days, weeks or months before you see some real results include:

• Increase in aggregate traffic – if more unique visitors are landing on your website, then that means there’s a bigger trend of searchers looking for you, therefore your website is more relevant, so the more traffic you have, the more you’re seen as authoritative
• Increase in links pointing to external pages linking to you – this has a snowball effect because you receive more link juice from one link linking to you when other websites are linking to the page that’s linking to you (hope that wasn’t too confusing)
• Increase in the amount of clicks from searchers – search engines have a general idea of the percentage of clicks the #1 position for a keyword should get (i.e. the #1 result should be getting 40% of clicks, while #2 should get 20% – arbitrary numbers), so when there’s an imbalance of clicks (if the #2 result starts getting 40% of clicks while the #1 result receives 20%), the results in the SERPs are re-ordered (the #2 result would be bumped up to #1 to see if it can maintain the 40% of clicks it has been receiving)
• Increase in age of domain – as your domain ages, and you continue to renew your domain for at least a few years until expiration, your website’s authoritativeness increases because it’s an older source of information
• Increase in age of backlinks – as the age of the backlinks pointing to you increase, search engines believe that your website is more authoritative because the links serve as past proof that your website is worth checking out. While search engines love fresh content, they also highly respect older content

Source: Factoring Time into SEO