While I have not had a “meaty” post up on this blog in a couple of weeks, a lot has been going on in Jeffalytics land. I have been invited to speak on several occasions in the past few weeks, and the time spent building out presentations has eaten into my ability to produce the long form blog posts you have become accustomed to reading. Stay tuned for many in depth posts to come in the near future!
In the meantime, I'd like to bring a few things to your attention. One has to do with SEO and the other is my recent presentation on Social Media.
Studying the Effects of Google Authorship post on SEOMoz
On the SEO Front, a post that I wrote and submitted to SEOMoz finally went live on their YouMoz blog early last week. I say finally because the post was originally submitted in December and was delayed due to some mixups with scheduling. After working it out with the Moz team, we went live last week to an exceptional response (as for the mixup, it has to do with thousands of people submitting to SEOMoz each year, nothing to do with their excellent team. They remain the best in the business!)
The post was entitled Google Authorship and the Fast Track to Better Rankings: A Case Study and chronicled my experiences and success getting this blog to show up in the search engines after only being live for a few short weeks. I was very happy with how the post turned out, and the SEOMoz community seemed to enjoy it as well, with the post receiving hundreds of social media actions and 65+ comments. While most of the responses were extremely positive, some did offer constructive criticism about the thinness of my conclusions. Basically, the post started a debate about whether the correlation I drew from Google+ and Authorship was the same as causation that these activities were related.
In other words, I had too many variables in my experiment that could have impacted my conclusions, so I can't safely make conclusions without isolating each of them.
This sparked me to work on a new study, which scientifically will look into exactly how much Google+ and Authorship impact rankings. Over this past weekend I spent about 20 hours creating 4 brand new websites complete with domain research/registration, 12 deep pages of copywriting and other configurations needed in order to conduct a study.
The results are very interesting so far, and I look forward to showing the results either on the SEOMoz blog or right here on Jeffalytics. I have yet to see a study conclusively prove what I have noticed in my observations so far, so this could be very exciting.
How Businesses Can Use Social Media Presentation for SoLoMoCon
My most recent speaking engagement was part of a panel in Minneapolis for a new event series called SoLoMoCon.
The premise of the event is for local marketers interested in Social Media, Local and Mobile Marketing to gather for a monthly roundtable discussion with industry experts to talk about how these topics affect their business.
I took the approach of talking about how Social Media has had a positive effect on Three Deep Marketing and on me personally. I designed this presentation to be short and sweet, and I think that's exactly what it does.
If you are in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and have an interest in these topics, I highly recommend that you check out the monthly SoLoMoCon events in the area!