Below is the re-recording of the Whiteboard Session we did live last Friday. Thank you for your patience!
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week we had a little bit of a mix-up. What happened is we used Livestream to film a live version of Whiteboard Friday. It was an hour long. It was tons of fun. It was super awesome. But unfortunately, due to an issue with Livestream, who we normally like, but it just had this weird error that we eventually reproduced even though we tested it beforehand. It didn't keep and capture the video content. So, here is Whiteboard Friday - Keyword Targeting Gets Tough all over again.
Just for those of you who are wondering and worried, in the future live Whiteboard Fridays will always be followed up by a recording of that. So, we might end up actually doing them Thursday night so you can watch Thursday after work live and tweet at us, and then Friday morning the video will be right there. In fact, Thursday night the video should be right there. With that said, let's go talk about when keyword targeting gets tough.
One of the first issues I wanted to address is when we've got multiple keywords on a single page and a lot of people worry. They sort of say, "Well, I know that I'm trying to target a bunch of different keywords. I don't know whether I should have an individual page for each one, or maybe I should have one page that targets a lot of them. How should I spread things out? What do I do with plurals? What do I do with synonyms or variations?" I think a really good rule of thumb here is to keep in mind a few things.
Number one, the intent of the users. If what users are going to find on the page is useful to those people and there are three or four or five keywords that all make sense, there are plural variations, there are synonyms, etc., and that content makes sense for those users, one page is usually the best practice.
Number two, you need to be worried about natural word usage. It's really weird to have something like keyword phrase one comma, keyword phrase two comma, keyword phrase three. Those pages you can see them getting fewer clicks in the search results. So even if you are ranking, you might not perform as well. People are less likely to link to them. For all sorts of reasons, they're just not as good for SEO from a white hat perspective. If you're a churn and burn spammer, you probably don't watch Whiteboard Friday.
Number three, combining those things when it makes sense. I really like combining words that go together and that make sense. Let me give you a good example here. I think that will really illustrate the point.
I've chosen the keyword "Batman." Maybe I've got a website about comic book characters. I've got this keyword Batman. I know I want to go after Batman comics. I want to go after Batman graphic novels. Batman comic books. Batman versus Joker. Which of these things do you think I'd put together? My sort of feeling is Batman is a global topic. It is sort of too big for anything else and it is hypercompetitive. So it'd be really tough to target other things on there. I might go with Batman as its own separate page. Just one page on the site all about the character and have links to the comics and all that kind of stuff. Batman comics and Batman comic books, those are a natural fit. You can do a really good job of crafting a title tag and a headline that go together really well. Batman comic books or Batman comics and comic books, those work really nicely together. So I can connect those. But graphic novels are a little different. I could do something like combine it if I felt like the intent was the same. People who are coming searching for graphic novels are also looking for comics, or comic fans are also looking for graphic novels. I could do something like "Batman comic books and graphic novels" or "Batman comics, graphic novels, and comic books." Those three things work pretty well together. Natural word order. Those things, I would probably combine those because I think the intent is the same. Keyword targeting can be done pretty well and effectively all in the same page.
Remember, too, that it is not just about the keyword targeting. It's about the links pointing to the page. If you've got lots of links pointing to one page, you want to leverage the power and importance of that page on the link graph to be able to get it to rank for many things. There are good reasons to try and combine stuff. The finally, Batman versus Joker, that's its own thing. That's probably its own comic book, own series. Maybe it's a movie from the 1960s. I'm not sure. But Batman versus Joker gets its own page.
On the second piece, internal and external linking, what we want to think about is, "Well, I'm worried about these issues of where I should link to different pages and how to do it." Actually, the Web has given us a really good methodology to think about this. It is sort of the breadcrumb methodology, and that follows a category like structure that search engines love and that humans are very used to. Users are going to have a good time with it as well. So, it makes sense, right. We've got the Batman page that I created. We've got our Batman comics and graphic novels page, and then our Batman versus Joker comic. Obviously, we'd have lots of detail pages and subcategory pages, potentially under these. The way to think about these is in breadcrumb format. So, on this Batman versus Joker comic page, I'd have a breadcrumb that looks like this, Batman, Batman comics, Batman versus Joker. Those links, Batman is going to point back to this topic. Batman comics and graphic novels, going to point to that one. This one is going to link up. This one is going to link down. This one is going to link one level down. So you can see that level structure creates a really nice, easy to follow thing for search engines. They know, Aha! Someone's looking for the broad Batman topic, that's my page. Someone's looking for Batman comics or Batman graphic novels, that's the guy. Someone's looking for Batman versus Joker comic, this is my guy. You can see a lot of confusion sometimes. SEOs will comment like, "Ah, jeez, this page is ranking great for this keyword, but it's not the page I wanted to rank for." This kind of structure can help with that, but there's also some cool advanced techniques and advanced strategies that we can talk about to solve particular issues. Some of these are pretty sweet.
The first one, the move it. This is when you've got a situation where the page is targeting a particular keyword - targeting Batman, targeting Batman comic and graphic novels - and you either need to move it for one reason or another or the search engine is ranking the wrong page. Maybe they're ranking a deep comic page for Batman comics and graphic novels. You go, "Ah! This is terrible." You can see this on SEOmoz right now. If you search for SEO on the front page, it's our web developers SEO cheat sheet that's ranking. It switched about three months ago from our home page. It's sort of weird. It's a useful and fine page, but it is probably not the broad topic that people are looking for when they search SEO. So, we might want to do some things around that.
One potential thing is to move that old page or to rel canonical it back to the page that you want ranking. Remember that rel canonical is really only designed for duplicate content situations. So, you should only do this if the page that is ranking is a copy of the original, it has the same content, but just isn't the one you want. Newspapers have this a lot with print versions of pages. A print version will be ranking and they go, "No, no, I don't want the print version. I want the one that shows the ads." They want to make some money.
The next one is the replace it. The idea is the old URL, the URL that is currently ranking, could use some refresher content maybe or could use an update, or you're essentially saying it's that URL that is ranking for this, but I really want this content on there. So, you can feel free to do that. Go ahead and swap out the content. Put in the new content and maybe recreate the old page at a new URL.
Let me give you a good example of this one. Every year or every couple of years for the past few, we've done our search ranking factors. Whenever we reproduce a new version we make sure it stays at the old URL seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors. That replacement, that new page, came up in 2007, 2009, 2011. A new one is coming again. We are essentially just replacing that content, and the old one is going to live at another location. It is going to live at seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors- 2005. So, by doing that, we make sure that all the links that were pointing into this continue to point into this. It ranks where it used to, and it is earning new links to that same old URL. Great, great tactic here.
Last, final one is the consolidation system. This is really when you've got content that you are potentially moving on to the page but you want to be able to directly point people to it. Yet, you think search engines are really going to appreciate having all that in one place. This is a great time to use the internal or named anchors, the hash tags. For example, if I say, "Oh, today I have a Batman comic page, a Batman comic books page, a Batman comics page, and a Batman graphic novels page. Those should really all be one." I might think about having different sections that talk about the comics themselves and the history of them, etc., current comic books that are available, graphic novels. All of those on the same page. If I want, if the user is interested in just the graphic novels, they can still link and drop to exactly this section on that page.
All right. So, hopefully, given these strategies and what we talked about today, your keyword targeting can dramatically improve and you can have these best practices to go forward with. I'm looking forward to some comments about this. I apologize again for the live version not going up. Hopefully this will help out. Take care everyone. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
2nd update on the recording: Today we learned that Livesteam was unable to record last Friday's Whiteboard Friday Live. We'll be reshooting the video tomorrow (Wednesday) and will add it to this blog post shortly thereafter. We had expected this recording would have been posted and available as soon as the live event was completed-- I apologize that this wasn't the case. You can also expect a new pre-recorded Whiteboard Friday to appear on the blog this Friday. We appreciate everyone's feedback about our first experiment and will definitely consider it when planning future live video events. -- Jamie at SEOmoz
Update on the recording: The recording of the event is not yet available due to an issue with our live video provider. We're working hard to get the video up as soon as possible, but it may not be up until Tuesday at the latest. We're sorry for any inconvenience and will take precautions to reduce the risk of this happening in the future. -- Jamie at SEOmoz
The live broadcast is now over. You can watch the re-recording of the session above.
Whiteboard Friday Live – Friday, 1/21 at 10am Pacific Standard Time
We'll do it live! For the first time ever, Whiteboard Friday will be broadcast live! Will the whiteboard fall from the wall? Will Rand go crazy? You'll have to tune in to find out!
The broadcast starts tomorrow morning at 10am PST. Rand's topic will be: "When Keyword Targeting Gets Tough, The Tough Get Whiteboard Friday". Watch the presentation live, chat with other viewers, and ask questions using the Twitter hashtag #mozlive. We'll be live for a full hour so there will be plenty of time for questions.
The live broadcast starts on this page on Friday, January 21st at:
Pacific Time: 10:00am
Eastern Time: 1:00pm
London/GMT: 6:00pm
I can't decide if I should tune in at 10 pacific, 1 eastern, or 6 GMT! oh man, I'm gonna stress about this all day.
Great Job guys! First live broadcast and no hiccups! You must be stoked! Good questions, and kept it personal with answering the funny ones too! Maybe next time have more than just Rand. Include some others from the office!
Yea there were cheers over here when it was finished, we were very happy with the outcome. :) Great idea of getting more people on there!
Cheers? I thought those were beers opening! My bad! Great job everyone went great!
Absolutely funny, gorgeous and informative Whiteboard Friday.
Looking forward to the next one! Have all a nice weekend! Petra
great job, well done, Its never as easy when its live. next stop seo.tv
I'm sure the presentation was great. But its saturday night and I can't look at it, which is when I set aside a little time to catch up on these kinds of things.
Whiteboard Friday is now whiteboard sometime and the schedule doesn't fit what I need. I like the on-demand old version format.
I'm terribly sorry about this, and we're working to get the recording up as quickly as possible.
Whether we do Whiteboard Friday live or not, it is always our goal to have a recorded Whiteboard Friday up on Friday! :) This live event was just something new and fun to try, and we have no plans to permentently change the Whiteboard Friday you're used to.
Great to see live presentation...look forward for next live!
Live whiteboard friday worked perfect for me. Although I was working and only caught parts of it.... I really enjoyed it. I look forward to watching the full video of it.
Update on the recording: The recording of the event is not yet available due to an issue with our live video provider. We're working hard to get the video up as soon as possible, but it may not be up until Tuesday at the latest. We're sorry for any inconvenience and will take precautions to reduce the risk of this happening in the future.
Keep up the great work. I don't think anyone will have an issue with this. You guys do such a wonderful job.
Shame... Probably a Law of Murphy's casa this one.
On the other hand, even though Live Events are surely interesting and good (due the Q&A added value after, as it seems was in this case), they can be a risk for one thing - IMHO - when used in a blog section: asincronicity. I am not talking about audio/video one, but on a participation level by the "readers". In fact, a live video is not surely possible to be attended by the majority of people, it does not give the opportunity to intervene with equality into the discussion and cannot allow deeper comments (they are Q&A), issues that could be enhanced by technical problems when they happen (as it is this case).
Remember that timezones complicate things. For instance 6pm GT is 7pm on Central Europe/almost all Africa time, which is - depending on the different countries:
Whenever this is usually the same time Pro Webinars takes place, the situation is different, as Webinar are Pro (smaller audience), have a very different schedule (2 per month) and a different format, while WBF are an "for all" (bigger audience) and every week and (thanks to the transcriptions) supposed to be "universally" understandable by a wider linguistically able range of people.
I imagine you already have thought all these things, as it seems by the fact you say Live WBF are not previewed as the new WBF Standard, just wanted to "resume" what probably many other mozzers are thinking about this issue.
Finally, the live streaming is something I suggest you for the SEOpro events, or for some very special sessions of the same. I am sure people who cannot afford to attend them physically (time, travel costs or simply because of no places left), would happily pay so to have that opportunity.
Ciao :)
I have just two words as a reply: Amen Brother!
As always G. you make some great points. I'm blessed living where I do that I was able to take my lunch break to watch. I even got to eat a fantastic fish and sweet corn lunch during it. I felt like I was at a dinner theatre :)
The chat functionality worked very well and all in all, the WBF was every bit as good (if not even better) than the Pro Webinars. If they continued this live trend taking Q&A for regular WBF, it would be great for all the non Pro members, but would negate one of the benefits of the Pro membership.
I'm glad I'm not management that has to make these decisions as to what to provide for free (to attract prospects) and what to provide as a benefit to Pro membership (to increase revenue)
Thanks so much for your feedback, and I couldn't agree more! :)
Our original intent was to try something new and fun see how it went. We really had (or have) no intention of replacing our standard recorded Whiteboard Friday format. I think the presentation went pretty well, ignoring that we unintentionally haven't gotten the recording up yet.
The time zone issue is something we have to consider regardless of if we're doing a PRO webinar or a live video like this. The timing of our Whiteboard Friday live test run wasn't great; for a lot of people east of the Atlantic, it was dinner time on a Friday night. We'll definitely be thinking about how we can accommodate different time zones in the coming weeks.
Whatever the time we do these events we need to always ensure we record the event and get it up as soon as the live event concludes. If we do another Whiteboard Friday Live, we've considered pre-recording the instructional portion and doing the Q&A live.
We've got some other interesting ways we've can use live videos and I'm excited to announce them in the coming months. Your idea for the livestream of the seminar is a great one, and definitely worth investigating.
Missed the live WBF but got to attend @seomom's presentation on Analytics truly live @clickasiasummit.
It surely was a pleasure meeting her in Mumbai India.
great video, good job!
Gutted I missed this but love the idea, particularly if there is a facility to provide live feedback / questioning? I'll look forward to the next one...
I'm missing something here. How do I watch the video after the event? I know it'll be something simple but I can't see it!
** I've read the comments now!**
Hey Rodney. THe following was a comment from Jamie above:
Update on the recording: The recording of the event is not yet available due to an issue with our live video provider. We're working hard to get the video up as soon as possible, but it may not be up until Tuesday at the latest. We're sorry for any inconvenience and will take precautions to reduce the risk of this happening in the future.
Thanks for the comment - I had simply missed it. Very used to clicking away on these whiteboard fridays! Just so you know I do not give you the thumbs down. Don't know why someone has done that!
I don't know what the deal with the thumbs down is. I've gotten 4 thumbs down in the last 2 hours from older comments. I'm thinking there's someone out there that doesn't like dogs and they're thumbing down each time they see one ;)
very informative video .. thanx for all the info.. keep up the good work . :)
The video was literally the aweosme Rand. I liked it. The way in which you had described the importance of keywords ona page was the impressive one. The best thing i liked in a a video is that you had coverd the all the major points which are so much important from the SEO point of view.The advaced strategies & the internal & external linking points that were described was the impressive one. I am sure that this video will help us a lot.
thanks nice post ..
Regads
Sutopo
I just loved it... and the best part i liked is replacing the old content with the new... thanks... helped me a lot..
A great example of a site that uses internal anchor links to jump around content on the same page is Wiki!
Such a shame the original wasn't recorded. Here's hoping you can recapture the magic when you re-record it. I only got to see about 5 minutes of the live broadcast before life intervened but what I saw looked good so I'm really looking forward to seeing the reshot version.
Jamie! Ahhhhhh! I can't believe it. The one time I get a public shout out from Rand and I have no recorded proof! Arrrrrgh! Talk about Murphy's law being everywhere! [heavy sigh]
I'm sure it won't be the only time!
Hey everyone the re-recorded version of the Whiteboard Friday is now up. We lost the original recording sadly. :(
Its been over 12hrs I would have figured the video would have been posted by now consindering its from livestream.com.
Please make a blog post when the recording is posted please.
thanks.
Hi Digideth, the video being processed by Livesteam.com, and we'll have it up as soon as possible!
thanks.
Just use to other people using Livestream and their videos are up almost instantly after the live feed ends.
That's normally the case, but they seemed to have had difficulty processing our video-- we're working with them to resolve. Thanks for your patience.
Is anyone else having trouble viewing the playback? I keep clicking the PLAY button but nothing is happening. Is it a problem with Firefox?
The video isn't up yet, will be soon.
Good idea! Glad to see you live.
I'm looking forward to it!
Looking forward to this, will be awesome!
Ha, damn, eight hours is a crappy time difference! I wish I could be around to watch live, but have to be out and about by six... good luck! I'll watch it later on :)
Friday night drinks I take it? I am in the same boat unfortunately. If it were an hour previous it would be perfect.
hah, great idea, push the boundaries!
A big thumb up for the initiative! Let's hope there won't be techniqual issues. I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure Rand will do a great job, as all the SEOMoz team does for a good years, now :) Good luck!
Quite Excited ..
Gonna miss this one - 6pm GMT on a Friday is a sacred time :)
Good luck though. Great to see some new ideas!
Wish I could make this, but I have a lunch and client meeting scheduled in the time slot.
I'll be sure to watch the recorded though.
Break a leg rand.
I feel bad for abandoning Firefox now... he was adorable! Thanks to everyone who participated.
I Guess I’ll have to wait until Monday to see this week’s white board FRIDAY.
Weren't you there during the LIVE version?
Only for the last 10 minutes.
I'm still trying to work out the benefits of having a live whiteboard Friday, especially when the negative aspects outweigh the positives.
Here are some issues that I found:
· Out of sync (huge distraction)
· Video was slightly jumping every few seconds, but this could have been from my internet connection.
· It’s now Saturday, and the video is not accessible.
· I now have to make plans to be here next Friday evening.
So what about the positives? I can’t think of any, can you?
P.S. It would make my day if someone gave Rand a laxative next week.
@WizBit It sounds to me like the negative aspects you experienced were all due to your inability to view the WBF. The video quality for me was stellar, and I was able to view the entire WBF without a glitch. So if you weren't able to view it, then it's totally understandable that you weren't able to see the benefits.
Aside from the subject matter, (which for me was as timely as it could get) one of the biggest positives was the ability to ask questions either via the chat functionality or via twitter. There was a huge chunk of time devoted to the Q&A and a lot of questions were addressed.
@Rand re; the laxative comment, I couldn't disagree more with WizBit. I was amazed at how smooth the entire presentation was. I even sent some tweets to your staff during it marveling that you were doing so well live. I bet that 99.999% of my fellow viewers would agree with me.
I think perhaps if anyone needed a laxative, it was WizBit (sorry WizBIt, but really man, you came across as super cranky)
edit: @WizBIt I still gave you a thumbs up dude 'cuz you took the time and energy to comment
Goodnewscowboy,
So the only benefit for you was that you could ask a question?
Is there a problem asking questions in the comments of a normal WBF? If you have not had questions answered in the past then maybe the seomoz staff should do a better job, but I don’t think that is the case.
I really don’t know what the problem is. All I did was outline the negatives, is that not appreciated?
I might as well change my name to MR Cranky because you’ve seen nothing yet.
Nice to dialogue with you WizBit. Unfortunately, my wife has used the expression Mr. Cranky with me so much that I've already established the brand :-p
I think it's great that you mentioned the problems you had., It helps the SEOmoz staff sort things out better and that in turn helps everyone. But it sounded like the overarching problem you had was due to the fact that you were unable to view the WBF properly (out of sync, jumpy video, etc.) and that might have just been a connectivity issue at your end.
Not having access to it over the weekend was a very fair negative, but it sounds like it was out of the moz's control.
As far as the benefits to me, (at least for this WBF) I'll list them:
1) Being live had a certain "cool" factor to it. Sort of like the difference between listening to a studio album or seeing your favorite band live.
2) Having a live explanation complete with whiteboard sketches to answer the questions beats text answers in the comments.
3) Being live made me feel like I was part of the humor going on in the studio
4) Being able to chat with other mozzers real time made for fun networking
5) The topic was unbelievably timely as I had some issues with the site I'm working on now that were directly addressed during the initial presentation
and I'll throw in a bonus benefit
6) The street cred I achieved with my wife when I got the shout out from Rand. ;-)
I hope I didn't offend you when I called you cranky. I was trying to be tongue in cheek and I apologize most sincerely. One of the things I love the most about the moz is the lack of flame throwing and the sense of community here.
I really hope you stick around and continue commenting WizBIt.
"I really hope you stick around and continue commenting WizBIt."
Don't worry, I know where im not wanted thank you.
You will not be hearing from me again.
Completely empathize with your frustrations. I don't know if/when we'll do another one live, but we're going to be thinking carefully about how these affect everyone and be as accommodating as possible to everyone.
Thanks for the feedback.
p.s. laxative? Did I seem too uptight? I can try to loosen up more in the future - the 1 hour sessions are certainly a bit more challenging than the 5-10 minute segments.
Rand, I really hope the 'if/when' will be revised to 'soon', and that the seoMoz team will not be put off running more of these. Huge amounts of creative and mental energy go into the launch of these kinds of projects, and I know it can be a little deflating when the initial feedback isn't entirely upbeat.
Although there are some frustrations expressed by some who did/did not see the WBF, I'm certain that most of those who watched the 'cast will have been impressed, and other comments herein make it clear that the delay getting the recorded video live is due to an initial technical glitch rather than representing your intended service level, so you guys deserve to be given a little slack IMHO.
As well as being informative, Friday's live webcast was plain good fun, and it struck me that watching WBF live was like the difference between watching televised sports live rather than pre-recorded - that sense of a shared event.
I'm in the UK, so I watched at 6pm before heading to the pub; therefore the only downside for me was that I remained in seo geek mode for the first few hours; I sometimes forget that many of my friends know little, and want to know little, about SEO :)
Informative, thought provoking and entertaining, lets have more please.
Great webinar and really looking forward to next week.
If you guys answered some of the questions that wern't covered live that would be the icing!
I wish Rand would talk more about the Google Place Local Listing
When will the recorded video get posted?
Just one question: Will there be a transcript?
Great question. Yes, there will be. The recorded video will appear on the blog later today, and the transcript will be added as soon as it's completed.
Update: As noted at the top of the blog post, we've had some difficulty getting the recording up on Friday as we intended. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Will there be a panel of judges providing scores and feedback on rands' presentation?
It was a great WBF... although I watched it live, I'm looking forward for the recorded version, because Rand has said a lot of great stuff.. as he always does;) Well done, SEOMoz team! I forgot to add one more thing.. the video and sound quality were wonderful...
Thanks iulian! We've done a lot of work to get the audio and video as high quality as possible. Great to hear you liked it!
Great post, thans Alot,