video

There are 7 posts tagged video (this is page 1 of 2).

Reading Best of inbound: February and March

February

Complete list of link building strategies
This is just insane – tons of different strategies and you can even filter them!

The New SEO Process

  • Opportunity Discovery: What opportunities arise with regard to:
    • Business Objectives – what’s the goal?
    • Market research, keyword research, site audit, etc.
  • Content Strategy
    • Ideation
    • Content build
  • Technical Development
  • Social Strategy
    • Link strategy
    • PR
    • Contests, Events, Social Media
  • Measurement
  • Optimization

Link Building resources
an other insane list

Quick Queries For Link Wins

  • Do you have sponsored something but didn’t get backlinks?
  • Find sponsorships under $100, that give you a backlink
  • Find interviews you did
  • Do the same for your competition!

Broken Link Building Guide: From Noob to Novice

  • Pointing out dead links on an other site and recommending others
  • Find broken links: look for high authority sites and high authority pages
  • Contact owner but without any urls in the initial mail if possible
  • Get Link!
  • 301 Redirect Broken Link: If a 301 exists that points to an other location

Buying Links is Shallow, Short-Term Thinking. Buying Blogs? Now that’s a Strategy.

  • Look for blogs in your niche (which may covered you)
  • Propose a monthly payment and a lump-sum at the end of a 3 year period
  • The blog will then move to your domain – but you won’t influence the writings
  • You will help to boost the traffic, improve the UX and design

Findings about how graphics affect conversions

  • Images can reduce readership
  • Try to put the image above the fold
  • Headlines below an image are 10% more read than above the image
  • 80% of people read headlines
  • Captions are read 300% more than body -> try to catch attention and bring the reader back into the text
  • Don’t break the left margin
  • Images without clear relevance are useless
  • Avoid obvious stock photos, poor quality images and oversized faces

March

Link Building Tools We Use at Distilled
Distilled is one of the finest online agencies and Will Critchlow lists some great tools they use.

Incorporating video into your link building strategy

  • You can start for about $1000 producing videos
  • Look for students or graduates from film schools
  • Video in content almost triples the avg. number of links
  • Video is a form not a content – if a video is better than text, make a video
  • If your videos don’t provide value, then they are useless
  • Film in high quality – high quality audio is the most important
  • Create (if feasible) indexable transcripts
  • Make sure that you include a link to your site in the embed code
  • Create Movie schemas and video sitemaps for better indexing

AuthorRank

  • Reputation as a content creator – could influence the SERPs
  • Different Ranks for different topics
  • Google+ as a identify platform and rel=author as your signature
  • AuthorRank could be influenced by shares, time, comments, etc.

How Sitelinks are quietly costing you conversions

  • Under certain circumstances google may swaps your website for a sitelink
  • Monitor analytics and webmaster tools frequently to avoid some problems

Google Places Ranking Factors

  • Places math broader categories if available; e.g. pizza => restaurant
  • Business name is matched: “Alfonso’s pizza” works better than “Alfonso’s Restaurant” for “pizza”
  • 5+ reviews help
  • Category term in reviews helps
  • The physical address is not extremely important but influences the results
  • Average review score matters: score of 1 penalizes heavily

How to Uncover 100s of New Longtail Keywords in Minutes

  • ubersuggest uses google suggest to get new keywords
  • Use these keywords to get even more longtail keywords
  • Now you can add search volume, competition, etc. and work with them

How to rank product pages for SEO

  • Limit global navs -> exploit categories
  • Clear anchor texts
  • Canonical links
  • Similar pages should be interconnected
  • Minimize cross-category links
  • Related products work well: 5 – 10 max
  • Short urls
  • Keep product categories alive

Using a Glossary to Rank and Build Links

  • Helps providing internal keywords
  • Can get you inbound links
  • Enter public resource lists
  • People maybe going to quote you
  • My tip: Find people how search for definitions and prove it

SEO Experts discuss link building for affiliates

  • Interesting, unique product pages: videos, copy, images, comments
  • Guest blogging on vertical and horizontal reach
  • Create a good about us page
  • Ask the product provider if they use your review as a testimonial
  • Create infographics / widgets
  • Ego bait, interviews and crowdsourcing can help you to produce more content
  • Get active in your product’s community
  • Create useful press releases
  • Blog commenting
  • Compare your product with competitors
  • Be as unbiased as possible

Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing
Incredible extensive post about creating a editorial calendar – take a look and be amazed!

Video: Successful Web Analytics Approaches by Avinash Kaushik

Again a great video, this time about Web Analytics by Avinash Kaushik. I just love his no-BS style.

  • Ask the metric: So what? Three times, if it don’t give an action it’s useless
  • Data should drive action
  • Give people the information they need – don’t send them everything => no death by data
  • Home pages of websites, are no longer the home page you want
    • Where do people come from?
    • What are they looking for?
  • Context matters: previous months, years, etc.
  • Relative numbers more important than absolute numbers
  • Compare different metrics, e.g. conversion rate and page views
  • non e-commerce sites:
    • averages hide truth effectively
    • How often do they visit?
    • How recent did they visit?
    • Depths of visit
    • => Understand the value: Loyalty
  • Segment people
  • Survey people: What do they think about the content?
  • Bounce rate: Came and left
    • Segment by source, entry-page, landing pages, etc.

Rules for Revolutionaries

  • 10/90 Rule: $10 Tools, $90 People: Understand Data & Business, Able to analyze => to extract value
  • Reporting is not analysis: Reporting -> provide data; Analysis -> prove insights
  • Data Quality can be low, but is still better than other data
  • Faith-based initiative: e.g. magazine ad without tracking
  • Make decisions, don’t argue about the quality of the data
  • Over time understand why quality is different -> confidence will get better

    Conclusion

  • Decision making is a journey, not a destination
  • => Put some level of process in place, mostly for tasks, e.g. what happens to implement a test, etc.
  • if HiPPo (highest paid person’s opinion) makes the most decisions
  • => make experiments
  • Learn to be wrong, quickly
  • => You probably don’t know what your customers want
  • => Experimentation

Cracking Google’s reCaptcha

Recently, I checked some Defcon presentations and stumbled upon this beauty. It’s a presentation about cracking Google’s voice captcha by the guys of the Defcon Group 949.

Firstly, you can get more information, the code, corpus, etc. on their project page.
The video isn’t directly from one of the Defcons but from LayerOne.

Let’s start with the summary:

  • words were distinguishable because of differing frequencies to the background noise
  • they collected about 50k samples and labeled them by hand
  • Google used only 58 words
  • Two primary methods for used:
    • pHash: provides similar hashes for similar “media” files
    • Neural networks with lots of input nodes
  • Different NNs and pHash was combined and the best performing ensemble was about 12 methods long
  • Audio captchas were phoenetic based instead of spelling based captcha (e.g. blu and blue are the same)
  • This allowed for mashing:
    • Four and Fork => Fourk matches both
    • Seven and Oven => Soven
  • Then they wrote an automatic merge finder which found dozens of mashings
    • the finder took two random words, calculated the Levenshtein distance and created a new string => small distance between parent strings
  • Aftewards, they used contextual merging based on probability on top words from NN
  • Solving one captcha takes about 2sec. They biggest bottleneck was internet speed
  • As human 8 sec audio alone

There were two systems. An old one, which could be activated if JS was disabled, which included 2 voices and 10 digits and the new one with one voice and 58 words. There was some research done on the old system by Stanford and CMU. Stanford achieved about 1.3% accuracy, CMU about 58%. These guys achieved, on the newer system, 99.1% accuracy. Just amazing! However, Google changed the system a few hours before their presentation and their accuracy dropped down to 0%.

There were about 20 – 25 million audio aptchas, i.e. if you solve enough you get duplicates. They created a lookup table which provided 61% accuracy in about 0.005 seconds.

The countermeasure by Google consisted of the following:

  • Same frequencies for words and background noise => makes it harder to split words
  • 10 instead of 5 words per captcha
  • 25 seconds in stead of 8 seconds in length
  • added new words
  • background noise consists now of actual English words instead of reverse radio broadcast

The big problem of this countermeasure is that humans got about 30% success rate. Reminds me of Rapidshare’s infamous cat captchas.

Great talk, extremely interesting. Especially, interesting is that they show again that it doesn’t really matter if you use NNs, SVMs or RBM for prediction but that the work before that, i.e. classification by hand, feature extraction and learning about the system (mashing), and after that, i.e. creating ensembles is much more important than using the latest method.

How to Take your Start-Up to the Next Level What is it about? Aaron Patzer, founder of mint.com, tal

How to Take your Start-Up to the Next Level

How to Take your Start-Up to the Next Level from Carsonified on Vimeo.

What is it about?

Aaron Patzer, founder of mint.com, talks about how he got from an idea to $170 million in just three year.

What can I learn?

Don’t be secretive: Aarons first idea was a goal setting software. Instead of building it in stealth mode, he decided to talk to people. Only about one in eighty of these people found this idea appealing, so he discarded it. Later he hasn’t gone secretive. He showed mint’s UI to lots of people and optimized it over time.

Build a prototype: If you are raising money, looking for customers or hiring people, a prototype is real advantage. People can actually see your idea in action, click around and feel the experience. Would you rather listen to a 10 minutes sales pitch or playing around 10 minutes with a new software?

Leverage your success: If you are once in the news, try to stay there. Mint got a pretty clever idea. They gave away free mint mojitos at the Techcrunch 40 and were eventually elected as people’s choice. Then they talked to other journalists if they won’t want to interview the people’s choice winner. And so on.

(via Carsonified)