Since the majority of people have access to information at their fingertips, the need for real-time has become increasingly popular. As a result, real-time search engines are popping up everywhere to try to fulfill this need.

WebProNews spoke with Jack Moffitt, the CTO for Collecta, about the challenges these real-time engines face. The main idea behind real-time search engines is getting data as soon as it is published. Moffitt says this is challenge for three reasons.

First of all, it’s a challenge because the real-time engines have to convince publishers to send them their data. Secondly, they have to make sure that they get the data quickly. In other words, real-time search engines need publishers to push content to them instead of pulling it themselves.

The third reason it is a challenge is due to user privacy issues. Facebook data, for instance, is private, which means Collecta and other real-time engines cannot use it. In addition, there is the issue of users changing their minds about their data. Sometimes users go back and delete their data or decide to make it private. This creates a challenge for real-time search engines since technologies that distribute these types of action do not exist.

Despite these challenges, real-time search engines are growing in value and will only improve with time with the introduction of new tools and developments.

Posted by randfish

One of the most common questions we receive here at SEOmoz is "What’s the best way to learn SEO?" There are many ways to answer, but in this post, I’m going to cover the responses I give most often and those I’ve seen have the most success. But, before I describe each of these, it pays to understand that not all learning methodologies are the same in style, substance or where they can take you. If you’re completely new to SEO, some of these won’t be appropriate and if you’re already a veteran, others won’t teach you much you don’t already know.

Thus, let’s start with a chart of relative knowledge/experience levels (similar to this old/outdated post on levels of knowledge):

Now that we have some context, let’s dive in to the ways I recommend learning SEO. For each, I’ve provided a description of the process, the ideal starting level(s) (and where you can expect to reach via that methodology) and a list of resources with my notes.

#1 – Free Online Guides

A number of free guides, eBooks and downloadable PDFs exist on the web to help provide insight into SEO. Some are highly comprehensive while others touch only lightly on the topic. The key to being successful with this process is to identify guides that are both up-to-date and accurate in their recommendations. No council exists to regulate the dispersal of SEO information and thus, a few proprietors of free guides can lead you down incomplete or even dead wrong paths.

Recommended for: New to SEO, Aspirant, Journeyman

List of Resources:

• SEOmoz’s Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO (just updated for 2010)
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Guide for Bloggers
• Google’s Starter Guide for Webmasters
• Danny’s Checklist for Learning SEO

Time Investment / Commitment Required: 1-3 hours should get you through any of the guides above

#2 – Published Literary Works

For those who like to curl up with a book, a number of authors/publishers have come out with solid resources in the past couple years. Books have a unique advantage over online guides in that they’re often better written, more carefully edited and can be more easily judged on the reputation of the authors/publishers. Conversely, they are hard to update (even in the book I wrote last year, a few links and references are already broken) and thus, don’t always contain the most up-to-date information.

Recommended for: New to SEO, Aspirant, Journeyman

List of Resources:

• Inbound Marketing by Dharmesh Shah & Brian Halligan
• Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing by Kris Jones
• Search Engine Optimization Secrets by Danny Dover
• Marketing in the Age of Google by Vanessa Fox
• Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grapone & Gradiva Couzin
• The Art of SEO by Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola, Eric Enge & Stephan Spencer

Time Investment / Commitment Required: The largest of these is ~450 pages, which might take between 4-8 hours depending on how fast you read

#3 – Blogs, Forums & Search Communities

In my opinion, everyone learning SEO can garner value from discovering 3-5 favorite sources of information online and keeping up to date with each on a daily or weekly basis. Forums and blogs pump out a tremendous quantity of content, but just by browsing the headlines and reading teh stories that stand out, you can get exposure to strategies, techniques, news and trends that would otherwise be difficulty to stumble on by yourself.

Many SEOs (myself included) first learned the practice almost entirely through contributions, questions and threads on industry blogs & forums. Today, I’d suggest starting with a base from a free guide or book, then diving into the communities to stay sharp and get individual questions answered. I’ve provided a few of my personal favorite resources below, but will be working on a more comprehensive list in the near future.

Recommended for: All

List of Resources:

• Forums / Q+A
  • Cre8asite Forums
  • SearchEngineWatch Forums
  • Onstartups Answers (SEO)
  • Quora (SEO)
• Blogs
  • Search Engine Land
  • Search Engine Roundtable
  • Search Engine Journal
  • Performable Blog
  • Conversation Marketing
  • Distilled Blog
• Other
  • SEO Alltop
  • Delicious SEO Tags
  • Techmeme

Time Investment / Commitment Required: 30-45 minutes per day or 90 minutes per week (if you aggregate your time into a single slot)

#4 – Building Sites & Earning Rankings

Many in the SEO field will say that building your own sites and practicing SEO in the real world is the only way to learn. I disagree with that message, but I do concur that it’s possibly the most crucial step to advancing your career and abilities.

My view is that if, prior to building a site and attempting to earn some rankings, you have a great mental model of the field, you can build a truly defensible strategy for your site(s). If you simply register a domain that sounds nifty and start trying to rank for a keyword you think is popular, you can get a very warped sense for how to do SEO and what matters in the short, medium and long run. At the very least, read a free guide and engage a bit on some of the online communities.

Once you’ve got a base of knowledge, building a site is the next logical step. I strongly suggest starting small and preferrably with a topic that you’re personally passionate about rather than one that just has high AdSense payouts. I’ll recommend a number of options for building/hosting below, but if you have the technical know-how to configure your own server and write from scratch, that’s a perfectly reasonable alternative (just make sure it’s not too time consuming to leave room for some actual SEO).

Recommended for: Aspirant, Journeyman, Authority

List of Resources:

• Posterous
• Page.ly
• WordPress
• Tumblr
• SquareSpace

Time Investment / Commitment Required: A minimum of 4-5 hours for setup and creation of initial content, and more likely 40-50 hours to produce something high quality and robust and conduct initial off-site SEO/marketing efforts.

#5 – Conferences & Events

If you’re hungry to learn SEO in person, see real life examples and hear stories from the front lines (as well as meeting the practitioners and evangelists), getting out to events is an excellent next step. The last few years has seen an explosion in the quantity and variety of events in the field and many have different foci and target audiences, so be sure to choose the right one for accomplishing your goals. Many of the large conferences are focused on drawing out discussion around topics, advancing the discourse in the field and promoting networking while some smaller events are more specifically geared to pure education or intimate networking.

Recommended for: Journeyman and Above

List of Resources (in order of upcoming dates):

• Blueglass Los Angeles - July 19-20
• SES San Francisco - August 16-20
• SEOmoz PRO Seattle - August 30-31
• SMX East New York - October 4-6
• Inbound Marketing Summit Boston - October 6-7

Time Investment / Commitment Required: Typically 2-4 days plus travel time

#6 – Online Classes

The online online learning series I’m familiar with in this category is Market Motive, but they’re impressive enough to warrant both a category of their own and a recommendation. Founded by Michael Stebbins and John Marshall (who previously founded & sold ClickTracks) along with Avinash Kaushik, Todd Malicoat, Bryan Eisenberg and more, the staff is a who’s who of Internet marketing. When this many great brains get together, the results are smashing. Market Motive combines webinars, phone calls, coursework and more into a comprehensive curriculum. They end the series with a dissertation defense given over the phone and only passing candidates earn certification.

I’ve personally been on a few calls with early entrants and master certification candidates and been seriously impressed. Since I’m recommending them so highly, I connected with the folks at Market Motive, and they’ve put together a discount  for moz readers. You can sign up for MarketMotive using the code "SMZ6TOOLSMC" and get $600 off their master certification course + 3 months of SEOmoz PRO membership FREE. But, make sure to do it in the next 5 days as the upcoming master certication course starts on July 19th.

Recommended for: New to SEO, Aspirant, Journeyman and Authorities/Gurus seeking formal, recognized certification

List of Resources:

•  Market Motive

Time Investment / Commitment Required: Over the course of 90 days, this is a 10-20 hour per week commitment, possibly more when cramming for the dissertation.

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The field is certainly much richer with options than when I began, but as we know from the science of conversion, more choices don’t always indicate more actions. Hopefully, the recommendations above have helped to give you a starting point. I’d love to hear from you in the comments about where and how you learned SEO and what you’d recommend to others.

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Semantic search is one of those terms that people are throwing around a lot lately, but it is raising a lot of questions. For instance, what exactly is semantic search? Although the term itself is still being defined, Gil Elbaz of Factual tells WebProNews that it is about structured data and how search engines can make use of all this data.

As he explains, this data could be in the form of rows and columns and databases. There are, however, many challenges for the search engines. While traditional search engines do a great job of crawling the information on the Web, it is hard for them to understand the human brain and provide all the right answers for users.

In actuality, the traditional search engines could be called semantic engines since they have tried to make some structure of the Web. Fortunately, there are innovations such as microformats and databases that help publishers explain their information, which helps the engines. For example, Factual even provides databases and tools to help publishers build structured data.

In the end, the actual meaning of “semantic search” is still up for debate. Elbaz did say, “There’s no semantic search; it’s search. It’s getting the user exactly what they want.”

How do you define semantic search?

It’s been a couple of days since we launched the 2nd edition of ProBlogger the book and I’m hearing from many of readers who bought a copy that they’re finding parcels with it enclosed in their mail boxes.

The above video was produced by our publishers (Wiley) and is both a preview of the book but also holds some tips for bloggers from my co-author, Chris Garrett and I (filmed in Austin earlier in the year – one of the few times Chris and I have met in person).

In it we talk about some of the new stuff in the book but also talk about the challenges and benefits of blogging as well as each sharing 3-4 tips for bloggers wanting to make a living from the medium. View the video at full size here.

Bonuses for Owners of the Book

In my post earlier in the week when I launched the 2nd edition I mentioned some bonuses for those who buy it yet I failed to mention what they were. There are a growing numbers of bonuses included.

The bonus area includes:

• a number of interviews with bloggers making a living from blogging
• a video on installing WordPress
• a pdf report with 102 headline ideas for posts
• a pdf on blog traffic strategy.

Chris and I will be recording a few others in the coming week to add to this list. There are details on how to get access to the bonuses in the book itself.

If you don’t yet have a copy – it’s just $16.49 on Amazon.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

More on Why You Need ProBlogger the Book [Video Tips and Bonuses]

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The publishing industry has changed dramatically over the past few years and will continue to do so moving forward. As a result, traditional journalists are being forced to re-invent the industry. At SXSW, WebProNews spoke with Joran Oppelt and Stephen Hammill of Creative Loafing about what they are doing to save their alt-weekly newspapers.

As an experiment, Creative Loafing redesigned its Tampa alt-weekly website and brought in a new contributor model with community journalists. They recruited people that didn’t have a lot of professional training but people that were passionate.

The recruits covered local events and news and would sent their content to the professional writers. These professionals would then edit the content and put it on the site. In the end, Creative Loafing’s new strategy worked.

In order to be successful, Creative Loafing had to evolve with the changing times. Hammill says that content producers have to realize that the economic model that formerly provided revenue to newspapers, magazines, and alt-weeklies is not coming back. As a result, he advises content producers to find new sources of revenue by utilizing partnerships, sponsorships, and social media.

Oppelt adds his advice for content producers saying, “You cannot withstand change – you have to change.” He also says that publishers should re-evaluate their business model and staff.

What are you doing to adapt to this new era of publishing?

Today I want to share a powerful principle of successful blogging… that I wish I was better at.

Accessibility.

What I Know

One of the reasons I was attracted to blogging as both a blog reader and as a blogger was the opportunity I saw it opening up for conversation and interaction between people sharing common interests. To be able to discover others to learn from is a wonderful thing – but that learning can be all the richer if it is interactive – where the person sharing their ideas makes themselves contactable.

As I look back on the growth of my own blogs over the past 8 or so years I certainly have benefited by putting myself ‘out there’ for people to contact. At different times I’ve done this by promoting everything from my email address, to my cell phone number, to my instant messaging details, to my social media accounts etc.

The results of being so accessible have been – in the main – very beneficial. It has deepened my relationships with readers, opened the doors for contact from journalists, other bloggers, publishers, potential business partners, event organizers and many others. Many of the opportunities that I’ve taken over the years to expand what I do have arisen simply out of being accessible.

It is well worth working hard on being accessible and interactive with your readers. It’s not easy – but the benefits will well outweigh the costs.

What I don’t Know

The problem with being accessible is of course that it is challenging to scale up as your blog grows. In fact almost every popular blogger that I’ve met have told me that this is amongst their biggest problems. The weight of incoming comments, email and social media messages can become quite overwhelming – some days I personally feel quite overwhelmed by it.

Please don’t hear me as complaining – it’s a challenge but it’s also great – however I’m just not sure how to scale it (or if it really can be).

Each blogger I’ve chatted with about the challenge has dealt with it in different ways.

• Leo from Zen habits switched off comments and gave up on email (he did this for numerous reasons – he is a minimalist after all).
• Gary Vaynerchuck has been famous for answering every email he gets (although managed expectations of those who emailed him by auto-responding to emails with a video explaining how many emails he gets and how long it takes to reply – interestingly he’s recently said he’s changing his approach)
• People like Timothy Ferriss preach about the power of outsourcing and minimizing how much time one spends on things like email.

Other bloggers use a variety of tools to manage their communications, hire a teams of people to assist and use time management and organization philosophies to streamline their workflow.

What I Do

My approach is not perfect – it is something that I need to improve and on many days fail at miserably. Having said that – here’s what I’ve been doing:

• Limit the points of contact – as mentioned above, I used to put my cell number, IM accounts, email address and more on my contact page. While this had some benefits it also made things disorganized and messy. It also became unmanageable. These days I attempt to funnel people to my contact form and Twitter account as primary places for contact/interaction.
• Outsourcing – I don’t outsource much but do have some help with comment and forum moderation. I have a number of people help with this. They don’t ever comment in my name but do, when needed, let me know where there is something I need to address and comment on personally.
• Maximize the impact of personal contact – one of the best things that I do is try to get on Ustream for live video streaming on a semi-regular basis. I find that this type of contact is great because it allows individuals to make contact but because it is in a public setting my answers are heard by many. I find this more productive than one on one communication (email). In a similar way I try to use some of my private email communications as a basis for blog posts (with permission of the person of course).
• Conferences – the best part of going to live events is that you get to meet people face to face. Getting to Blog World or South by South West (the two US based conferences that I try to get to) has been invaluable to me on this front. Each time I go it allows me to have personal face to face contact with hundreds of people.
• Boundaries – in the early days of my blogging when I didn’t have much demand for my time I was able to put myself out there fairly liberally and without any real restrictions. As things have grown I’ve found it necessary to pull back. I don’t like this but I’ve found for my own sanity (I’m an introvert and need to watch my energy levels when I’m interacting with people too much) but also my own productivity that I need to set boundaries around when and where I’m contactable.

It is certainly not easy and I’ve not arrived yet. I’ve resisted outsourcing too much of this because I want to retain a personal approach – however every day the unanswered emails and messages that I receive grows and I’m approaching a point where I think I’ll need to get some help on this – after all some contact is better than none (or is it?)

Do Your Best – Some Last Tips

Lets come back to what I know – there are many benefits from being accessible so I would encourage bloggers to find ways to do it. A few quick last tips:

• Set up a contact form on your blog. This is better than an email address as it keeps your email private from spammers.
• Set up good expectations with readers – try to communicate on your contact page how you prefer to be contacted and what kind of response people might expect to get. If you can’t answer every email, try to graciously communicate that. If you answer them within 24 hours, let people know that too.
• Direct people to where you’re most interactive – if you have a variety of social media accounts but are more active on one than others – let people know this. Again it is about setting up good expectations and funneling people to where you are most present and more likely to interact.

What tips would you add on being accessible to readers? How do you approach it?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Making Yourself Accessible to Readers

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What is legally classified as Fair Use? It’s a question that is puzzling to many. With the number of content producers increasing as a result of the Internet, it is even more important that the issue of Fair Use is understood.

To clarify, WebProNews spoke with Pat Aufderheide, the Executive Director for the Center of Social Media at American University, and Attorney Michael Donaldson of Donaldson & Callif. According to Aufderheide, Fair Use is a part of copyright law that gives people the right to use other people’s copyrighted material without licensing it, paying for it, or even asking permission for it. However, there are circumstances in which Fair Use is misused.

As Donaldson explains, Fair Use is rooted in the First Amendment. He says, “If you keep in mind the First Amendment origins of Fair Use, you’ll have a good starting point.”

If your argument of Fair Use is tested in court, judges will ask if material was used in a way that was different from the original, and if the material was used in a way to produce a profit. To be legal, it must be used in a free speech way and not a way that takes market value from the original.

Bloggers often receive grief from mass media in regards to quotes and other material. Some of the grief is merited since some bloggers simply copy and paste an article into their blog. While the law is probably not in favor of this usage, bloggers do have the right to pull some quotes, images, and video from publishers, as long as they are used in the right context.

Although the law is vague, Aufderheide says, “I don’t think this is such a thorny area of expression as it might seem..”

How do you interpret Fair Use?

Guest post by Annabel Candy from Get In the Hot Spot

Like a lot of people I set up my blog as an experiment. I wanted to raise my profile as a writer and build up a blog which publishers would see as a useful marketing tool.

Realising how important it was to commit to blogging I vowed to blog for a year and, because I work best with a goal in mind, I set myself the challenge of getting 1000 subscribers after a year blogging with my deadline the end of March 2010.

I picked 1000 subscribers as my goal because I read somewhere that this is the amount of subscribers a writer needs on their blog to get publishers interested. I know 1000 doesn’t sound like a lot when you look at Problogger’s RSS count, but I thought it was a number that was both achievable and challenging.

The point of an experiment is to find out what works and what doesn’t and from that point of view my experiment has been a successful one.

I started blogging in about March 2009 and there are a lot of mistakes I made during my first year of blogging that I’ll do differently next time I set up a blog.

My Classic Blogging Mistakes





1. I changed my topic after 4 months


Although I spent a lot of time thinking about what to write about in my blog I still got it wrong. In the beginning I focused on writing a blog for people who want to move overseas but I soon ran out of steam. It was a subject I knew a lot about and loved but after about 4 months it just didn’t interest me enough to keep me writing about it three times a week.

In the end my blog topic really chose itself broadening naturally to self improvement with the focus on helping people live their dream. Since many people have the same dream of travel and writing as me I had a good angle and since I’ve been interested in travel, writing and self improvement for as long as I can remember it wasn’t something I’d ever lose interest in or run out of things to write about.

As you can see from my Feedburner stats even after about 6 months of blogging in August 2009 I’d only got about 43 subscribers.

It was depressing but I’d made a promise to stick with blogging so I persevered. I even wrote a guest post for Problogger called Getting Over The Blogger’s 6 Month Itch telling other bloggers why they needed to stick with it too.

2. I only got my own domain name after 6 months of blogging

Because my blog was an experiment I didn’t buy my own domain name or host the blog myself, it was just hosted by WordPress.

In August 2009 I got my own domain name and started hosting my blog there. That month I doubled my subscribers from 37 on August 1st to 83 on August 30th. Maybe readers started taking my blog more seriously now I was.

3. I never invested in graphic design

My husband and I threw together the look and feel of it based around the invitation for a leaving party we had in 2007. We’re now working with a graphic designer to get a professional look for the blog. It will be interesting to see if that helps convert more subscribers but I’ll never know how many potential readers and subscribers I’ve lost this year by not investing in graphic design at the beginning.

4. I used Feedburner for my email newsletters


There were two main problems with using Feedburner for email subscriptions. First it sent an email every time I posted which was overkill when I was posting three times a week. Secondly the emails were unbranded and ugly.
This February I switched to a different way of managing my email subscribers. If you look at the Feedburner graph that’s when there’s a drop off in subscribers because the email subscribers were being recorded on MailChimp. It lets me send out branded emails and is free if you have less than 500 email subscribers. I have a feeling choosing MailChimp could have been another mistake as all the professionals recommend Aweber so once again my penny pinching could have cost me subscribers but at least my email newsletters only gets sent when I want them to, not every time my blog is updated. I can always switch to Aweber but if that happens I’ll probably waste a of time changing over.

So How Did I Get 1000 Subscribers?

Well, actually I’ve only got 923 so far (575 by RSS feed and 358 by email) at the time of writing I still have 16 days until my self-imposed deadline. I’m fairly confident I’ll make it to 1000 and if I don’t I believe in rounding up so anything over 950 will do the job.

Here’s how I did it:

1. I kept going for the whole year even when it looked as if I’d never make it.
2. I wrote guest posts.
3. Even when my guest posts were rejected by my blogging heros I wrote more posts and tried again until they accepted one. I finally succeeded in November 2009 with guest posts on Problogger and Zen Habits. If you look at the graph again you can see a huge jump in subscribers from 117 on November 1st to 478 at the end of the month because of that.
4. I kept learning about blogging and improving my writing and my blog layout but although my subscribers rose over the next 3 months progress was slow.
5. I started posting once a week instead of three times a week on my own blog so I had more time to write guest posts for other blogs because that proved the best way for me to find new readers.
6. In March 2010 with my deadline looming I went all out and had guest posts on five major blogs including Problogger, Zen Habits and Write to Done.
7. I believed in myself and ignored people who said it was a waste of time.
8. I worked hard and kept my goal in mind.
9. Once I did set my blog topic I focused on it 100%.
10. I wrote my heart out and really helped people by giving them the most useful information I had on how to make their dream come true.

If I can do it anyone can. I own a business, work from home, have three young kids and run a busy household but in 12 months I still managed to set up a blog I’m proud of.

Over the next year I’ll be continuing the process of improving my blog by setting up the new design, adding incentives for subscribers, possibly offering a free e-book, writing more guest posts, working on my search engine optimisation and setting myself a new goal.

In March 2011 I’d like to have 5000 subscribers. But I worry it’s too low. Over the last year I’ve increased my subscribers 1000 times so if I do that again next year I should be aiming for 10 million subscribers but that ridiculous. Somehow I need to work out how many subscribers I should aim for after two years of blogging and then get on to it.

My ultimate goal is to make money from my blog. I have a few ideas on how to do it but there’s still lots of work to be done, experiments to be made and challenges to overcome. I’m looking forward to it.

What have your worst blogging mistakes been and how do you measure your blog’s success?

For information and inspiration to help you live your dream read Annabel Candy’s self improvement blog, Get In the Hot Spot. Please subscribe to the RSS feed or choose email updates to stay posted on the latest articles.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

4 Classic Mistakes I Made In My First Year of Blogging [and How I Got 1000 Subscribers Anyway]

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The term “social search” is starting to creep up more and more in online conversations, but what is it? WebProNews caught up with Johanna Wright, the Director of Product Management for Google Web Search, to get an explanation on what the phenomenon really is.

According to Wright, social search is a beta product for both Web and image search that Google launched in January.  In other words, Google takes published content from a user’s social network and ranks it as relevant to other users in that same network.

Wright gives an example that if her friend, who is also a writer, writes a article about the iPad and if she searches for an iPad, the article will show up in her search results since it is relevant to her.

Although she does not believe social search will have a strong impact on marketers, she does offer tips for marketers and publishers. She says:

-    Make good content that people want to read and follow
-    Follow webmaster guidelines
-    Use webmaster tools to make sure your site is indexed in Google

In addition, if your site is social, Wright suggests marking it up using Google’s social graph API code that comes from code.google.com.

Since Google Buzz is also raising hype, are the two connected? In response, Wright says, “I think that Google Buzz and social search are a great way to marry key components of Google, the company, in a way that’s great for users.”

Plenty of people spend their days moving from one screen to another, consuming information whenever possible. BuzzVoice tries to plug the holes – time spent in the morning commute, for example – but letting users listen to the Web’s top news and blogs.

John Atkinson, the cofounder and CEO of BuzzVoice, explained to Abby Johnson at SXSW, “People have compared it to a Pandora for news and blogs.” BuzzVoice has about 1,600 different blogs on tap, too, so the selection is impressive.

As for how to use BuzzVoice, device compatibility shouldn’t pose much of a problem. It’ll work with MP3 players (including the iPod), the iPhone, Macs, and PCs; would-be multitaskers can pretty much just grab their nearest piece of electronics and go.

Then here’s one interesting detail about where BuzzVoice is heading: Atkinson said that a real-time radio widget, currently in private beta, will be released to publishers.

This should ensure the selection of blogs available through BuzzVoice grows even larger in the near future.

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