From the Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker describes a methodology for improving oneself – or otherwise, improving by choosing where to best use our efforts at education for the aim of getting better.
Comparing your expectations with your results also indicates what not to do. We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a person – and especially a knowledge worker – should not take on work, jobs, and assignments. One should waste as little effort as possible improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most people – especially most teachers and most organizations – concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead to make a competent person into a star performer.
It is a common thought process in SEO that one should learn to code. Codecademy has taken fire in the space as of late, and the push for this knowledge acquisition in computer science has reached a critical mass. The thought process Drucker describes is cogent for us – the SEOs – to assess in our decision making when learning, or not learning how to code. Is this something we can become great at? Will it make us great SEOs, or simply good SEOs with a mediocre coding ability? This thought process, explained by Drucker, should be the one we undertake when deciding how to proceed. The answer is not as cut and dry as many public voices may lead you to think.
It is my belief that knowing how to code is not a requirement of a great SEO. Constantly getting better, however, is. Coding is just one way of doing that – and there are many other paths on the road.
by Ross Hudgens on December 13, 2011 | posted in Marketing
I work in lead generation, so one of the things that frequently catches my eye is the conversion rate optimization (CRO) efficiencies of a page. It’s natural. Getting users to convert while maintaining SEO best practices is something that is a vital part of my job, so when I run into great examples of CRO anywhere on the web, I get pumped. I love seeing great work, cause it inspires me, and it should for you, too.
Today, I found the best call to action on an SEO company website I’ve ever seen. It made me run fill out their form and I don’t even need their services! The company is Australian-based Dejan SEO. In an effort to not take their pageviews, I suggest you mosey on over there and be impressed. The CRO is impeccable. Dejan’s CEO reported a 700% increase in conversion rate over their old version using this new form! That’s an incredible improvement.
That’s not to say that implementing the form instantly means you’ll win millions of leads. Dejan also noted that their competitor, Web Marketing Experts, spotted their CTA and began using it as well. Although Web Marketing Expert’s design is still better than most, it is of my opinion that the overall framing/CRO on-page for Dejan SEO is superior. This is based on more trustworthy/natural “trust signals” in the form of their press clippings, and also the slightly less cluttered design. Of course, I can’t see the stats of either site, but that’s my gut instinct on having run and observed hundreds of A/B tests for sites built out just like this.
Nice work Dejan SEO!
“Great content” is palpable. Easy to understand, identifiable instantly by the trained eye, and communicatable with a refreshing consistency when engaging with clients and upper management alike. But the idea is not congruent, necessarily, with obtaining links, and often times the intersection of “great” and “link magnet” is not nearly as harmonious as we might hope.
Surely, the correlation is there. Great content correlates with a bundle of links – but it does not create them. When we understand this, we comprehend it, and we move to act upon it, we can begin creating great content that creates lots of links – and not just something we’re okay with having hosted on our websites.
Linkable Asset Classes
Linkable assets, for the sophisticated link builders who know better, are not as simple as their normally characterized definition implies. There are clear delimiters that make each linkable asset different, making some more attractive for obtaining links than others, beyond the pure “greatness” we often characterize as the only true differentiable quality. For the purposes of this exercise, we will define the most important, differentiating “class” as a zero sum environment where pain points occur. Right below that, is the asset class of non-zero sum environments where pain points exist, and the worst – but still potentially potent, asset class, is a non-zero sum environment where no pain point exists at all.
- Non Zero-Sum Environments
- Non Zero-Sum Environments Where No Pain Point Exists
- Non Zero-Sum Environments Where Pain Points Exist
Zero-Sum Environments with Pain Points ….
Broken link building is a bit of a recent fad – you correct broken links, add value to the webmaster by doing so, and therefore increase the likelihood you get a link back to your website. That’s true, but what is lost in this transaction is not that you are truly aiming to solely solve broken links, your goal is to add value back to the webmaster. Correcting broken links is not the only way to do this. A second and third “mistake” we can solve comes in the form of correcting spelling and/or grammar errors for webmasters, which can be checked just as quickly.
Firefox has a quick and effective add-on for spell checking. You can find it here - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spell-checker/.
There is a need for a combined spell check/grammar check combined add-on, particularly for Chrome. With that, we have a complete “value add” equation to help maximize potential webmaster errors to reciprocate the value equation to get links built when we combine it with the super-fast Chrome broken link builder add-on.
If you know of any other add-ons that check web documents for grammar and/or spelling mistakes, please leave a comment.
Otherwise, the SEO community could use a tool such as this to improve our link building efforts. Who wants to step up and get it done?
