Ken's Ramblings

BLOG - SMX East Wrap Up

It has been a few weeks since SMX East 2014 in NYC. I’m still digesting all of the great stuff that I’ve learned. It’s a little delayed, but I wanted to share the rest of my takeaways from days two and three with you all. So here we go!

Schema can be used for practically anything.

99% of SEOs still do SEO in a tactical manner (1 keyword + variations). SEO today is strategic – One researched topic for a landing page.

Make your content more holistic.

You cannot trick Google into ranking you just because you have your keywords in your headings and titles. You need content that backs that up (e.g. having a page about 15 tips of something, only without listing any tips – no good).

Search Engine Optimization is about Search Experience Optimization.

Schema has been updated to support JSON-LD allowing you to mark up a page without doing it inline.

Some email clients can support schema to offer a convenient experience for users (e.g. Gmail cards)

Don’t underestimate how powerful on-page optimization can be for local and local-organic results.

On-page optimization still matters.

Keep experimenting.

You need a strong and fast mobile experience, or you will be left behind.

If you have a business you want people to visit, have a Places page.

When filling out a local listing, don’t skip the website. It’s a local link to a local website.

Google understands more than we think they do.

SEO accounts for 20% of leads in a business’s first year.

Keywords can be ambiguous (e.g. subway the sandwich maker or subway the transportation system?).

Google has moved from strings to things.

Consistency is community; inconsistency is phony.

Utilize the resources you have for creating content.

You can learn a ton by watching a customer review your product.

Go after the customers of tomorrow, not the past (so much).

Overall, the conference was excellent. I cannot wait to go back for my fourth year next October. If you attended and would like to share some of your takeaways, please do in the comments section.

It was a great day today at SMX East 2014 in New York City. I've met some cool people, learned some new things, and refreshed on others. Some key sharable takeaways that I picked up from the sessions I attended are:

SEO is not a project

Check your website log files to see how Google actually accesses your site

Social is the authentic face of a brand

IF social is discovery, THEN search is validation

When researching your competitors, there is no "magic metric" to base off of. It depends who your online competitors are and your market.

Pull data, record, watch!

Today's grey hat is tomorrow's black hat. Today's white hat is tomorrow's grey hay

Twitter cards and Facebook Open Graph is some pretty powerful stuff if implemented correctly

"Go ahead and do it!"

There's some food for thought for the night before becoming crammed with more gems tomorrow.

If you are at the conference and have a little down time tomorrow, tweet me (@kenhkelly) and let's meet up and talk some shop.

If you need a mobile friendly handy access to the agenda, check out my mobile pocket agenda.

It's that time of the year again — SMX East 2014 is here! Tomorrow I'll be embarking back to New York City to join hundreds of other search marketers for my third year straight to learn the latest in our fields.

The agenda is pretty exciting this year (as it has in always been) with lots to learn from all of Google's latest changes (both organically and paid) to the latest on the social media front. This only scratches the surface.

Stay tuned for some interesting tidbits I'll surely share. And if you're going to be in the NYC area, be sure to connect with me either at the conference or outside.

Lately I've been really getting into Markdown, a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

It's great because it makes life so much easier when it comes to writing your content without worrying about formatting. I use it for my blog posts and it has greatly sped things up and kept everything in a similar format. There are a few tools out there that I’ve been using as well.

An extension I added to Firefox is called Markdown Here. Markdown Here will help you to write email more quickly and powerfully than you thought possible.

Tumblr supports Markdown, using a variation that has a few more features than the traditional Markdown - Called PHP Markdown

Draft also supports Markdown.

A while back, I needed to check the uptime of my Mac. To my delight, there are two simple commands in the terminal: uptime and w

Uptime will return simply the uptime of the system.

kenneths-mbp:~ kenneth$ uptime 9:50 up 34 days, 14:17, 2 users, load averages: 1.50 2.38 4.74

It will return the system uptime and the logged in users. If you see two users like I did, that's because you are logged in twice: once in the desktop and once in the terminal.

kenneths-mbp:~ kenneth$ w 9:50 up 34 days, 14:18, 2 users, load averages: 1.49 2.28 4.60 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT kenneth console - 03Mar14 34days - kenneth s000 - Sat10 - w

That's my tip for the day.

Here's a handy little snippet that you can use to determine if the array you are about to work with is multidimensional or now.

if (count($array) == count($array, COUNT_RECURSIVE)) { /* not multidimentional */ } else { /* multidimensional */ }

With the latest in Google privacy conundrum, I've decided to make the switch from using Gmail as my personal email provider go using iCloud. There were a few things I've taken into consideration when it came to making this decision. 1. I was getting lots of spam and needed a new email address anyways. 2. iCloud was already there and set up 3. It integrates lovely with my Apple devices. 4. I didn't want yet another Google+ profile.

I've been using iCloud for a few weeks now and have moved most of my services over to that email address and so far I don't feel I'm missing anything. With iCloud I have my email, contacts, calendar, and notes sync, are all things I had with Gmail. Moving was very easy for those that are interested.

First, you can use your email client of choice to move your emails over, if you so desire (I didn't). If you configure both clients with each email address using IMAP, you should be able to just drag and drop what you want to save.

For contacts, I used the native contacts app on my Mac. Both accounts were set up and I simply did a drag and drop from Gmail to iCloud, and done. Calendars and notes were the same process. You should be able to do in you client of choice.

In the end I'm pleased with my new set up. I created a Google account using my new email so I can use its services like YouTube for some video creation I'd like to get into, so I'm not completely rid of Google, which I'm fine with.

Hey all. Just a quick tip I discovered when playing out with Trello.

In a textarea of Firefox, typically when you hit tab, it moves to the next element. After mashing a few key combos, I discovered that you can put a tab character in the text box with Option Shift Tab on Mac. I haven't tested this in Windows, or other browsers though. Let me know if it's the same equivalent.

I have lots of ideas written down for future posts and will try to make some time to share my ramblings.

Have a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving.

Hey everybody. I'm going to work hard on getting back into the mix of things. Over the past few months, I've been crazy busy. Because of this, I have quite a bit to talk about:

I've done some traveling recently. First I went to Mountain View to visit Google for the Google Engage All-Stars Summit.

I also went to New York for the SMX East 2013 to learn the latest in SEO, PPC, web design & development, including mobile best practices, and social tactics.

At work, I've been inundated with tasks of rewriting websites, in which I've picked up some more handy code tricks and snippets, learned responsive, and even in two of my projects, began using Bootstrap and Markdown.

Plus a bunch more!

To celebrate my return, I've updated this blog to a nicer, yet still simple template, and tweaked it out. You'll also notice some more links that I put in place as shortcuts to the more commonly discussed topics (tags) here.

I've also some more topics and ideas in mind that I want to expand into for you gamers out there - but you'll just have to wait and see.

I know this is a teaser post, but you're just going to have to stay tuned and see what good stuff I have in store for you guys.

Hey all. I'd like to apologize for my disappearing act. Been pretty swamped with business and such, but I'm going to make more of an effort to get back into this.

For my return back, here is a nice little Google Drive tip that I found on funbutlearn.com. You can use Google Drive to host and download files directly. You do that by plugging the file's unique key into a direct download link.

You can find your key when you open the file in the default view:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/<KEY>/edit

Then you can take that key and plug it into this url:

http://drive.google.com/uc?id=<KEY>&e=download

Voila! You can also hotlink images from Google Drive into your site.

It has been quite a while since I've last posted something. Things have gotten pretty hectic and I haven't had time to do to much playing or writing. I've some things in the works to share with you all.

Today I wanted to share a server uptime monitoring service I started to use. I've needed one of these for a while, but everything I found was paid. And then I found it - Uptime Robot.

Uptime Robot a pretty good free service. It checks the server in 5 minutes increments. If the server is down, it doesn't just send you the alert immediately, it checks again to make sure it's really down so not throw a false positive. It supports 50 different sites (which is plenty if you only use a few servers). It checks websites via the HTTP Port, but you can also set it up to check specific ports - I have it check my hosted Minecraft Server.

They offer an API, which is pretty interesting. I haven't used it yet but it looks pretty straight-forward. You can receive alerts by any combination of email, sms, Twitter, or push notifications for iOS.

If this is a service you've been needing for your clients or yourself, I highly recommend giving it a look.

Have you ever launched a new site and found that your ISP, or your router, or your computer, or who-knows-what has cached the DNS and just won't refresh? I do on a pretty frequent basis. I get around it with SSH Tunneling.

I tunnel into my webserver on the other side of the country to use it's ISP to fetch me the page and show me whether or not the domain provider has pushed the new DNS settings.

It's also very helpful if you are working on a live website and don't want visitors to see the latest content until it's perfect. What you can do is use the PHP $_SERVER variable (or your language's variant) in a conditional to limit the view to just your location. You can then use the tunnel to check and make sure whatever you do in the back-end doesn't make it to the front end until completion.

You can read more about this here and use their tutorial to get your tunnel going. I prefer to use Firefox for this because it utilizes its own proxy settings. Chrome uses your computer's proxy settings so your entire computer's Internet connection will route through your server. Doing it in Firefox means you may view the site through your server and then use Chrome to see how it looks from your location.

Several months ago we hired a new employee and he shared with me a text editor alternative, called SublimeText. It's fantastic. It's a cross between basic text editor to programming IDE (but without the complexities that come with your typical IDE). It's also very customizable and uses JSON files to maintain your settings, keyboard shortcuts, etc. Definitely worth checking out if you are needing something a little more that your current editor may not offer.

Also check out the plugin Emmet. It's a text expander for HTML and CSS (probably does much more too, but that's what I use it for). It's great for quickly creating the boilerplate HTML for your newest web project.