Best of Austin

Frankie Muniz melts down – literally – in this psychodrama from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2SDmTdl via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2QaOOj4

Ghana’s gold mining industry reveals a nation’s soul from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2qkeZZq via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2SwK8FF

When Google’s Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev was asked about Google’s most important ranking factors, he gave three : content, links, and RankBrain. We’ve known for a long time that links impact websites’ search rankings and Google has for a very long time emphasized the importance of quality content. What is RankBrain all about, however? Unlike content and links, RankBrain is influenced by behavior metrics that indicate that users actually find a site to be useful. These behavior metrics, more than anything else, are influenced by the usability of your website — in other words, user experience (UX). If you’ve been focusing on content and links at the expense of user experience, you won’t be able to maximize the performance of your website in the search engines. The following five UX tips will give you an SEO advantage. 1. Work on your site’s mobile compatibility Google hasn’t hidden the fact that it pays a lot of attention to a site’s mobile compatibility. Anyo...

Getting PPC and SEO to work together effectively is always a key goal, whether we’re managing just one of the channels or both of them. Although it sounds easy in principle, it’s generally not. A typical request cropping up is around sharing top-performing PPC ad copy by category and using this to update meta descriptions . Sharing ad copy performance is something PPC teams should definitely be doing with their SEO counterparts; but unless your meta descriptions are awful the impact here is minimal. This brings us to the first problem you encounter — although there is lots you CAN do, picking and prioritizing what you do when is vital . The second common request is switching off PPC ads when you rank in position one (P1) organically. Initially this makes perfect sense and gets the attention of sharp CMOs and CFOs. But this is the second key challenge to overcome; how do I get the right data in the right place to know if it’s actually working. Let’s take a typical example: car...

Family drama captures the haunting power of addiction from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2qdfm7Y via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2RgWujU

British mystery probes the identity of a man and a town from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2JmDOfJ via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2OawaGh

Birds are more than pets in this quietly probing character study from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2qfBdf3 via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2OYf6IP

Defeat, desire, and dreams deep in the heart of Texas from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2SrIrJQ via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2CLPWWh

Hannah Fidell’s road trip comedy makes all the right stops from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2EWwetY via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2CL4KEL

Psychic powers and powerful delusions in this bloody thriller from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2OUxLF8 via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2PsyeOm

Austin choral ensemble performed at National Cathedral service from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2CFDRCa via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2z5Fw0d

Local authors dish on their favorite bars for reading and writing from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2ONvQlM via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2yzgIP2

Austin transplant on going Hollywood and AFF in the same week from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2O8OwqX via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2O5hDeU

Yesterday while I was having a blast reading “ The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine , ” I happened across some fun facts. We got into some of the more technical goods from the paper yesterday , but figured these would also be an worthwhile — or at least more enjoyable — read. Friday and all. 1. “Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?” – people encountering a crawler for the first time They note that they received almost daily emails from people either concerned about copyright issues or asking if they liked the site after looking at it. For many people with web pages, this was one of the first crawlers they had seen. “It turns out that running a crawler which connects to more than half a million servers, and generates tens of millions of log entries generates a fair amount of email and phone calls. Because of the vast number of people coming on line, there are always those who do not know what a crawler is, bec...

Does Natalie Portman’s music drama hit the right notes? from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2Aw6foV via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2Jop6oN

Austin Public Health released new boil-water info, effective today from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2q8OZ2V via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2q8VMtr

Earlier today, Dixon Jones from Majestic  shared on Twitter  a thorough, digestible explanation of how PageRank actually works.  I gave it a watch myself, and thought it was a good moment to revisit this wild piece of math that has made quite a dent on the world over the past 20 years. As a sidenote, we know as of 2017 that while PageRank was removed from the Toolbar in 2016, it still forms an important part of the overall ranking algorithm,  and thus is worthwhile to understand. Jones starts with the simple — or at least, straightforward — formula. For those who don’t adore math, or who may have forgotten a few technical terms since the last calculus class, this formula would be read aloud like this: “The PageRank of a page in this iteration equals 1 minus a damping factor, plus, for every link into the page (except for links to itself), add the page rank of that page divided by the number of outbound links on the page and reduced by...

Relish in opulence and whiskey in Downtown Austin from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2yz6fDc via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2SiYdq3

Welcome to the fourth in my series on alternatives to Google. It follows my piece No need for Google back in May and my in-depth reports on Ecosia , DuckDuckGo and Baidu . Today we turn to Yandex. Since we last covered Russia’s search giant (way back in 2015) the engine has reasserted its dominance over Google in the market. It has a presence in other countries too and is branching out into numerous other tech verticals. So let’s take a look at search in Russia and what Yandex is doing well in order to solidify its position. And what does the future hold for the brand and Russian search market at large? A top-level view of digital Russia Russia is the biggest internet market in Europe. It boasts more than 109m web users reaching 76% of the total population (according to Internet World Stats ). The size of the market may not be much of a surprise, but the country’s digital landscape does have some unique traits. Desktops, for instance, are still the leading devices by which Russ...

A great website is a powerful combination of quality content, appropriate web design, ample SEO efforts , and marketing. Web design and SEO go hand-in-hand, and both play a part in developing an SEO-optimized website. This further lays emphasis on the major role played by web designers in building the entire website and its online reputation as well. To get better at SEO, web designers need to get a deeper understanding of the commercial aspects of websites. Apart from creating killer designs, web designers should always be aware of some of the basic SEO insights that can implement positive change in their entire web design approach. In this post, we’ll discuss the basics of SEO for web design, whether you’re building a new website or revamping an existing one. Site structure The structure of your website is essentially how your audience gets around. There is always a peculiar way for the information to flow on a website. This path is taken by every visitor to reach their dest...

UPDATE: Boil notice could continue for “10 to 14 days” from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2S9aJIK via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2SbYmvB

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing. Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you. As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say ?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered. Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day: Where search is heading Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP,  kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading.  Social is the new storefront . The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%. With the ris...

Texas Book Festival brings the author and his magnum opus to Austin from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2JeCf3C via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2yu8FTD

Silt levels bring dirty water to city sinks from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2ExKokO via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2PhdOYD

Ecommerce marketers at US brands are struggling to keep pace with where and how consumers browse and purchase online, according to new research published today. An ecommerce-focused study by Search Engine Watch and ClickZ, produced in partnership with Catalyst, part of GroupM, has found that 85% of browsing and purchasing activity occurs with non-Amazon retailers, but only 25% of US brands say they have a strategy for ecommerce retailers beyond Amazon. The Era of Ecommerce: Capitalizing on the New Customer Journey has also found that there is a 29 percentage point gap between the proportion of consumers who have visited a retailer to research and the proportion of brands who market on that retailer’s website (53% vs 24%). Details about the research The report is based on a survey of more than 750 North America-based consumers and more than 600 business to consumer (B2C) client-side marketers across the following nine sectors: appliances, baby care, beauty and personal care, cloth...

SF and horror film fest adds centerpiece film and more from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2R57tgm via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2J6yooX

An interview about gut health, Barton Springs Mill, and pickles from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2ypQ5vE via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2q1WFnB

First let me ask you: how many unread emails are in the “promotions,” “updates,” and “other” tabs of your inbox? When I got to work on Monday morning, there were 248. How many of those did I read, you ask? Three at best, and only because they were already my favorite news roundups. The others? Didn’t stand a chance. “Marked as read,” “deleted,” and otherwise wholeheartedly, happily ignored. Long story short, consumers these days are drowning in emails . We have promotions, “we’ve missed you!”s, “rate our product!”s, and 100 other types of unread newsletters pouring from our inboxes and never getting close to our attention. For a long time, it was businesses seeking out consumers And while that obviously is still at play, the tides are shifting. It’s just too much content to keep tabs on. More and more, consumers are ignoring the bombardment and seeking out businesses on their own terms — when and where they want to look. For a long time, SEO was a small group of nerds (*experts) si...

Informational keyword research is a subject that has been covered thousands of times across every SEO blog, publication, and web design company. However, with voice becoming a more prominent way of searching, it’s important that it’s now taken into consideration. With voice usage growing, marketers need to understand how their audience is using this technology, and how they can adapt to this. Keyword research has been advancing dramatically over the last couple of years. No longer are the days of simply sorting by the highest search volume and creating a page; it comes down to much more than that. Semantics, categorisation, ranking difficulty vs reward, questions, featured snippets, people also ask. The list goes on. A straightforward task has now become much more complex as well as time-consuming, and it’s important that it’s right the first time as keyword research will tend to influence your strategy, projections and, in some cases, KPIs. We’ll be using a variety of paid and fre...

What ATX and Lone Star titles are screening at next week’s fest? from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2P4pePf via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2J7eNFu

The rise of voice search is no secret, and many companies are still wondering how to address it. When it comes to search data, how can we monitor which queries are from voice? In this article, Jason Tabeling shows how he finds insights into voice search from his own company’s data. Alpine.AI estimates that there will be more than 1 billion voice searches completed in 2018 . At this point I’m sure that everyone has seen or done a voice search, even if you just saw an example in a Google Home or Amazon Alexa ad. The power of what can be completed with a voice command is growing by the day. This trend is already having a massive impact on consumer behavior and therefore needs to be a consideration when monitoring or optimizing our search accounts.    Right now Google doesn’t provide specific information on how a search was started. For example, was it a Google home search, from the app, done via typing or voice. However, I wanted to take a recent dive into our ...

Alejandro Escovedo, Dianne Scott to be fêted at Feb. 27 AMAs from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2Ag0wDA via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2NJGpAZ

Austin theatre artist receives national arts scholarship from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2AebF7L via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2ymOqHr

Other Worlds Austin screens amnesia thriller with a twist from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2CkTHC4 via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2COUtbz

WordPress initially started out as a ‘blog-only’ platform and now that it has extended as a full-fledged Content Management System, it remains a popular blogging platform. WordPress.com blogs have over 409 million monthly viewers who looked at 22.4 billion pages per month this past year. This standalone fact is enough to justify the popularity of WordPress as people’s favorite blogging platform.    WordPress does provide a lot of helpful features for blogging enthusiasts who are looking to start their own blogging website. However, inexperienced bloggers do commit some mistakes in spite of all the online help available. In this blog post, we will review the most common SEO WordPress mistakes that bloggers commit out of either ignorance or sheer carelessness. Regardless of the reason, these mistakes affect the search engine ranking of their blogs and even their online reputation.   So, let’s explore seven of the most common SEO mistakes made by Word...