Eröffnungsvortrag und zwei weitere Sessions auf der SMX 2014

Nach Rands letzter Eröffnungs-Keynote twitterte ein Teilnehmer, er könne jetzt eigentlich heimgehen, die SMX habe sich bereits gelohnt. Die Stammbesucher der SMX kennen ihn, letztes Jahr legte er jedoch eine Pause ein. Die gute Nachricht: Er hat uns vermisst. Dieses Jahr begrüßen wir den begnadeten Redner, Blogger und Marketing-Guru wieder zur Eröffnungs-Keynote der SMX München 2014. Wir wollten von ihm wissen, was sein kryptischer neuer Jobtitel und seine prophetischen Buchcover bedeuten – und wie wir bei der steigenden Zahl an Faktoren für ein gutes Ranking auf Dauer den Überblick behalten sollen. Seine Antworten:

Rand, we are glad you will be back at SMX Munich in March. Did you miss us?

I did miss you! Really glad to be joining the SMX conference again, and hopefully I can share some interesting and useful stuff with the audience.

You stepped down as the CEO of Moz and now your new title is “Wizard of Moz”. Well, you’ve been a wizard as a presenter all along, but what does it mean to you, to take on this somehow fancy role?

The new role really lets me focus more on the product and marketing side of Moz, rather than managing, defining process, dealing with HR issues, etc. I wanted to get back in the trenches and contribute to our roadmap, to our content, and to some specific individual projects like writing a new book on marketing.

Talking of books – your book “The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice)” which appeared in early 2012, had a hummingbird on the cover. Was this just a coincidence or did you know about the plans for the Hummingbird update as early as that?

Total coincidence! But a lucky one 🙂 I also heard a lot of folks talking about conspiracy theories because of my Whiteboard Friday on guest blogging just before Matt Cutts‘ post on it. That, too, was a coincidence, although folks following the space closely probably could have guessed that Google’s webspam team would be taking action on guest posting in early 2014.

On past SMX events we have heard that SEO ranking factors are becoming much more complex. Where is the limit? How will SEOs be able to deal with algorithms that continue to get even more complex over the next years?

I think that in order to compete in a more complex world, we’ll need to focus less on the specific inputs and more on what types of pages/content/brands/marketing strategies work. One of the really interesting things about Google saying that they don’t use Facebook or Twitter as ranking signals, and yet correlation data showing that sites and pages with lots of tweets/shares rank much more highly than their peers with fewer tweets/shares is that it tell us something about the nature of successful content. Artificially boosting shares or tweets may do nothing to help a page perform better in the SERPs, but creating a page that is likely to earn lots of tweets/shares may indeed give you a far better chance of ranking highly.

I think this is the future of SEO – it won’t be about abusing or manipulating individual algorithmic inputs, but about investing in cross-channel marketing tactics that correlate well with better rankings. The best part is that this form of SEO is, to me, far more creative and fun.

 

 

Wer Rand Fishkin noch nie erlebt hat, hat viel verpasst. Doch nach der Keynote heimgehen? Kommt nicht in Frage! – Nicht nur, aber auch, weil Rand Fishkin und Marcus Tober, Geschäftsführer Searchmetrics, in einer weiteren spannenden Session die Ergebnisse ihrer hauseigenen Studien zu den wichtigsten Ranking Faktoren vergleichen und diskutieren. Und dann ist er, natürlich, noch auf dem Webmasters on the Roof All-Star Panel vertreten – ab 16.35 Uhr live auf der SMX.