WordLift is happy to announce a new member of the team – Stefano Fabbroni💙
Name: Stefano Fabbroni Age: 41 Position in WordLift:SEO Project Manager Languages spoken: Italian, English, French
Let’s Get to Know Stefano
Tell us more about yourself…
I was born in Tolentino, Marche, and have always combined my passion for writing and storytelling (since 2005 as a video blogger and currently as a director and artistic director) with the analysis of data and numbers. I graduated in Milan at the University of Milano-Bicocca in the Communication Sciences course and started my work as a consultant in the field of web listening and online reputation analysis and design of online and offline communication actions.
I was a project manager in the field of online marketing. In this role, I managed numerous projects for small, medium and large companies in the fashion, tourism, pharmaceutical and wholesale industries. These projects included e-commerce as well as communication and branding activities.
SEO and CRO /UX are activities on which I have given very important advice in my career, following the evolution of search methods, algorithms and ranking techniques both on Google and other search engines.
3 things you love the most about being a Wordlifter🏋️♀️
– Working with a multidisciplinary team with strong expertise in SEO, Data Science and AI solutions development.
– The opportunity to work in depth in knowledge graph creation with the most innovative tools.
– The work environment and strong approach to research and development.
Can you share an exciting innovative work that you’re doing at WordLift?
I was very impressed with the methods used in WordLift to measure the performance of an SEO campaign, but also with the advanced tools used to categorize search intent. With the algorithms, I was able to quickly process and cross-reference so many variables and decide on the most predictive set for large data sets.
This allowed me to quickly decide on meaningful clusters for each intent, create variants, and take steps to personalize the browsing and internal search experience.
Can you share exciting innovative tools that you’re using at WordLift?
I found the SEO Add- on for Google Sheets extremely useful. It was designed to extract entities in the Knowledge Graph and synchronize them with Google Search Console data.
I was able to quickly match large amounts of information with a very high quality of information architecture and correctly transfer and update it to JSON-LD while adhering to Schema.org standards.
Actions were quickly implemented based on a selection of pages, and I could continue to quickly compare the data with Google Search Console data. This made the experience of SEO work very smooth and intuitive.
In addition, with the SEO add-on, I can automate other operations or transfer them for later updates of content, entities and vocabulary on the website or e-commerce.
What I like is that in WordLift you always have an eye on your own work and that of other SEOs. This leads to the development of new and innovative tools that aim to facilitate workflows. One example of this is Data Visualization, which lets you evaluate measures to implement structured data on the page via the Google Data Studio connector.
When used in conjunction with the WordLift plugin, it allows for quick, accurate and impactful upgrades and intuitive evaluation of results. Something that can change the day – or life – for us, team Agency🕺
Name: Aiswarya Menon Age: 26 Position in WordLift:SEO Project Manager Languages spoken: English, Malayalam, Hindi, a bit of Tamil
Let’s Get to Know Aiswarya
Tell us more about yourself…
Weeks into my campus-placed MNC job, I realized I wasn’t at the right place. Java wasn’t quite my cup of tea, rather stories were. I’d happily put semicolons in sentences, but not at the end of code. And, thus began a journey from a happy engineer to a happier writer. Entered the world of marketing and soon enough SEO, and fell in love! It’s been more than 4 years, and haven’t looked back since!
In a parallel universe, I’d have been a marine biologist who studied sharks & dolphins. During my free time, I love to paint(trying my amateur hands at acrylic & resin art), learn ukelele even though the cords confuse me, and fuss over home decor & plants.
3 things you love the most about being a Wordlifter🏋️♀️
1. Being one among a supportive, amazing team who are laser-aligned with the mission. 2. Getting to learn about an entire new side/world of SEO that is all set to change how things are done! 3. How we perceive a challenge, brainstorm, and give the best for clients who knock our doors.
If you think that knowing SEO means working with semantic HTML and meta fields, you’re missing out. Creating sites as a builder or managing a site as an operator requires you to keep up with the latest techniques in SEO. SEO is changing though and old-school SEO techniques are still rife within the WordPress community.
Those were the topics that Andrea Volpini presented on his latest interview with David Vogelpohl on PressThis! They discuss how the next generation of web developers are helping their sites win in modern SEO. As the CEO of WordLift, Andrea is well positioned to talk about how SEO has changed and what you can do to stay ahead.
If your answer to SEO is to add meta fields to the site you build, you need to listen to this episode of PressThis!
What is your WordPress origin story?
I don’t have a proper one ? I’ve been into CMS since the early ages of web development. In the late nineties I developed, together with my team, a CMS called Site Manager. At the time it was important to make a Website which could be also stored in a CD-Rom to be sold at news kiosk. But that wasn’t enough, I also wanted something structured, so we implemented custom types and fields and you could define a structure where a content could have fields specific to its nature. But to keep such a custom CMS running took a lot of effort and that’s when I met WordPress and I thought: I don’t need to start from zero, I can extend WordPress to do it. That’s more or less where I started working with WordPress.
Help people understand: what WordLift does for SEO?
WordLiftautomates structured data markup and creates a knowledge graph for your website that is designed to help search engines and virtual assistants (and software agents in general) know what your content is really about. It does more than this but this is the most relevant part.
What do you think about when you think about “old school SEO”?
SEO is really about information retrieval (applied to commercial search engines). Is there a way to make sure a crawler can index my pages at best? How are the results going to be organized once the user starts searching? These are evergreen concepts – one guy publishes content online, another one is (hopefully) looking for that content – in between – there is technologythat links the publisher with his/her audience. Some of the elements of this workflow didn’t really change that much. The first time I “sold” a search engine technology it was called the AltaVista Enterprise Search Engine (this says a lot about my age!). It was for Telecom Italia, AltaVista was top-notch and it could search over 200 different file formats. The crawler would go out and build an index made of all the keywords he could find in a document organized in such a way that I could look for a single keyword or a combination of keywords and I would get a ranked list of results. Indexation is still a big issue in SEO today and yes, it’s pretty old school.
Information Retrieval
What old school techniques need to die?
Keyword stuffing has been dead for a long time, and still we have tools that check that. Having a traffic light to let you know if the content is SEO optimized doesn’t really make sense – the game is more complex than whatever a traffic light can understand, and being an SEO is really about knowing the language that searchers will use, speaking like them and providing the best possible answer in the entire SERP. What else? Focus keyword doesn’t really exist and tags are completely irrelevant in today’s world but there are things like meta descriptions that a couple of years ago I would have said were useless (as Google is making them by itself) and indeed are still very powerful even in today semantic search world.
What is modern SEO anyway? Have things really changed that much?
Ranking has changed significantly due to machine learning and the work done to help Google understand the search intent. When Ray Kurzweil arrived at Google in 2012 the goal was to help computers understand human language, and a lot has been done in that sense: think about the smart replays that you can now send from your Gmail account to help you respond to the messages that you receive. Modern SEO is really about: 1) rich semantics 2) great content that people read 3) user experience.
Many SEO agencies have switched to basically being content agencies, why?
Great content – yes. Remember that you need to make sure that your content matches the intent of the query and uses similar words and phrases that cover that topic. You also have to make sure to solve the searcher’s problem better than anyone else on page one. So yes great content is “almost” all you need to do.
What role do you see the developer playing in SEO in the future?
Improve data quality. Publish all the data that needs to be published at the right time, using the right licensing term, and in the right format. AI needs data and as a developer, your role is to make sure you have the right infrastructure to manage and publish the data that machines will consume.
Have you seen any other examples of people using AI in their SEO strategy?
Content Recommendations can have a tremendous impact on how people access and consume content online. This is one area where I see AI being used not only by the team working on the CMS but also by SEOs. Can I rankand MarketBrew analyze the search results and using AI models they provide users with data that help them choose, where to go next? To us 🙂 We use natural language processing and linked data to help you rank higher and there are several factors involved in this process.
Search engines use AI to rank sites. Won’t this mean that SEO will be dead?
There is a significant shift in SEO: researches show that CTR on mobile SERP is starting to decrease, the advent of Voice Search is also a paradigm shift. Does this mean that machines are capable of automatically organize human knowledge? Not really. We’re still much behind in terms of what a computer can really do. Humans still have control over the intended behavior of a system (i.e. “I want to sell modern SEO tools”, “I want travelers to book a room in my hotel” and so on) – and knowledge graphs are the best way that humans have to communicate to machines their “intended goal”. SEO right now is a lot about data creation, data quality, and data integration.
What are your future plans for WordLift?
We need to make it super-easy for our users to let their content talk with software agents and personal digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and the Google Assistant.
In July, we started a new column on our blog named #DigitalTrotter. It was the lucky intuition of our friend Alessandro who came up with the title and the focus of this new series of articles.
Who are those Digital Trotters? From Fashion Bloggers to Foodies, from Social Media Managers to Digital Visionaries, there’s not just one kind of trotter that we like to meet.
Today we would like to present a friend from WooRank that came visit us in our office in Rome just few weeks ago while visiting Italy with her mom and girlfriend. Her name is Anne Dorko, and she’s the most perfect example of what Digital Trotting means. She’s young, talented, creative and fun. A long-time digital nomad, Anne now lives in Germany and moves to make things happen. Do you want to know more about her?
[hewa_player asset_id=”695″]
She’s an artist, a web developer, an entertainer. She thinks of something, and then she realizes it. Like when on 2012 the Without Boxes project was launched. It is a series of extraordinary podcasts made of ordinary people’s extraordinary stories. Because everyone matters, and we can all improve so much by learning from each other and sharing our lives. During that same year she also started (and finished!) the project girlsbetrippin and visited 48 states in the USA in just 7 months. Mission accomplished!
Then, in 2013, because she’s a singer/songwriter too, she started First Aid Project, featuring a series of raw, acoustic music session you can find on Twitch. Her music is really good, and from time to time you can find her performing live on the streets in the new city she’s visiting.
Just looking at what she has accomplished in her life so far, I’m – whoa! She must be truly amazing. Traveling, diving, cycling, realizing new original plugins and WordPress themes. Nothing has stopped her so far.
In 2015 she launched DialectPro, a community dedicated to build effective and more useful websites that could improve the life of the users visiting them. Clever, uh? Then, she also published a book, “Catching Up with the Internet”.
On July 2017 she launched SEO Prompts, in partnership with WooRank. The tool helps little website owners attract visitors from search engines in a simple way. They will get a new, short task every day, by email, helping them improve their website ranking and overall performances. With SEO Prompts everyone can learn to create stand-out content, make better design choices, and, above all, optimize their site to reach specific goals.
Here’s how it works:
Maybe you’re a young entrepreneur who has spent a lot of time and energy building a very good website, but the SEO side of the project is still a mystery for you.
You’ll need to rank better to really increase your exposure and attract better and more qualified visitors.
How Woorank SEO Prompts might help you? You will get a simple task every day, a simple reminder with all the essentials of SEO grouped together into manageable daily tasks so you don’t have to think about it anymore.
[hewa_player asset_id=”696″]
If you want to receive Anne’s SEO Prompts, just go to SEOPrompts.com, subscribe with your name and email and… enjoy Anne’s advice.
24 years ago, before anyone had ever heard of a tweet, a Facebook timeline, or even what it meant to “Google” something, there was France.com. Jean-Noel Frydman began this website as a way for those around the world to get an up-close look at what France has to offer.
The world of technology is constantly changing, but not always in a positive way. Unfortunately, in 2015, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs created a lawsuit against France.com stating that the use of the name “France” was against French law.
Despite the unfortunate determination of Frydman’s website, he still stands by and he is now launching his online business consultancy. Check out our interview below!
You’ve been in the digital marketing space since 1994, when you started your first business online, France.com. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and how you began your path as a digital entrepreneur?
I was working in Los Angeles, in the movie distribution business. I had no knowledge of computers, but when I stumbled upon the Internet, I thought it would be a very exciting place to launch my business. I had no idea how the online world worked, but that was not a disadvantage since nobody knew anything about this nascent industry.
How did you manage to build a successful online business in the travel industry over the years?
By focusing on one theme (in our case France) and trying to cover it as well and as extensively as possible. We were also able to be successful by creating new products for that niche and trying to consistently bring innovation to help people make the best of their trip to France.
You were starting to use WordLift – how much has SEO changed in the course of these years?
SEO has been constantly changing since the dawn of the search engines. However, I would leave the details of how it has changed to the minds of Wordlift, who know this much better than me! But in the small time that we used Wordlift, I was impressed by the results. If only we still had the site to show off your accomplishments!
You also managed to build a good relationship with the French institutions overseas, didn’t you? And then what happened?
Yes, in fact my first employer was with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and our first client at France.com was the same minister. I have worked closely with the French government tourist Office for the last 24 years. I am unsure of what happened to our relationship. These institutions that backed our activities for 24 years suddenly decided to paint us as ‘digital pirates’. Why the turn of heart? The only explanation is a desire from these institutions to profit from having France.com without having to indemnify us or purchase it legally.
What exactly is the French government claiming? Can you elaborate a bit more on the case?
The French government is claiming that the word ‘France’ is now a registered trademark. It’s totally absurd, both legally and even economically. How do you promote France if you can’t use the word?
What’s next on your agenda for this year? Any new online business coming up?
I’m working on bringing my quarter-century experience online to small businesses to help them get more out of the digital space. One piece of advice I have for them is to use Wordlift for their SEO!
Content marketing is a popular strategic approach, but it takes time and a lot of efforts. Automating as much as you can content creation, optimization, and distribution can be key to success. We discussed this topic with Ruth Raventós, one of the co-founders of Nelio Software.
If you don’t come from Mars in the world of marketing, you’ve probably heard about content marketing — and, probably, you’ve even experimented it with your organization. If so, you probably know that creating content in order to drive lead generation and sales is not effortless.
It takes time, creativity, research, money, and the ability to measure your results, just like any other marketing approach.
Nevertheless, 91% of B2B and 86% of B2C marketers are relying on content marketing according to a research published this year by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs and sponsored by Brightcove.
What is content marketing and why it’s such a big deal?
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content Marketing Institute
Content marketing is an excellent way to build your own audience. When your brand shares valuable content, people are more likely to trust it. And trust is like a magic glue that makes your audience stick with you.
Are blogs worth for content marketing?
The same research mentioned above, states that 79% of marketers use blogs to distribute their content — and, even more importantly, 60% of the most successful marketers think that a blog is one of the most effective formats.
When it comes to blogging, there is no CMS like WordPress. But, even if WordPress simplifies a lot the editing and publishing process, you still need to organize, optimize, distribute, and promote your content through different channels to reach your audience.
Here is why we decided to ask a few questions to Ruth Raventós, who created two WordPress plugins to make content marketing easier and is truly devoted to this approach.
A chat with Ruth Raventos, co-founder at Nelio Software
You are one of the co-founders of Nelio Software and a Ph.D. in Software Engineering. Talk me about your background: how did you find yourself interested in content marketing?
Ruth Raventos – Co-founder at Nelio Software
After finishing my degree I started working as a software developer. But I was attracted to the academic world, so I did my Ph.D. and became a teacher and researcher of topics related to information systems development.
However, I like challenges and in 2013 my partners, David Aguilera, Antonio Villegas, and I chose to leave the comfort of a good stable job and build our own startup, Nelio Software. We didn’t have a concrete project in mind yet, just a vague idea of creating a scalable service. What service? How would we do it? We didn’t know, but we were super thrilled about running our own business… so, who cares, right?
In the end, we decided we would work within the WordPress ecosystem and would develop plugins. We started brainstorming a lot of alternatives related to WordPress. In the end, we came up with two different projects that shared one vision: making WordPress sites more impactful.
And from there, our interest in content marketing came naturally.
Your company developed two different plugins for WordPress, Nelio Content, and Nelio A/B Testing. What needs are you trying to solve for your customers?
Nelio Content features an editorial calendar and a content assistant. It has been designed to help you to efficiently create, schedule, and promote the content of your blog by automatically creating social publications on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest. Focus on the content that works best with its built-in analytics, and run a successful blog while saving tons of time.
Nelio A/B Testing is a powerful and versatile conversion optimization service for WordPress. It helps you define, manage, and keep track of A/B-testing experiments, combined with powerful and beautiful heatmaps.
With Nelio A/B Testing you can create alternatives to titles, featured images and excerpts without the help of designers and developers. Nelio A/B Testing will tell you which ones keep traffic on your site.
How did you understand that there was room for your plugins within the WordPress environment and market?
The idea of plugins came from our own needs as web owners. We had a clear idea of what we wanted for ourselves. From there, we made an in-depth analysis of the plugins and other similar tools that existed in the market and their popularity. It seemed to us that there was a market and, at the same time, they could be improved in many ways to have a much greater impact. And that’s it; we started with the development of an MVP for each one.
Talking about WordPress, you are part of the organization of the upcoming WordCamp Barcelona. Why do you think it’s crucial for the community to stick together?
Being part of this community has been critical to our success. It allows you to meet other interesting product developers, with whom to share your experience. An open source community is a great place to learn new things and grow as a professional, especially when you’re getting started and you don’t know exactly where you’re headed.
As you progress and become a better professional, you can’t help giving something back. Our first contact with the community was like everybody else’s — we attended a few meetups, talk to the organizers, met people… but as soon as we felt more confident and identified we too had a story to tell, we quickly got involved with the organization. Keep in mind these communities are volunteer-driven, so it’s very important that everybody who can and cares gets involved!
You often write content on your blog… do you ever struggle with SEO?
I’ve always been surprised at how many people present themselves as SEO experts. For us, the only formula that has worked so far is to improve our positioning in a totally organic way thanks to the regularity and constancy of the post published in our blog and their automatic promotion in social networks with Nelio Content…
But yes, SEO is anything but easy. So far, we’ve been focused on following the best practices everybody talks about (links, tags, keyword management, and so on) and we’ve recently integrated your plugin, WordLift, to our content marketing strategy, hoping it’ll help us rank even better.
Do you think content organization can make a substantial difference in engaging your readers and, at the end of the day, converting them into customers?
For us, it has been key. Our experience is that with no advertising budget, but with great planning in creating content and seeing what is working best for us on our website, we have been able to create our current business. In fact, the use of our two products has helped us grow and make a difference.
If you had to sum up your experience in content marketing in three tips, what would they be?
Content marketing is based on the generation and promotion of content. Therefore, the creation of a blog is the starting point for any online communication strategy of any professional or company. A blog with quality content helps you improve the visibility of your brand, it is the key factor to generate leads and, of course, the best way to improve your SEO. However, from our experience, a blog requires a lot of sacrifice and perseverance. Therefore, my recommendation to make this trip more bearable would be:
First, have a topic that you’re passionate about.
This way, it’ll be easier for you to write quality content. You’d better like what you write about or you’ll soon leave it aside.
Second, be consistent.
You may not be the best writer in the world or you may not always choose the best topics possible, but if you persevere and, whatever happens, continue to publish content, you’ll eventually get better than most.
Finally, be as much as efficient as possible in the entire content generation process and its promotion.
Automate as many tasks as you can and don’t waste time doing work that doesn’t give you value. Tools like WordLift or Nelio Content will help you to save a ton of time.
Talking with Ruth has been really inspiring and I’m sure you’ll find much interesting content on Nelio blog too, check it out!
