On asking Randy about getting recognized in public as a ‘celebrity’, he says, “Almost never, and even when it happens, it’s usually someone I know or have met, so that doesn’t really count. I don’t think it’s fair to say I have “celebrity status, especially compared to all those “social media” experts who have 100K+ followers on Twitter.”
Probably, you might also not have identified him by his name, but, what if I say, Mr. Rand Fishkin – Co-Founder and Former CEO, SEOMoz..??
Got him now??
SEOMoz is not a new name in the Digital world today and hence Rand Fishkin is a familiar face for all!
“There is a great story behind every successful individual” and this saying fits well with the life of Rand Fishkin. Like every other great personality, Randy too covered the voyage through hardships, struggle and failures in his life.. But these letdowns never stopped him and he reached where he is today
Rand fishkin SEO MOZ
Rand Fishkin – His Tough Journey to Success!
Achieving success is not a game of a day or two. Even people who are highly successful have suffered a lot in getting all they have achieved today.
When Randy along with his partner Gillian Muessig started working on MOZ, they had no idea about how to run a business. From venture capital to even the full form of MRR, they were completely blank. “You know, we just had no savviness at all about how to build revenue, how to get customers, keep them, how to maintain a financial model that had any hope of succeeding… We were just truly rank amateurs at this stuff.”
What they knew was just the expenses needed to maintain the tools.
“ All I knew was well, it cost us this much to maintain our tools, so we’d better get people paying us every month instead of a one time download, because it costs us money to keep it up. I had the most simplistic of thinking that you can imagine from a business perspective.”
Although, today SEOmoz is the world’s biggest SEO platform, it gave a lot of pain to Randy during his entire journey. Rand literally struggled with depression while building Moz. His depression made him see everything around him with negative light as all his strategies and efforts for Moz were failing. The situation got worst when Moz lost $6m in 2013. It was a heartbreaking episode for Rand.
Although, Rand is very jubilant in real life, during depression he started living in isolation, away from the limelight and even family and friends.
“When I was depressed, I really did not feel better after spending time with my friends and coworkers who were just like, “everything’s fine, Rand, look at these amazing thing you built. What are you complaining about? It’s going so well, so you had one misstep, it’s going to turn itself around. It’s not like you’re bleeding money, you didn’t have to fire anybody. What’s your problem, Rand?
I hated that. HATED it. It just bugged the shit out of me.
I’m having a visceral reaction just remembering that now“.
What shattered Randy was the public response he received when Moz was in loss.
“Folks were like, “yeah man, this is complete shit. I can’t believe we fucked this up, you fucked this up, it’s gotta get better, we’ve gotta improve it, we need to work on this, this is just terrible and I understand how badly you feel.”
But…… things really changed! Randy finally made efforts to fight his depression and come back. His supporters, friends and mentors who trusted him brought him back into action.
“The thing that helped me the most was hanging out with friends and folks who either had depression before, or understood that anxiety and could commiserate. Honestly that was way more helpful, way more comforting than “everything will be all right.”
People like Ben Ha (of The Cheezburger Network) who have been through struggle and depression, greatly inspired Rand.
“I really liked spending time with him. I like spending time with him now, too, but it was just great to have that feeling of not being alone. Of not feeling like “the rest of you are crazy, why can’t you see this terrible thing for what it is?”
And finally, his depression began to fade with a silly event that he had.
“The moment of change happened after a doctor’s visit, in a very weird, inexplicable way. A few months prior to the doctor’s visit, I had tried a chocolate truffle laced with THC (don’t panic, personal Marijuana use is legal in Washington State). I’ve had sciatica in my left leg for years. For 6 hours after I tried the pot truffle, I felt horrible – crazy paranoid and high and awful. Then, for the next 3 days, my leg didn’t hurt at all for the first time in six years. I told my doctor about this, and she said “the funny thing is, Marijuana doesn’t have any pain-killing properties. It just lessens tension, anxiety, and stress for some people.”
Moment of epiphany! My pain is tied to anxiety and stress (probably) and since I’m not particularly excited about trying pot truffles again after those first 6 hours of hell, I need to work on those things in order to fix my leg. And not just my leg, There’s likely all sorts of maladies, mental and physical, that I might suffer in years ahead if I can’t get this under control. That night, I felt different. I looked at our daily numbers email in the morning, and I didn’t come up with some reason in my head why they were bad even though they looked good. “
The Bottom Line
Despite of having specific goals in life, we tend to fail often. This is because it’s not difficult to set goals; it’s difficult to fulfill them. People get into depression because they fear failure and loss, just like Randy. He was so much moved by the continuous losses that he got clutched in despair and heart-break. But, that one event, though weird, changed Randy’s life, bringing him back in his pace and getting him the position he earned today. It’s only a momentous impact that can shake and wake you!
Don’t fear failures. They are the stepping stones to success. The more you fail, the more you learn and the better you achieve. Try to learn from your pain. Just think, what are those things that can ease your pain and anxiety and you’ll find several things around.
And as said, Big things come in small packets…. Your journey of endless failures and little gains… though may take time… but definitely will lead you to your ultimate goal.
Computer science has for long made extensive use of “entities” and “relationships” for defining different data sets and key rules that govern their associations. Now, SEO and content writing professionals too may have to learn a thing or two about these concepts.
Let’s go through the basics first.
What is An Entity?
Something that can exist independently in its entirety can be termed as an entity.
So, your name is an entity and so is the title of this post. Any noun you can think of can be an entity.
What is a Relationship?
Multiple entities can be related to each other. These associations are known as ‘relationships.’
What is entity relationship model?
A Sample Entity-Relationship Diagram
entity relationship example
While ‘Writer,’ ‘Consumer’ and ‘Novel’ are entities here, they are related to each other through relationships named ‘Creates,’ and ‘Buys.’
This simple concept, enriched by “roles” and “cardinalities” forms the basis of Relationship Database Management Systems (RDMS).
What’s in it For SEO Experts?
If you are an SEO expert, you may now need to get into the basics of how relational database systems work or how you can use ER diagrams.
What should be of interest is the fact that Google has recently secured a patent that revolves around such entities.
In this case, Google has used the term “search entities.”
The Internet is growing bigger and search engine giants, well, smarter. The next big thing happening after Hummingbird, it seems, is Google taking “search entities” quite seriously.
Google’s Knowledge Graph, for example, is in fact an “entity graph.”
In near future, Google may use the “search entities” to a great extent to correlate different pieces of information that otherwise appear disconnected to a bot.
It’s Not a Recent Development
Google has been of course trying harder each year to better serve the end user as the Internet grows in size. If Google didn’t update its search algorithms every now and then, it would just fail to provide “relevant search results” due to the sheer size of the Internet.
Providing relevant results is Google’s core competence and there’s no way the company would want to lose out on that. It wants to ‘answer’ everything that billions of people want to ask it and do so in a manner that no one else can.
Back in 2010, Google acquired Metaweb, a company that had created a fine system of indexing “named entities” on the Internet.
A “named entity” is a specific place, person or a thing. Cristiano Ronaldo, Brazil and Football, for example, are “named entities.” Each of these named entities is given a unique ID.
Equipped with a database of tagged data (named entities) created by Metaweb, essentially a semantic search startup, Google was in a position to improvise it further and ultimately make it a part of its search engine offerings.
Today, when you search for Bob Marley, you’re shown some highly customized results because Google already has information ready to be served. “Bob Marley” in this case, is handled as a “named entity.”
Example Google Knowledge Graph
Not just Google, other search engines are using such entities too. According to an internal study carried out by Microsoft, as many as 20 to 30% of all search queries processed by Bing Search were just named entities. The study also pointed out that close to 71% of all queries submitted to Bing Search had named entities in search strings.
Does that ring the bell? It should!
Search Entities – How Google Can Use Them
By successfully correlating billions of disparate “search entities,” earlier identified by making use of metrics such as keywords, images, meta tags, back links, anchor text, social signals and more recently authorship, Google may soon be in a position to further improvise its search algorithms.
Imagine how page ranks of many websites may change (for better or worse) if Google bots can effectively correlate specific information about different people, places and things.
Let’s say you create a new website on Bob Marley and make it a complete resource, by assimilating unique and high quality content as well as other information including the songs, wallpapers, videos, graphics, books etc.
Earlier, it would have been pretty hard for you to get it ranked well. It would take great effort because of highly competitive keywords. But once “search entities’ begin to play a bigger role, it would be a different ballgame.
Search Entity = Bob Marley
Related Search Entities = Songs, Music, Awards, Tours, Biography, Books, Articles, Images, Videos and so on.
If the list of “related search entities” is available with a (more) intelligent bot, do you not think it will begin to rank pages differently than how it is possibly done right now?
With “search entities” Google may be able to make some sense out of the unstructured data on the Internet. The outcomes will directly impact page ranks of websites crawled by the search engine.
What are you selling on the Internet? What are your products known for? Are you targeting a specific place? What is that place known for?
All such questions and a whole lot more may soon become more important than ever for internet marketers!
The task of an SEO is to polish the available content to see that it reaches high ranks in the popular keyword searches. However, it is not really possible for everyone to rank on the first page of the search engines because search engines frequently change their algorithms to penalize SEO oriented sites from faking the system. As search engines resort to semantic search, SEOs are steadily changing their ways and have begun using semantic SEO as the way. Semantic SEO sends more relevant search to the search engines so that your product or services ranks high in the query that is best suited for your offer.
Semantic search and semantic SEO
Semantic Markup by NY Times
Semantic SEO is one step ahead of the SEO techniques of yesteryears. Semantic SEO is fairly new web marketing technique but is fast growing in conjunction with large scale SEO perhaps for the fact that it so ably combines the facets of SEO with semantic web technology and semantic search – which instead of using keywords as the core for search results, uses searcher’s intent and meaning of the query.
Semantic SEO therefore, besides the normal focus on the user’s keyword search and links also focuses on the user’s intent and meaning of the query to provide best results on search engines.
So, when it comes to semantic SEO it becomes all the more important for retailers, bloggers, news websites, video web pages, contact, product and medical data information providing website etc. to rethink their focus on vocabularies and syntax of the structured data to rank high on the search engines following the semantic search technique.
Good Relations Ontology
It is known that structured data is responsible in sending meaningful information of data on the webpage to the search engines and other data consumers in a way that is best understood by them. There are many vocabularies and syntax that actually make a much needed difference in the structured data, but the most important that also helps in semantic search and SEO is the GoodRelations ontology or schema.org markup in RDFa or Microdata syntax.
GoodRelations ontology or schema.org in RDFa or Microdata syntax are the most powerful and effective vocabulary and syntax that can be used to send rich description of all details of products and services of a webpage in a way best suited for search engines, web browsers, mobiles applications etc.
Therefore, its believe that if a GoodRelations is used in the markup on the website then search engines, mobile apps etc have a better chance of recognizing you in the search results, which can directly increase the number of users visiting your site from the search engines. This is the reason SEOs are beginning to utilize GoodRealtions ontology.
Semantic Markup
Vocabularies and syntax mentioned above for structured data can be summed up as semantic markup. Because semantic SEO involves inclusion of semantic markup in the web page to enhance meaning of the page and make it easily comprehendible to search engines, it becomes necessary to understand what is Semantic Markup?
Semantic markup is a way to assist search engines, browsers and apps to identify the information on a web page in a language that they can easily understand. Presently the most useful semantic markup formats are RDFa and Microdata, and semantic markup is best defined as using HTML tags, which offer every clean codes that are not only easy for humans to understand and right but also for the search engine algorithms to comprehend. A reason SEOs and developers love it and semantic search recognizes.
