Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Howdy, Moz community! Hope you're all having a fine Friday so far!

Tuesday on the blog we featured Samuel Scott's superpowered "Advanced Guide to Online Publicity Campaigns." One interesting tidbit stood out to me as I was reading; the author states:

On online marketing websites and blogs, I see pitching often being discussed by "content marketers" as a way to gain shares of and links to one thing or another. They should stop. I receive e-mailed pitches from PR executives and "content marketers" all the time — and I can tell within three seconds which one I'm getting.

How? Here is the difference between the two.

"Content marketers" pitch me:

1.) To share or link to some random article, and they do so often when
2.) I have no connection to or interest in the topic at all

Publicists pitch me:

1.) To write about an idea because
2.) They already know that I have a connection to or interest in that topic

I ignore or delete the pitches from "content marketers." Following the pitches from publishers, I may choose to include their source, study, or idea in some future piece in the publications to which I contribute. Most "link earning" methods are poor imitations of traditional publicity practices.

Pitch in a way that will genuinely interest the people who you are contacting. Do not pitch thinly-veiled attempts to get links and shares for you or your clients.

I definitely get these emails fairly regularly, but I've never given thought to just what it is that makes me respond positively to some and decline others. So here's my discussion question for the week:

What's the distinction for you? Have you noticed that, in your own pitches, you've had a better reception to a certain strategy? Does the "publicist" angle work better in your experience, or have you had plenty of luck with the "content marketer"-type pitch? What do you actually find yourself responding to, in these situations?

In a post earlier this week, Roy Hinkis makes the case that SEOs should be focusing on attacking diverse traffic sources and harnessing the potential of social, sites like Twitch.tv and Buzzfeed, and new search engines like DuckDuckGo.

Have you had success in diversifying your traffic sources beyond the Big G? What are your thoughts on the up & coming DuckDuckGo, and do you have any personal experiences to share in optimizing for it?

In the comment discussion for Thursday's blog post, An Essential Training Task List for Junior SEOs, there's been mild debate around some of the items, such as having a Junior SEO build a website by hand. It's a fantastic comment discussion (the kind that makes a blog manager's heart sing), and it's got me thinking.

We've all gone through the wringer when it comes to boosting our careers. Heck, I was a poetry major and found myself learning SQL last week. What hurdles have you jumped that have been painful and challenging, but have taken your career to the finish line? Maybe even gotten you the gold?* What would you recommend to newbies just starting out (or warn them about)?

*Yeah, I got Olympic about it. I went there.

Voice search represents a new challenge for SEOs, certainly, but it may also outline some pretty cool opportunities.

In Purna Virji's post about the subject, there's an interesting line of thought raised in the comments: voice search reacting to differences in accent and mispronunciations, and taking those things into account for optimization.

Let's just take a minute and think about all the wild possibilities in a hypothetical world where voice search is more prevalent than text queries. Release your imagination from the confines of current reality. cue Twilight Zone music

We've been looking at the relationship between SEO & UX a bit more closely lately on the blog. Our good pal Cyrus started the wheels turning with a tweet: https://twitter.com/CyrusShepard/status/748296076411625473

...and that morphed into a Whiteboard Friday idea, which was filmed and posted here: https://moz.com/blog/ux-vs-seo-whiteboard-friday

We shared the story of one site that enjoyed rapid growth and that subsequently battled with managing that UX/SEO relationship on Thursday.

And it's hard, right? UX and SEO teams often operate independently of one another, and may make decisions that affect one another's work. Sometimes it's a "hindsight is 20/20" situation. Sometimes the answer is so radical and impactful that you may want to settle for a "safe" alternative.

I'd imagine many of you have encountered some big issues with user experience and search optimization in your day-to-day over the years. What's the most difficult situation you've encountered with this? How did you resolve it? (I'd bet money on there being some really creative solutions out there :). Is there a particularly challenging situation you're struggling with now that you'd want to share & crowdsource ideas for?

Hi there, SEOhanna, thanks for bringing this up! I'm so sorry you've mistakenly gotten caught up in moderation, that's really frustrating. We've been working to lessen the amount of comment spam on the blog, and added a few new filters to the moderation system. While most of the time those filters have been doing a great job of catching spammy comments (I've deleted about 10 posts inviting me to join the Illuminati in the last day alone!), we've noticed that a few spammy comments still slip through, and a few awesome comments get caught in the net. Because I'm the point person to manually go through and approve or deny comments, I can attest to the fact that your insights are just the kind I love to see on the Moz blog! I'll see if we can't find a way to lower the defenses a bit while still keeping the spam away, and in the meantime, please reach out if you run into anything else that's frustrating -- we're here to help!

When Laura Lippay came to me with the idea to write a series of posts on the Moz blog about SEO and accessibility, it really got my gears turning. As the blog manager, I realized I'd been thinking about all sorts of ways to make the blog the best it can be, but accessibility was one place I had yet to explore in-depth.

While I have my own goals and projects around this topic churning along in the background, I'd love to hear what the community's done to be inclusive to all users of the Internet.

• What've you struggled with in terms of making sites you've worked on accessible -- both technically and as an initiative in general?
• What's often missing that you've become passionate about including?
• Do you have any big wins you're especially proud of and want to share?

Looking forward to reading your thoughts and stories, folks!

"An act of poetic acrobatics" -- I love that description, so apt! It's really interesting to consider all the overlap between different work, teams, and roles (even those that don't immediately come to mind) and to keep in mind that there is a cohesive story to be told, in the end. Excellent insight, thank you for sharing!

Wow, this reads like it could be its own team org plan -- awesome story! Lots of really intriguing points, especially the final takeaway. Makes me wonder if even the simple act of having the folks who manage SEO and UX sit together could go a ways toward boosting mutual understanding and overlapping work; it can be so difficult to have an awareness for what you don't know you don't know. Thanks for sharing this!