Ani Lopez's Search Engine Optimization Blog

My rants on what H stands for in HR

Apr 27, 2013

Moving to a new country and growing your professional career is a sure ticket for a trip with many stops for job interviews. Even higher chances to increase that number if your skills fall into the bucket of the latest cool jobs, as data analyst or SEO strategist, and the city where you live is a small one. Well SEO is not as cool as whatever related to data lately but anyway.

Rants here around my interactions with Human Resources people is pretty much limited to the geographical scope of Vancouver and a subset of HR population, IT staffing specialist and recruiters, in a time lapse of three and a half years.

I have no idea how well they do when related to specialties other than online marketing and such.

Hello, is anyone there?

How much cultural aspects make a difference here? You tell me. It's a fact that Mediterraneans and Latinos manage communications differently from other cultures, example: in those worm countries when you apply for a job you expect some kind of 'thanks for sending your resume'.

Even if it's an automated response it makes you feel there is an interlocutor in the other end of the line. Of course it does mean nothing in terms of possibility to get that job, out of discussion now. They might not contact you ever but at least accomplishes the most basic form of human communication when two people are involved, message sent -> answer back, so I know you are there.

I remember feeling quite disconcerted when I started applying for jobs right after landing in Vancouver. Did they receive my email? Should I call to be sure? Probably not, they will think I'm desperate (I was, so what?). Do they give a damn about the people that can potentially end up working for them?

Not saying that other cultures have the wrong approach but my population of study fails miserably at the very basic first moments of this process.

There are tons of jokes mocking Canadians for their extreme sense of politeness but every rule has exceptions and it seems we found one here.

I've been involved in the process of hiring people too. In this city you don't get hundreds of resumes for certain positions like a Senior SEO Strategist, maybe 12? In part because SEOs are not very good searching for jobs ironically. How much time takes you, my dear HR, thanking briefly 12 people? Not a lot but the perception I get from you as professional is completely different.

Even if you are pretty good managing your expectations it's disheartening when not having any signal back. I like to say that I don't do business with companies, I do business with people.

Meeting interuptus

Congratulations, you passed the first cut and they want to know more about you. Are you going to meet them for a first interview? Nope, they love to have that first one on the phone.

Probably another cultural issue here. We are more 'physical', body language tells a lot, and meeting face to face is like pictures, it says more than thousand words.

Obviously a phone call made sense when I was contacted by companies in Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia or Singapore but I can be at any local one in less than twenty minutes from home.

Confession, I hate phone interviews. I understand HRs prefer the phone version of anyone instead the complete show because it saves their time* but I don't feel I can give my best performance with an invisible audience. Don't know about you but I need eye contact.

*unless you are an HR in a company growing as fast as Hootsuite, (jeez! have you seen their offers list lately?), in my humble opinion you should have time to meet candidates in person.

Who writes the job offers?

I'm old enough to remember the times where people used to think you could fix any electronic device because "you do computers stuff, right?". That now replicates around anything related to data. Yes, I've been presenting on Analytics for International Scenarios but it doesn't mean I put together a distributed processing system with Hadoop on top for better data warehousing in the context of an international gaming company*.

*Note to myself. Write a post explaining where I seat in the Data landscape.

As an IT Staffing Specialist it must be really hard to keep updated in all the different specialties IT encloses, I get it, and Data Analysis is cool nowadays but don't throw those words in every job description you write because:

It's probably going to be a waste of time for both, you and me
It doesn't say much about you as specialist

Make a quick search at jobs posting sites, you'll get what I mean right away.

Few weeks ago an analyst mate forwarded a job description knowing I would have a good laugh. Title was "Online Marketing Analyst" but reading further they were really looking for someone doing just SEO and Paid Advertisement. And that's not the worst I've seen.

Special mention to IT recruiters that having my resume in their files, sent offers having nothing to do with my skill set now. 1998 flashback.

What you know about me?

Very well known brand in Vancouver. Everything from the beginning in that interview was going wrong. The guy, who knows why, seemed pretty disgusted having to do it. At a certain moment the classic 'What you know about our company' entered stage. I answered "well, I took a look at your site and your Wikipedia page but EVERYBODY knows your brand" and one third of a second later, in one of those moments of clarity I added "and what you know about me?"

Was I a pretentious loudmouth? Up to you to judge but his face turned into a cubist poem. I've done that again in a different one and it amazes me how easy is to catch interviewers off guard. Don't they investigate a bit who they are going to be putting under the magnifying glass?. If the Linkedin profile is not very good Google does that for you, just type a name and dig a bit.

It's not a one way thing, you want to know about me and I want to know about your company. Don't ask 'What you know about our company' if you are not ready to answer 'what you know about me'.

'Where do you see yourself in 5 years' is an all-time favorites of mine too. Nowadays it's easy to be ready for that kind of questions but I dislike canned answers, it's not me for better or worse.

Dear HR, let me give you an advice

What I know about the art of selecting the right candidate for a job? Nothing, nada, rien, niente but as any other human being with incipient gray hair I know a thing or two about courtesy and politeness, which are the glue that prevents societies to fall apart, and I have a bit of experience being in the other side of the table.

Don't ever forget the �H' factor from HR

It does not say much in favour of the culture of a company when you don't receive back a simple �thanks for your email', even worst when you ask candidates to forward examples of their work, list related books and blogs they read and such in a follow up conversation.

Email back no matter if it's to say your company is not moving forward with a candidacy. The impression you leave behind is "Wow! Those guys really care about people. I was not hired but I wouldn't mind working for them in the future" otherwise is completely the opposite and, believe me, it counts.

Am I from another planet, getting too picky or both?

IT recruiter: I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments but more specifically when I ask you what went wrong when not accepted for a job. Don't be shy, as I guy who likes to get into the numbers and the whys that kind of info is the quintessence helping me helping you do a better job.

No more rant, back to coloring spreadsheets.

Big Data? Hadoop? Sure I get it! What else?

Jan 11, 2013

Christmas holidays are over, back in business. Here we are Eduardo Cereto and me ready to move truckloads of big data :)

Rise hands those having a decent understanding of what is Big Data in technical terms. Let's say 'Hadoop', that has become lately a collateral buzzword almost equivalent to Big Data.

Rise hands those who have implemented and played around a bit with Hadoop and such.

Lastly, how many of you work in a daily basis with HiveQL or Pig Latin?

Well, I could mention NoSQL instead to lower the level and it would probably make no difference.

So, why so many people are using those words in their daily chatting without a clue of what they mean? Why many job offers asking for data analysts include as requisite having a guru level on those technologies when they barely understand them and no idea if they really need them?

Let's be honest, most of us manage to pay invoices working just with the basics, a bit of SQL to query the usual databases (Microsoft or MySql), Google Analytics to grab data from sites and Excel, Tableau if you are lucky, for reports, dashboarding and visual analysis.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an expert at all, far from that. Trying to do my homework and sharing it with you. Not interested in discuss what Big Data is, boring thing, but explaining the simplest way possible the technicalities around it.

In the beginning there was MapReduce

It's a programming model/framework for processing huge data sets using a large number of computers, 'nodes', commonly referred to as a 'cluster'. This distributed processing can occur on data stored either in a filesystem (unstructured) or in a database (structured).

In plain english, we have many computers working together to handle tons of data, no matter what kind.

Google Datacenter. Pic by Connie Zhou

MapReduce usually refers to an implementation of that model created by Google although NoSQL databases, like the popular MongoDB, can also provide commands to perform map-reduce operations.

Then Hadoop was born

Hadoop, open-source, was derived from Google's MapReduce and and Google File System. It has become the most popular data-intensive distributed applications.

On June 13 Facebook claimed that they had the largest Hadoop cluster in the world with 100 PB of storage. November 2012 they said it grows by half a PB per day. Crazy uh?

Nice but I still have no clue on how I run a simple SELECT query on Hadoop.

Hives and Pigs

Hadoop excels as a processing platform but apparently it sucks as a query tool because it was designed as a batch-oriented system and nothing to do as a real-time query engine we all have in mind. Facebook guys started to develop Hive to achieve an easy to use, SQL-like query language called HiveQL.

In short, Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop for providing data summarization, query, and analysis. How it works: a compiler translates HiveQL statements (queries) into MapReduce jobs, which are submitted to Hadoop for execution.

In Michael Driscoll words "Thus Hadoop has solved the challenge of economically processing data at scale. Hive has solved the challenge of hand-writing Hadoop queries".

Hive is not alone, Pig from Yahoo!, now incubating at Apache, is another platform to accomplish the same tasks that also has its query language named Pig Latin.

Summary

Query language: HiveQL, Pig Latin
Translates queries into MapReduce jobs: Hive, Pig
MapReduce jobs execution & data handling: Hadoop

No SELECTs yet? Patience, let me finish, this evolves everyday.

Next: Need for speed

Querying terabytes of data to perform some analysis and expect to have results in the blink of an eye is not realistic. Technology is quickly becoming very good at that but the problem leans more in the amount of data to process and not so at technology level so there still are some challenges to solve.

Solutions to increase response time point to, for example, pre-processing data generating summarized data chunks that are allocated in faster access containers what lets you load it comfortably into desktop analytics tools like Tableau, Qlikview or such. Metamarkets is working in that direction.

Some other solutions like the Cloudera Impala project, tries to accelerate it directly accessing the data through a specialized distributed query engine, similar to Google's Dremel or Apache Drill.

It is not only about solving size issues but the speed too.

Ok but how do I query Hive, Hadoop or whatever the heck it is?

All that sounds fantastic but you have data to analyze, work to do so, please, make my day and tell me how I extract the data I need executing some SQL queries using something with a human-friendly interface.

Hive has a JDBC Driver that integrates with SQuirrel SQL Client that is more the clasic database administration/query tool we all know in the lines of Microsoft SQL Query Analyzer or phpMyAdmin to mane a couple.

It also integrates with Pentaho, business analytics tool, I just discovered while researching for this post.

Not the most scientificaly acurated explanation but now you get it, right? For you and me, that we don't make a living implementing complex frameworks for processing huge data sets in clusters, all we need to know is the same old SQL with some more new specific additions.

Next time an HR interviews you for a data analyst position and asks you how much you know about Big Data and Hadoop as the coolest question around the block don't chicken out, if you are familiar with SELECTs, FROM, GROUP BYs, JOINs and such you are safe.

Movember roundup. Data Mining, Visualization & Analysis

Nov 04, 2012

We first discovered what Movember is, growing of moustaches during the month of November to raise awareness of prostate cancer, when we moved to Canada. Not a popular thing in Spain*.

At the door of a market there was a sign that read something like "1 in 7 Canadian men will develop prostate cancer". My daughter said: no worries dad, you are not Canadian yet. ROLF!

She would probably make a good statistician :)

Three years later we are about to apply for the Canadian citizenship, what seems to increase chances along with the fact that I'm not a teenagers any more so this year I joined the stache bros. Donate and let's fuck cancer!

Coming back to our favorite topics, here you have my particular selection of latest articles I found providing solid insights. Have a good read.

Analytics

Cool DataViz / Infographics

Data Mining

Data Visualization

Measurement business

Metrics Are Politics

*Spanish Public Health Care fortunately covers cancer or any sort of disease although a type of cancer is growing lately with apparently no cure: corruption.

How to measure traffic from Google Images

Sep 21, 2012

This is a quite simple way to measure effectively traffic from Google Images search engine. Unfortunately it does not work for images appearing at universal search but worth it.

You might argue that traffic from images is low. Take a look at this old article where I found some sites having up to 12% of the total traffic from images, not bad eh?

Obviously some webs rely more of this type of media that others but even when the percentage is low, the data you get is interesting because it helps a lot to understand how the work you did to SEO optimize your images for search engines is performing.

How to

Just add this simple line to your Google Analytics tracking code

_gaq.push(['_addOrganic', 'google', 'q', true, 'google images', '/imgres?']);

something like

Here you will find the parameters of _addOrganic() explained. Well, they only explain 3 parameters but that implementation adds five. Why they are not described? Who knows, maybe at Google they thought they are self-explanatory.

What do I get from that?

First of all you get that traffic labeled properly as source 'google images' what lets you more accuracy in the numbers as you are now able to segment it.

Secondly you get the keywords users queried the engine. Apparently there aren't (not provided) here so you get 100% of them which is fabulous.

You also get the landing pages where visitor headed after clicking at one of your images in the SERPs.

Exporting data directly from Google Analytics to Excel and a bit of the magic that pivot tables add, insights pop up right away.

Of course there you have the rest of metrics you usually get like Visits, Revenue, Conversions, Pages / Visit, Avg. Visit Duration, Bounce Rate, and such. Did you say Revenue? Yes, take a look.

It won't make you reach but it pays for some good diner. There are sectors where having good images is important.

Traffic from images might drive some revenue but it surely helps assisting conversions as you can see below if you implement that simple line onto your tracking code.

The more you segment the more you know.

OK but what about the image bringing traffic?

One of the parameters coming in the referral string is the exact path to the image matching the query:

imgurl=http://dynamical.biz/blog/image/ani-lopez-data-analyst.jpg

With a bit of patience and a filter you could capture that extra info in a User Defined Value but I'll let you deal with that if you don't mind.

Enjoy it!

6 Beautiful Dashboards

Sep 17, 2012

I opened the balcony to enjoy the last days of sunny Vancouver while having breakfast this morning and found my street was packed with collector cars for sale. One of my neighbours have several of them but I never saw him, or some of his mates, organize such a garage sale around here.

My wife Montse and I went downstairs with cameras in hand. She is way better than me taking pics so here you have the nicest dashboards she shot from those vehicles.

Yes, not the kind of dashboards you are expecting in this blog but it's a gorgeous sunny Sunday, dark winter is round the corner, and the only hard work I'm planning for today is making some caipirinhas, OK?

You are free to use the pictures under under copyleft license: attribution - share alike 2.5 Canada. In short: you just have to attribute the work to the author, Montse Medialdea.

Mid-August Roundup. Analytics & Visualization

Aug 20, 2012

Finally summer had the decency to show up here in Vancouver giving us the opportunity to have fun under warm sunny weather. I had some well deserved holidays but did not forget my pursuit of wider and deeper knowledge in Data Analysis and Visualization since I quitted SEO.

You will notice less and less SEO related articles from now on and the ones hitting the roundup will be related to analysis for ovbious reasons.
Enjoy the reading!

Analytics

Data Visualization

SEO

Content Strategy

UX

Color and cultural design considerations

Bye Bye SEO. Hello Data Analysis & Visualization

Jul 25, 2012

"changes aren't permanent, but change is"
Tom Sawyer - Rush

You might think I'm crazy, stupid or both. Up to you but let me explain why I'm halting my career as Senior SEO Strategist to be, eventually, full time focused on Data Analysis (whatever the source is, web or not) and Visualization.

So Why moving? Why now?

If you are a decent SEO, Analysis's round the corner

You guys already know that Web Analytics was always big part of my SEO thing. I like to base the practice of that discipline on data, not speculation so that step is not a U turn for me, just a slight detour.

In other hand I studied Industrial Design and practice some Graphic Design in a well renowned, at that time, art school in Barcelona. A strange mix of disciplines related somehow to the ones required to be successful in Dashboarding and Data Visualization where scientific matters as statistics and aesthetic subjects shake hands.

I guess I've got a nice spot in the pole position to make a good start for that race.

Looking for challenges, burning bridges

Probably I've already mentioned in this blog that for many years I was having the feeling that life was pushing me wherever it wanted instead of being me driving my live and heading to some premeditated professional destiny.

Besides some personal / familiar reasons, one of the most important ones why I decided to move to Vancouver from Barcelona with my wife and daughter three years ago was to challenge myself with a relevant decision. We went for it full throttle and it has been a marvelous adventure. Experience another culture should be mandatory once in a life time, seriously.

But that one, although not finished yet, does not represent a challenge any more and I need something making my daily doses of adrenaline to ramp up again.

One of the tools I never had in my tool box was the experience to be an in house SEO, quite different to be an agency guy. Even assuming I could get a position like that right now I'm a bit tired of the SEO game, to be honest. I'm looking for something else.

Very timely Amelia Earhart's doodle. Her fearless love for aviation inspired many including me. My dream was to be a pilot when I was a teenager. Who said �fear'?

Would I make it? Would I become a really good professional in those topics? I'll do my best investing many hours of my time off educating myself, enrolling online and offline courses and seminars, reading tons of blog posts, following relevant guys in Twitter, investigating tools and testing ideas the same way I was doing for SEO.

The important thing, more than arriving somewhere is having fun along the way, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!" (attributed to Emma Goldman).

I'm starting to madly adore this idea of burning bridges from time to time; it keeps my poor brain awake, alert and working.

Opportunity is right in my face

I joined VKI Studios March 2010 and one year later we joined two other agencies to become Cardinal Path, the largest digital measurement firm in North America with 50+ people dedicated to search marketing, acquisition, and performance measurement.

Most of my time there has been devoted to SEO but no matter what you do there, you breathe analytics! The perfect ecosystem to try this new adventure is right there, why not making profit of it?

Small or Big Data, there I go

'Big Data' is the new buzz work in the analytics space. As Stephane Hamel commented recently in a meeting "it has been always there" although it is true that lately it grows insanely and we have to be creative to tame it and make sense of it somehow, the same way we treat small data with all our love and affection.

Simplest definition of #BigData ever: "it doesn't fit in Excel" :) #measure #analytics
� Stephane Hamel (@SHamelCP) July 3, 2012

Big or small, real time or historical, relational or not, all is good to understand the whys of what generates it, personas, nature, economies, artificial systems, or any other.

I've learned tons of good things, especially from bad experiences, that will help me for sure. Many good mates that I'm not planning to 'unfollow', on the contrary because their expertise and kindness goes beyond pure SEO.

Do you think I'm going to miss Google's algorithm updates? Nah.
And yes, I've replaced the green for blue in the design of that blog to represent somehow that new phase I'm heading to.

How to Include Blekko as Search Engine in Google Analytics

Jun 17, 2012

Yes, I spend most of my search time putting my eyes on Google SERPs results, a pinch more on Bing but as a search engine I love Blekko.

Not only because they offer relevant SEO data like inbound links, states and countries where the links are coming from, duplicate content, when the site was last crawled, etc, also because their results are far more interesting.

Slashing queries (interesting integration of search queries and the popular twitter hashtags) is maybe an advanced feature for most users but as search engine users are becoming more sophisticated in the way we use them. Young but promising one.

I was recently taking a look at the sites Google Analytics include as search engines, thus showing their data at search organic report. Blekko was not of them and, as a consequence, it shows up as referrer what leaves apart some interesting data as keywords when someone visits your site after querying this engine.

No idea why it is not included but it could be the way Blekko constructs its queries, example http://blekko.com/ws/analytics+for+seo where there is no parameter handling the query terms, something like http://blekko.com/?q=analytics+for+seo and this is what Google Analytics needs at least to include a search engine in the list.

The thing is I want it to be there and get all the possible information from it. You might think it is not such a popular search engine and the visits coming from it are going to be very few. You are somehow right, Blekko has not a big piece of the market share but any bite of information counts and, what the heck!, I like it.

Here is how.

Tweaking GA tracking Code to include Blekko

I was never a terrific programmer and lately I'm not coding a lot so I asked mate Eduardo Cereto, the most technical analytics geek I've ever met, to review this piece of JavaScript to add to your regular GA tracking code. It is simple, copy code in red and add to your code the way is shown below.

<script type="text/javascript">
   var _gaq = _gaq || [];
   _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-0000000-1']);
   if (document.referrer.indexOf('blekko.com/ws/') >= 0) {
     var ref = document.referrer;
     _gaq.push(['_setReferrerOverride', ref.replace(/\/ws\/[^?]/, '/ws/?q=')]);
     _gaq.push(['_addOrganic', 'blekko.com', 'q']);
   }
   _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
   (function() {
     var ga = document.createElement('script');
     ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl....
     ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');
     document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);
   })();
</script>

It works as you can see at these screenshots from my GA account.

From here you could be adding to the mix the regular metrics you use in your daily data torture routine.

52 feeds to be updated on Web Analytics & Data Visualization

Jun 16, 2012

What's SEO without Web Analytics? Not much. And what's Web Analytics without Data Visualization? A quite hard thing to digest.

I enjoy both disciplines, data analytics and its visual aesthetics, as much as I enjoy SEO so I try to keep up to speed on what is interesting on both topics that could help me analyze, understand, and explain much better to myself and clients how my daily work performs and how to improve traffic from search engines.

This is the list of sites I have in my feed reader that I daily scrutinize including some I read from Spain where we have terrific analysts.

Pic by Brooks Elliott

Visit them, grab the feeds of those you like or if you want to get them all in once, here you have the OPML file Web Analytics Data Visualization feed (xml) letting you import the complete list into your favorite reader.

No need to say you should be following Cardinal Path's blog on Web Analytics. Well, in fact all the topics covered there.

Web Analytics

Google Analytics Blog - RSS
The Analytics Edge - RSS
The Intercom Blog - RSS
BloggerChica - RSS
Chandoo.org - Learn Excel & Charting Online - RSS
Next Analytics Community - RSS
Conversion Room - RSS
Analytics Talk - RSS
Dudu's blog - RSS
Online Behavior - RSS
Simply Statistics - RSS
All Analytics - RSS
Analytics Ninja - RSS
Facts and Figures - RSS
The comScore Data Mine - RSS
Juice Analytics - RSS
KAIZEN Analytics - RSS
Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - RSS
Michael Whitaker's web analytics blog - RSS
Optimisation Beacon - RSS
Savio.no - Webanalyse og Markedsf�ring p� Internett - RSS
ZoomMetrix.com - RSS

Web Analytics in Spanish

Data Visualization

blprnt.blg - RSS
Infochimps Blog - RSS
Effective Graphs - RSS
Chart Porn - RSS
Datavisualization.ch - RSS
eagereyes - RSS
Visualization Group Papers - RSS
fathom.info - RSS
Feltron - RSS
FlowingData - RSS
Information Aesthetics - RSS
Junk Charts - RSS
Neoformix - RSS
Periscopic Now - RSS
TULP inspiration - RSS
vis4.net - RSS
GE Data Visualization - RSS
Well-formed data - RSS
Dashboard Insight - RSS
Data Pointed - RSS
Daily chart - RSS
The Excel Charts Blog - RSS
Visual Business Intelligence - RSS
Statistical Graphics and more - RSS
visualcomplexity.com - RSS
Visualizing.org News and Visualizations Feed - RSS

Please, share with us some other sites you consider relevant on those topics.

Mid-June SEO & more Roundup

Jun 15, 2012

I admit it, this is becoming more a monthly than a weekly thing but you know how this goes, right?

Sir, help yourself. If you can't find anything let us know. No worries Ma'am, we'll take your groceries to your car.

SEO

Content Strategy

Link Building

Ani Lopez's Search Engine Optimization Blog

My rants on what H stands for in HR

Hello, is anyone there?

Meeting interuptus

Who writes the job offers?

What you know about me?

Dear HR, let me give you an advice

Big Data? Hadoop? Sure I get it! What else?

In the beginning there was MapReduce

Then Hadoop was born

Hives and Pigs

Next: Need for speed

Ok but how do I query Hive, Hadoop or whatever the heck it is?

Movember roundup. Data Mining, Visualization & Analysis

Analytics

Cool DataViz / Infographics

Data Mining

Data Visualization

Measurement business

How to measure traffic from Google Images

How to

What do I get from that?

OK but what about the image bringing traffic?

6 Beautiful Dashboards

Mid-August Roundup. Analytics & Visualization

Analytics

Data Visualization

SEO

Content Strategy

UX

Bye Bye SEO. Hello Data Analysis & Visualization

If you are a decent SEO, Analysis's round the corner

Looking for challenges, burning bridges

Opportunity is right in my face

Small or Big Data, there I go

How to Include Blekko as Search Engine in Google Analytics

Tweaking GA tracking Code to include Blekko

52 feeds to be updated on Web Analytics & Data Visualization

Web Analytics

Web Analytics in Spanish

Data Visualization

Mid-June SEO & more Roundup

SEO

Content Strategy

Link Building

Local Search

Mobile SEO

Usability

Analytics