Blog - Page 7 of 15 - Mike Arnesen

Challenging Myself: Blogging Every Week

The title says it all. I’m challenging myself to blog at least once a week, every week. Until when? I don’t know. Maybe FOREVER!

Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aliedwards/

I’ve struggled with being a perfectionist for my whole professional career and my blogging has absolutely been handicapped by that. It takes me an inordinate amount of time before a blog post is good enough, has been reviewed enough times, has been researched or validated enough, or is original enough. By holding myself accountable for writing something on here each week, I hope to start working through some of that obsession.

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts last week (This Week In Startups) and famed venture capitalist Fred Wilson was talking about why he values blogging daily (yeah, not weekly, daily). He said that he’s found it super valuable because it forces him to put his thoughts into a coherent format.

I can see a lot of value in that personally. My mind is typically all over the place and I have hundreds of random, strange, useful, useless, innovative, derivative ideas every day. But when it’s in my head, I don’t really need to flesh the idea out or make it coherent. I think this will be a great exercise for that. Putting my thoughts down on paper, as it were, might help me get more value out of them.

Also, did you know the term “Freemium” originated from an random question that ended up as a blog post and a commenter suggested the term “Freemium” to describe a business that had a basic free model but then paid features on top of that? Blogging your ideas allows you to get feedback and help from other brains, too!

I’m stoked about this.

Hello world!

Nerd Life

So, I completely rebooted my site. This is it. Don’t judge me until mid-November once I have time to play with this.

Exploring Startup Culture

Startups

What is company culture? It surprised me that I couldn’t just pull a decent answer out of my back pocket for this. For the past few years, I’ve thought of myself as an advocate of company culture, yet it wasn’t until I set out to write a blog post about SwellPath’s culture that I realized how difficult it would be to pin down what that actually meant.

Sure, I could turn to Google and figure out what “organizational culture” meant in less than .00062 seconds, but instead I waited until I was a mile up in the air to try to figure it out on my own. Something incredibly counter-instinctual for a search geek like me.

What is company culture? To me, culture is the way a startup, a company, an organization behaves. I’m not sure I like that definition…let me clarify.

Wanna be on my team?

Startups

UpBuild is hiring! If, after your read this, you feel like you’d be a good fit for our team or you know someone who could be, go to the site and shoot an email.

Note: This post was written when I was the Director of Analytics & Optimization at SwellPath. Enjoy!

Over the course of my SwellPath tenure, I saw dozens and dozens job postings go up. As we hoped, those postings led to lots of new hires; shiny new additions to our team. The folks who ended up joining our team over the years usually fell into one of three groups:

Exceptional: The exceptional new hires have always been the people who were great cultural fits and had the drive to produce exceptional work. The loved being here and, as a result, we loved having them on as part of our team.
Good: The good hires were able to do a good job, but SwellPath ended up not being a great long term fit for them. A stint at an agency was simply one step for them leading to what they probably wanted to do all along. So invariably, people who aren’t fantastic at working in an agency setting and aren’t perfect cultural fits end up moving onto something else.
Poor Fits: Then there are people who just weren’t good fits in terms of culture and/or quality of work. Thankfully, we almost never see that.

[Read more…] about Wanna be on my team?

Tonight is the Night! Semantic & Social Markup in PDX

SEO

Just wanted to throw up a quick post because I’m super stoked about what’s happening tonight. I’ll be speaking at SEMpdx’s February educational event called “Under the Hood: Advanced Markup for SEO & Social Media“. Semantic SEO and social sharing enhancements are two of my favorite topics, so I’m beyond excited to get to talk about that with people who are also getting worked up about it.

And it gets even better: I’m sharing the stage. I’m tag teaming the topic with none other than the great Will Hattman. Have you heard of Will? Maybe not yet, but you will. As recently as a year ago, I had the pleasure of having Will on my SEO team over at SwellPath and was lucky enough to be able to teach him a few things about SEO. Now he’s moved on to heading up the SEO offering at SEMpdx mainstay Anvil Media.

Tonight really is going to be an amazing reunion for us. We actually haven’t seen each other in person since we were working together. I know it probably won’t happen and I know it sounds cheesy, but I just really hope he opens with this when I see him…

Will: We meet again at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the Master.
Me: Only a master of evil, William.

So, if you’re in Portland, Oregon tonight and you want to learn everything you need to know about structured data, semantic markup, and social metadata and why it matters, join us! There are still tickets left and you can buy them at the door, too.

See you there!

Tickets

Optimizing Mobile Page Title & Meta Description Length

SEO

Let’s start with the quick answer.

Mobile Page Title Length

58-60 characters max

Mobile Meta Description Length

115 characters max

Mobile Meta Description Length and Page Title Length

Recently, I’ve been focusing more and more on making sure the sites that I work on get super mobile-friendly metadata. Mobile search traffic go to the point this holiday season where I had eCom clients who were getting the majority of their organic search traffic from mobile devices and tablets. That’s freakin’ nuts!
So one of my New Years resolutions is to make sure that the metadata I write jives with the length that mobile search results can handle. #LamestNewYearsResolutionEver

If more than half of a site’s search traffic is coming from mobile search, holy heck, the site better be optimized for mobile! Now, of course there are plenty of other things we need to do for mobile, too, like use a responsive design, have great page speed, yada, yada, yada, but that’s not what this post is about. It is about the small everyday deeds of ordinary SEOs that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of optimization, and mobile search.

Now what we really need

Now what we really need is a new set of meta tags for mobile-specific metadata. We have to optimize metadata for mobile, but we’re much more limited. Google and Bing are telling us to ditch mobile-specific sites (heck, I hate them, too), so what are we to do? Pick one or the other?

Can’t we just get a new standard put in place so that we can specify a standard set of metadata and a mobile set? That would be amazing!

My ulterior motive in writing this post about mobile page title & meta description length

Well, it’s not ulterior any more, since I’m stating it…but I’ve been Googling the ideal length for mobile page titles and meta descriptions pretty often. Trouble is, it always takes me way too long to find a decent post with that information. I always ended up just pulling out my iPhone and literally counting the characters in meta descriptions. So, to save time, I wrote this post so I can have something to Google when I need to get a result for the query, “mobile page title length” or “mobile meta description length”. Shameless? Maybe. Lazy? Definitely. Putting way more work into this that if I had just wrote it down as a note somewhere? Oh, for sure.