Category Archives: blogging

Fast Five in Search – Week 4, 2013

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fast-fiveThis week’s Fast Five selection is mostly about blogging, since 2013 is shaping up to be all about content creation and sharing!

1) Content Marketing Made Easy: 7 Blog Post Formats You Can Copy by Sujan Patel Stumped for blogging ideas? This excellent post by Sujan Patel offers seven tried-and-true blogging formats that are sure to get your creative juices flowing.

2) My Favourite Way to Get Links and Social Shares – Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin When it comes to a list of posts to share I can rarely go past Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday posts on SEOmoz. Last Friday Rand described his favourite content sharing strategies, which revolve around helping others wherever you can – true online, true in life.

3) The Ultimate Guide to Advanced Guest Blogging by Pratik Dholakiya                        Pratik has put a lot of thought into this post about guest blogging – a hot subject given that 2013 has already been dubbed as the year of the online author. In this post Pratik describes 20 things to look out for when guest blogging and 20 things to avoid.

4) A Guide to Searching and Using Pictures in Your Posts by Chhavi Vatwani            Finding just the right picture for your blog post, website or feature article can be tricky. Chhavi’s post includes plenty of handy links and info on how to find images and use them properly by assigning credit back to the owner.

and finally, for something a little bit different…

5) Designing for SEO by Justin Taylor                                                                             Justin tackles the age-old issue of design versus optimization – by exploring what can happen when designers work closely with optimizers to build visually beautiful, user friendly and uniquely optimized sites. This post is a must for marketing teams, web designers and search professionals alike.

Happy reading!

*Image courtesy of Threadless

 

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Fast Five in Search – Week 3, 2013

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Our relatively new feature Top Five Search Industry Blog Posts of the Week is proving to be a bit of a mouthful to say (and to type!) so we’re shortening it to: Fast Five in Search.

The whole idea behind the post is to provide a quick grab-bag of must read blog posts, articles or presentations that sum up the goings on in the search industry for each week.

We hope you like the new name!

Here’s this week’s Fast Five:

1) How to leverage PPC to discover high-converting keywords for SEO by Nathan Safran. In this post for Search Engine Land, Nathan explains in detail a little keyword research trick that we SEO veterans have used for years: setting up AdWords accounts to measure the impression rate and conversion potential of keywords for SEO purposes.

2) Rapid Fire Link Building Strategies by Wil Reynolds. A client sent me this presentation by Wil. It was actually given at SearchChurch last June, but in light of the Penguin and Panda updates we experienced late last year, it’s well worth a revisit. If you’re stuck for link building ideas, I guarantee this will stimulate you into action!

3) A Manifesto of Content Marketing by Rand Fishkin. This slide deck by Rand is also from last year, but I came across it for the first time this week via a link from the post above. It’s a terrific reminder that traffic from search engines starts and ends with shareable content.

4) The Complete Social Media Community Manager’s Guide by Marty Weintraub and Lauren Litwinker. Ok, so this is a book rather than a post. But one of the authors is my effervescent friend Marty from AimClear who knows more about social media than practically anyone I know. If you’re in a position that involves any type of social media responsibility for a brand or company, you’d be well advised to pre-order this book.

and finally…

5) 101 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Web Site by Matt Schoenherr. If you ever find yourself out of ideas for getting more visitors to your site, you’d best bookmark this one. It’s jam-packed full of fresh inspiration for driving traffic and easy to implement activities using seven different key marketing channels. Whenever I’m feeling particularly uninspired, I start the day here.

Happy reading!

*Image courtesy of Threadless.

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Top Five Search Industry Blog Posts of the Week

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Blog imageIt has been pretty quiet in the blogosphere during the festive season, but there have been some great posts about link building lately, that I thought worthy of sharing.

Since the Panda and Penguin updates, webmasters are having to rethink the way link profiles are used to determine Google’s search results. Google is determined to weed out sites with spammy non-relevant links and make search results more intuitive and personal.

What does all this mean for link builders? Well, I gathered the following articles from the last few weeks to help answer that question – Happy Reading!

Semantic Search and Link Building Without Links -The Future for SEO? by Simon Penson

In this article Simon talks about how anchor text is no longer the primary factor when it comes to determining the relevancy of links. Other things like social signals, link age and personalized search query history are now equally – if not more important.

Simon says Semantic Association is the new catch phrase and determining the context of search queries is the new holy grail for search engineers. Google no longer wants to find out exactly what we are searching for, they also want to know why, so they can deliver search results personalized to our unique needs.

Simon lists several innovative tools he has used to adapt to these Semantic Search changes and encourages webmasters to even ‘post without links’ in order to take advantage of co-occurrence, “(co-occurrence) is a way of ranking websites and pages not on inbound links but by how many times they are MENTIONED in close proximity to key phrases.”

Interesting stuff!

3 Areas That Get Overlooked When Building Links in a Bubble by Julie Joyce

I engaged with this post straight away because I could relate to Julie’s suggestion that most link builders are operating in a vacuum. Having worked on many link building campaigns for clients, I know this is often true.

SEM is such a complex and ongoing process that one company may have the contract for link building, while another has the PPC contract and so on. The problem is how to align the various strategies.

Julie’s article describes ways to align link building strategies with PPC; Social Media Campaigns; and Technical SEO – for an efficient and effective overall marketing campaign that is sure to reach your target audience.

Your Best Link Building Tool in 2013: Community Manager by Kate Morris

This post follows on perfectly from the one above. Kate describes link building as a process of relationship building and outlines how to integrate in-house link building strategies across an organization.

More than ever before link building is about developing key relationships. Most companies already have staff which perform this function in various ways including: executives, marketing and customer service representatives. Kate says that what may be missing is a Community Manager who can oversee internal and external company relationships.

Kate lists the top personal traits for link builders/community managers in this interesting ‘human resources’ slanted article.

Don’t Build Links, Build Bubbles By Craig Bradford

While many organizations are underwhelmed by the marketing power of Google Plus, this post could change all that.

Craig describes how engaging with Google Plus can radically change the results of your customer’s search queries – in a way that Facebook and other platforms can’t match.

If we are signed into our Google Plus account when web browsing – our online connections influence the search results we receive. Craig describes this ‘filter bubble’ capacity of Google Plus – as more important than building traditional links and will revolutionize the way companies build and maintain relationships with their customers.

A must read for all marketing professionals!

A new tool to disavow links – Google Webmaster Central Blog

Although this post appeared back in November 2012, I felt I couldn’t do a ‘top five’ post on link building, without including it.

The new Google Disavow Links Tool is Google’s answer to taking control of your backlink profile post-Penguin, by removing all spammy in-bound links from your site – without needing to gain the permission of the site which is linking to you.

That’s all for this week, happy post-Penguin link building everyone!

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Top Five Search Industry Blog Posts of the Week

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Do you enjoy your morning coffee while sampling search industry news from your favourite blogs? We do.

So we thought – why not share our top five weekly favourites?

This week’s top five includes helpful info on: outreach emails, mobile marketing, duplicate content, link building, and social media campaigns gone wrong… Enjoy!

What Seperates a “Good” Outreach Email from a “Great” One? – Whiteboard Friday

Everybody’s doing it, but what seperates a “good” outreach email from a “great” one? What makes an “outreach” email – which is basically asking for a favour – stand out from the rest and connect with the reader?

Rand Fishkin from SEO Moz receives tonnes of emails every week from people hoping to make a connection with him and his hugely successful brand. Rand acknowledges the need for industry colleagues to assist each other, but says we need to keep things simple, be friendly without being pushy and be sure to offer something in return. In this post Rand describes the four key features of an outreach eamil that are sure to receive a favourable response.

SEO and Duplicate Content Issues that Hurt Google Traffic

This great post by Jill Whalen of High Rankings Advisor, is part of her promise to provide in-depth information about “SEO Killers” for 2013.

Duplicate content can easily creep into a site, either by accident or through mistaken SEO practices – such as building multiple landing pages which target different locations but have the same products. Jill draws upon her extensive experience as a 17-year Search Industry veteran to explain how to check for duplicate content, how to remove it and how to avoid it in the future.

The Broken Link Building Bible

The first thing I noticed about this post was the headline. Immediately I wanted to know – what’s “Broken Link Building”?

Russ Virante from Virante inc, describes it as, “a link building tactic where a marketer contacts a webmaster who has a broken link on his/her site and recommends one or more alternatives that include his/her target site.”

Sounds simple right? It is, on the surface. But like any effective link building strategy – it’s all in the detail.

Russ describes how to identify broken links on target sites using keyword research, methods of link extraction, 404 error checking and the importance of creating content that is worthy of being linked to. He also provides descriptions and links to a variety of tools that will help you in the process.

What Every Content Marketer Needs to Know About Mobile Marketing

Greg Hickman’s post on Copyblogger this week reminds us all to keep the power of “mobile marketing” in our attention when it comes to sharing content and making connections. According to Greg’s research, businesses that integrate a variety of mobile strategies generate the most leads, engagement, and sales.

In this post Greg describes four incredibly effective mobile strategies that can easily be  incorporated into any business. From harnessing the power of SMS, to ensuring landing pages have a clear and un-missable “call to action” button suitable for mobile devices – this blog post really got me thinking about how simple and direct content marketing needs to be in this increasingly mobile era.

Top Five Social Media Fails of 2012

I’ll finish this week’s ecclectic collection with this entertaining post about the power of social media to either enhance or detract from your brand.

Search Engine Journal’s Alech Barysevich has pieced together a noteworthy list of social media campaigns that did not turn out as their masters expected.

 

 

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Presentations from SMX Sydney 2012

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Hi folks

Sorry I haven’t been updating the blog daily lately, but I’ve been traveling, amongst other things. Last week I attended the Search Marketing Expo / Online Marketer Conference held in Sydney from 1-2 May 2012.

I’ve attended nearly every SMX event held in Australia and although I enjoy them immensely, I rarely learn anything new. It’s a credit to the organizers that this year, I came away with an enormous amount of exciting, cutting edge industry information, helpful new tools to play with and the inspiration to take Search Engine College in a new direction.

I have been positively itching to apply some of these new ideas into my own business, but first, I thought I’d share with you some of the inspiring presentations I witnessed at the conference. Over the next couple of weeks, I will post summaries of the best speakers and notes and ideas I jotted down during their sessions. Where allowed, I’ll post a link to their slide decks as well, so you can absorb a bit more detail that I may have missed (we had some fast talkers this year!).

Feel free to comment on any of the posts – I’d be interested to hear how the rest of you interpret the sessions as well.

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