Top Five Search Industry Blog Posts of the Week

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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