This week’s Fast Five features posts on personalized search, content strategies, link building tools and some helpful hints for start-ups. Enjoy!
1) Personalization and SEO – Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin Google has become our friend, or at least it’s trying to. Personalized search means that Google knows important things about us, like where we spend a lot of our time, who our friends are, what we like, common search queries and so forth. But what does all this mean for the search industry? Rand’s casual (he’s wearing a hoodie) Whiteboard Friday post points SEM’ers in the socially orientated direction we all need to be in these days. Thanks Rand!
2) Announcing the Just-Discovered-Links Report by Tela Andrews I’ve put this one in here for all the link builders out there. This ‘Just Discovered Links’ report generator is a new feature in Open Site Explorer, designed to help marketers find new links within an hour of them going live. “This report helps you capitalize on links while they’re still fresh, see how your content is resonating through social channels, gauge overall sentiment of the links being shared, give you a head start on instant outreach campaigns, and scope out which links your competitors are getting.” Amazing stuff!
3) Offering Guest Posts for Your Clients: Why You Should Get Your Writers Involved by Amanda DeSilvestro Now this one is for all the writers out there, or companies who employ (or contract) writers for themselves or clients. For companies: should you have writers in-house? Or contract to freelancers? For freelancers: should you specialise in a particular industry or subject? Want to find a better way to organise and collaborate on working documents? Amanda has it all covered.
4) Increase Your SEO Business by Specializing by Shadi Khattab SEO is a big industry now, long gone are the days of explaining to people “Oh I help websites rank better” and receiving blank looks in return. With so many SEO companies in the marketplace, how can a small start-up attract solid long-term clients (the goal of every business)? This great post inspires SEO’ers to find their niche and become experts by specializing in that niche.
and finally…
5) How Can Small eCommerce Businesses Use SEO to Compete With Sites Like Amazon? By Mark @ Think Traffic This is a great post which follows nicely from the last one. How can small start-ups hope to compete with megaliths like Amazon? Certainly not by competing directly, but with some creative thinking and niche-in-depth focus, it is possible as you’ll see.
Happy reading!
*Image courtesy of Threadless
