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Paolo Squadroni

Personas for SEO in 2012 (PubCon) Whiteboard Friday - Creating Marketing Personas. The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Hey Gang, This week we've got a special guest in Whiteboard Studios, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive. Ian and Rand discuss the marketing tactic of creating "personas.

" If you've ever seen "Shaun of the Dead" (and if you haven't, you should), you'll remember the scene where Shaun and Ed are sitting in the pub making up personal histories for the other bar patrons. Turns out this is not just a fun way to kill time over a few pints--it can also be an important tactic in evaluating your customer base for both marketing efforts and product development. Personas are essentially imaginary friends, or clients, to be more precise.

You invent entire back stories, personalities, quirks, and needs for all of them, then evaluate how each of them would likely react to your products or campaigns. UPDATE from the SEOmoz team: Oops! Yikes, looks like something went wrong. Keyword-Level Demographics. The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Keyword-Level Demographics On Tuesday I made my speaking debut at SMX East 2011 on a panel with Lena Flanigan (Life Technologies) and the creator of Google Webmaster Tools Vanessa Fox (Nine by Blue).

The session was called “Using Searcher Personas to Connect Search to Conversions” and I unveiled a methodology that I think is potentially game changing. Now I want to share this breakthrough with the community that has helped me build a name for myself. As you can tell from my tone and lack of cartoons in this one, I have my serious hat on right now! Without further adieu ladies and gentlemen of the SEOmoz community I present to you Keyword Level Demographics. Keyword-Level Demographics Methodology We are about to time travel folks and keyword-level demographics are the flux capacitor.

This function is called first. Step 1: Advanced SEO: The Final Frontier. DistilledLive | Big Data vs. Personas for Content Planning. Internet Marketing Strategy based on Audience Analysis. Let me tell you a story… Imagine a place: Middle East You see ocher landscapes in the distance, few palm trees around an oasis and a hill with a castle on top of it. Idyllic, isn’t it? No, it is not idyllic. Why? Give to that images a context: the Crusades. During Middle Age human beings were not really like in the Arthurian tales (to tell the truth, neither Lancelot was a real gentleman).

Faith was spread with imaginaries (think to the gargoyles) and stories. And stories were always real for the listeners. Let’s now return to that castle. A group of men is in a big room, standing up in front of a man, the commander of the Assassins sect. “Don’t be scared, men“, said the old commander, “Smoke and feel fine and with hope, because you have been selected between hundreds for beginning a new better life”. And here it comes the hashish, from where the Assassins name. The men smoked hashish and fell into a deep sleep without dreams.

Few day after the Christian troops arrived close to the castle. Ah! How SEOgadget Builds Links - Searchlove London 2012. Really Targeted Outreach - Mozcon 2013 - Richard Baxter. Turning SEO Link Building into SEO Audience Targeting with Twitter profiling. Admit it. You’ve sat in a meeting with your SEO Agency and thought, “surely, this shouldn’t work”. Endless, near irrelevant “guest posts” at best, “article submission” and “directory link building” at the very worst. For the past decade, “SEO” and “Marketing” have been allowed to remain almost entirely different disciplines. With a few exceptions, the vast majority of the SEO industry has been allowed to stumble along without a second thought to who they are targeting, where those people might be, and how best to reach them. Today, I want to share a combination of a few simple tools that actually help us identify our target audience, show us who might be influencing them and how to identify what content those influencers share.

SEO has finally arrived at the intersection between search engine rankings and real marketing. Start by identifying Your Audience Let’s think about an audience and do some imaginary targeting for a moment. Let’s return to our market research scenario. How I use Followerwonk, and Why I Love It. Best of 2013: No 11 – How I use Followerwonk, and Why I Love It During the holiday weeks we will be showing you the 15 best read posts of 2013. Except for on Christmas and New Years day, each day you can read the best articles again, going from number 15 back to number 1. Now it’s time for number 11, originally posted on March 7 2013, a post by Gianluca Fiorelli. Never like today SEOs and Internet Marketers had so many tools about practically every aspect of their job. Surely that is my instinct, but I must confess that at the end I don’t use dozens of tools, but just those few, which were able to demonstrate their value on the long run: Obviously, I cannot forget Excel, in my case powered with the SEOTools for Excel plugin by Bosma and the SEOgadget Links API Extension for Excel.

Of those tools, the one I see myself using more and more everyday is Followerwonk. When I work on a strategy I usually follow this process, here synthesized in the simplest way (a post will come about this): The Complete Guide to Link Building with Local Events. Whether you’re a small local business or an international company, hosting local events is a great way to build your brand, both offline and online. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to us internet marketers that there are plenty of non-internet-savvy organizations that are hosting workshops, speaking at events, and getting their brand out there using offline methods to promote their events. If that sounds like your business or one of your clients, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on a number of link opportunities every time you host an event. Why You Should Be Building Links By Hosting Events: Here are the primary reasons that this is such a great strategy: Lots of Easily Obtainable Links: These are easy links that fit Danny's Sullivan's recent description of hard links.

The takeaway? I need to point out one other thing before we really dive in: This guide is really meant to make sure you're getting the most online marketing value from your events. Outline of This Guide: Guess what? Linkbait Ideas For Small Business Owners. If you are a small business owner or webmaster and have been researching search engine optimisation, it is very likely you will have encountered the concept of 'linkbait'. Although the concept seems straightforward – produce content for your website that is of sufficiently high quality to encourage other webmasters to link to you – getting into the mindset of 'what linkbait looks like' is often unintuitive.

There is such a thing as a boring niche Countless times I have read or heard people in the search marketing space say 'there's no such thing as a boring niche', and it simply isn't true. Of course there is, after all, 99.9% of the world's population probably think that SEO is a 'boring niche'. However, just because your niche is boring does not mean you can't produce linkworthy content with a decent strategy. Additionally, linkbait is often presented as some kind of golden bullet, where the instruction is to produce content that is all of the following: Linkbait content ideas. Culture Building: 8 Local Link Building Tactics Beyond Business Listings | The Super Rad Whitespark Blog.

The culture of your locality provides endless opportunities for local attention. And attention means links, press mentions, and ultimately, targeted customers. As internet marketers, engaging with our local culture provides us with a great opportunity to build relationships, and ultimately, links. Citations and links are great from Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) sites, but as we all know, they don't seem to drive much traffic. We can do better. Why Local? We keep seeing algorithm updates focused on devaluing links that simply aren't relevant. A key benefit of local linkbuilding is that these links are almost entirely relevant. The Four Functions of Local Link Building 1) Driving Relevant, Targeted Traffic If your client is a small business with a brick and mortar shop in Minneapolis, their customers are probably in Minneapolis. 2) Building Strong Links from Authoritative Domains 3) Building Relationships with Authoritative Local Sources 4) Stimulating A Hyperlocal Economy 1) Linkstant Conclusion.

eCommerce Link Building in 2013: 6 Experts Weigh In. Building links for ecommerce sites is one of the most challenging and most lucrative parts of SEO. With complex information architecture, highly commercial content, and often little differentiation, ecommerce link building is difficult but rewarding. This month, I asked 6 experts for their top tips on link building strategies for ecommerce sites in 2013 and beyond.

Todd McDonald Todd is the Director of Link Strategy at RKG. You can find him on Twitter or Google Plus, or read his posts about link development on the RKG blog. One challenging aspect of ecommerce link building is prioritizing page types. How do you prioritize building links to category versus product versus home pages? To me, priorities are determined by your combining your goals, your current situation in relationship to the competition, and your own limitations. Goals + Competitive Situation/Standing + Internal Limitations = Priorities As an example, lets take a cigar store that sells online – company Z.

Alisa Scharf Don Rhoades. Creative Link Building for Ecommerce Sites. The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Some of the greatest challenges my previous ecommerce clients have faced have revolved around developing a cohesive and long-term content/link building strategy. They’ve done all the changes they can on the technical backend of the site, incorporated keywords on the site, created a crawlable internal linking structure, and have paid for PR releases, submitted directory submissions, and written the occasional blog post. Now they ask, what’s next? The latest Census Report indicates that ecommerce retail revenues are still rising quarter after quarter, meaning there is still boundless potential for the future of ecommerce.

In addition, it’s also an exciting time to be involved in SEO as we've begun to realize that now is the time to focus on content marketing, as this is what will distinguish your site from others in the long-term. Creative Category Pages. Linkbuilding for Ecommerce Sites - SMX Munich 2012. The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever. When you think you’ve seen it all, you’re not even close.

A couple weeks ago I emailed ~50 high profile SEOs in the industry asking them one simple question: “What was the most creative way you, or someone you know, got a link?” That was the question, these were the answers. UPDATES: There are now 52 responses and counting! When I was younger I had a lot of success with proxy websites. Getting links to a one-page proxy website covered in ads is not easy.

I then released the themes for free with my link in. The most creative tactic I’ve seen is using a hoax or a prank. Search for Ivar’s Billboard Hoax on Google – you’ll find 2.5 million results, and I’m willing to bet a few of them included links. “We now know that the billboard was not steel but rather painted wood; that Seattle advertising veterans, Heckler Associates (2701 1st Avenue) helped devise the campaign; that a $250,000 budget was allocated for creating the hoax and pushing it with TV and radio ads.

Bargain. Next Steps: 1. 2. 1. The Second Most Creative Link Building Post Ever. In November I asked a group of ~50 SEOs one simple question: “What was the most creative way you, or someone you know, got a link?” This was personally one of my favorite posts because there was so much awesome, actionable, and insightful responses. But it looks like I wasn’t alone – it’s now the #1 all time post on Inbound.org. After it was published, I got a lot of SEOs wanting to contribute as well, but very few people actually noticed the updated additions. That’s why I decided it was time for round 2, just because each response is just as awesome as the ones in the original post.

However, there are a couple things you should know. (1) I’ll be merging this post with the original in the next week or two so all responses will be on one post, and you’ll be able to vote for your favorites (the top responses will float to the top). (2) If you want to contribute a response, see the end of this post! Imagine that you run a casino affiliate site. Check the backlinks of Example.com. Make sense? SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics - Distilled. Getting the Maximum Number of Links From Your Infographic.

As the head of content creation and SEO over at Designbysoap Ltd, a significant chunk of my weekly activities is spend producing and promoting infographics for our clients. We've had infographics commissioned to be used for a variety of purposes, including public awareness campaigns, personal CV's, teaching aids, brand recognition, and everything in between. The vast majority of them, however, are produced with one key goal in mind: to increase backlinks to a target website. So with that in mind, here's my in-depth guide to making the most out of your infographic, framed from the point of view of gaining the highest level of distribution (and therefore links) as possible. It's worth noting that the concept, research, and design phase are extremely important in gaining links from your infographic - all the promotion in the world won't help with an infographic that people simply aren't interested in (or one that features a poor design concept).

Encouraging Sharing International Links. The Blueprint For A Successful Infographic Promotion. Infographics by no means have the novelty factor they once did but there is still plenty of mileage in them from a link and brand building perspective. Never forget that us digital marketers operate in our own little bubble and what seems old-hat or obvious to us can still be fairly cutting edge in some markets. The following is our step-by-step guide for infographic promotion: A few quick thoughts Pay attention to the design – one of the pillars of a successful infographic is that it is nice to look at so make sure you hire the very best designer you can – avoid infographics that make us all irritated.Infographics for the sake of it – infographics should be the method of presenting a concept rather than the actual concept.

Infographics for the sake of it aren’t cool. ‘Going interactive’ isn’t a necessity – contrary to what feels like common wisdom at the moment, ‘flat’ infographics are not dead and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with some HTML5-scrolling-parallax-flashy-graphic. Infographic Clean-up as Link Building Outreach - SEOgadget.co.uk. Following up on Oli’s excellent post (6 Steps to Making Your Infographic Work), I’m going to be expanding on the post-publication aspect of the infographic process, which I’ve been tinkering with over the past month.

If you are at all involved in outreach, then infographic clean-up is a great way to spend your time sourcing placements, beginning relationships and getting links while you do it. It’s also a nice way to get a foot in the door at some authority sites beyond your original placement. Going exploring also lets you really see how your work is performing in the wild. I thoroughly recommend it. You can do what I’m suggesting whenever you want, and done well, you’ll get you the satisfaction of knowing you’ve efficiently built a lot of quality links and contacts with relatively little effort. Done on behalf of a client, you can demonstrate your attentiveness in looking after their investment, showing it continues to pass benefit to them months down the line. So how do I do it?

SearchLove Boston 2013_Phil Nottingham_Leveraging video for links. Link Evaluation Survey 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC] Breaking Down the Mormon SEO Strategy. 18 Tools to Speed Up Link Building. 20 Resources To Add To Your Link Tool Arsenal Right Now. 9 Free Tools For Link Discovery & Content Creation. Big-Ass List of Link Building Resources. Setting Up Your SEO Project / Agency for Success. Thoughts on Great SEO Supplier and Client Relationships. Preparing a Team to Win at Content Marketing. Product Tour | Kanban Tool – Online Kanban Boards | Visual Project Management Software. Content Curation Guide for SEO - What, How, Why.

Conversation Prism. Bottlenose.