Hand Coding A Personal Website. Last year, I had something of an epiphany about web design. I realised I didn’t really know how anything worked. Every website I’d created until then had relied on a CMS, namely WordPress. It was only when a bad plugin utterly botched the database tables leaving me helpless that I realised how little control I actually had over my precious creations.
I count myself lucky that one of my friends is a wizard with PHP. I’m not out to diss WordPress. It’s a fantastic piece of software and I still rely on it daily. This prompted me to return to the fundamentals. Here, I’ll be sharing some of the tips and advice that I found useful along the way. Is This For Me? The good news is you don’t need to be a developer to hand-code a simple site of your own. Before we begin, three caveats. You’re a bit of a control freak If you like building things online, tweaking every last detail of a project until it’s perfect – even if that means learning something new – great. Still here? Local Development Redirects. Penalty Lifted: How To Use Google’s Disavow Tool Case Study. Here’s the story. Stratford Retirement got hit with a Google penalty. Hard. Over the past few months I worked pro bono with the team at Stratford, an assisted living community in Seattle, after they reached out to me to help them recover. Their previous marketing firm had built 1000′s, literally 1000′s of low-quality directory, spun article submission, and spammy network links all with over-optimized anchor text.
In July, everything crashed with an Unnatural Link Warning and penalty from Google. Here’s the steps we took to recover. 1 – Backlink Analysis Seriously depressing. Using Open Site Explorer, Majestic, and Google Webmaster Tools, it’s was easy to see that over 90% of the links were junk. We considered starting over with a new domain, but Stratford really wanted to avoid that. 2 – Outreach When faced with a penalty like this, you quickly become an expert in link research, contact details and methods of scaling outreach. I’ve written on link removal tools before, but my favorites are: The Full Guide to Remarketing in Google Analytics and AdWords.
Welcome to the start of our focus on PPC, a week devoted to nothing but paid search. First up we have Anna who is looking at how to use the incredibly powerful remarketing features in Google Analytics to create laser focused advertising on Google AdWords. In 2012 Google introduced the functionality to manage remarketing lists within Google Analytics. Previously it could only be managed within the AdWords environment and involved adding code to various pages of your website.
This post is going to cover the basics of remarketing, how to set it up through Google Analytics, as well as when and why to use it and different ideas for campaigns. So what is remarketing? Consider these ideas for starters: Advertise flowers at mother’s day to those who bought flowers for Valentine’s dayAdvertise contract renewals to users who purchased a year’s worth of insurance 11 months agoOffer discounts in ads that you show to users who viewed their basket but didn’t complete the purchase Getting Started 1. 2. 3. Conquering Pagination for SEO – A Guide to Consolidating your Content. 83inShareinShare83 A topic sure to make any SEO neophyte’s head spin, approaching and handling pagination can seem a daunting prospect at first. Pagination is a wily shapeshifter, rearing its ugly head in contexts ranging from e-commerce, to newspapers, to forums. Bottom line is, if you’re in the business of on-page optimization, it’s not a question of if you’ll have to deal with pagination problems – it’s a question of when.
Luckily, we’re here to give you some advice to get you started, and answer some of the more thought-provoking questions that can arise in tricky situations. So what exactly is pagination, you ask? In a very basic sense, pagination occurs when a website segments content over the span of multiple pages. “Big deal”, you may say. Crawler LimitationsWhen Googlebot is crawling your site, the depth (or levels of clicks deeper into the content) it travels will vary depending on the site’s authority and other factors. So how do you deal with Pagination?
(Page 1): (Page 2): Tracking Google Analytics Events with Google Tag Manager - YouMoz. The Complete Guide to Reconversion. A great deal of emphasis is placed on inbound marketing and attracting new customers. However, we should be careful not to neglect the existing clients that we may have. These people are just as important as new customers and more often than not can provide you with a great return of investment. We should give our existing clients the marketing focus they deserve. In this guide, I will look at why remarketing and reconverting your clients can be a valuable tactic for your business, while also providing examples on how we can do just that. I hope you find this guide to be something a little bit different than what we normally see on Moz and, most of all, I hope you find it useful. Prelude: What Prompted the Post I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told. Basically, our company provides a way for people to trade the financial markets, things like equities, currency pairs and so on.
There are likely a number of factors that are contributing to this. Chapter 1: I Demand Satisfaction. How I use Followerwonk, and Why I Love It - State of Search. 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. Maybe there are even too many tools, and – as if we were magpies – we instantly desire to experiment with every new little toy coming out in the market. 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. Audience Targeting Content creation Content Promotion Analysis. Micro Data & Schema.org: Guide To Generating Rich Snippets. This guide has been created to provide a quick and easy way of generating different types of rich snippets for your website, using a combination of Micro Data and Schema.org you can generate snippets like: I must point out that before you proceed with integrating any form of mark-up, you should be aware of the guidelines provided by Google, and Bing.
Any attempt to mark-up content that is invisible to users, or content that is irrelevant/misleading just to generate the rich snippet may result in action being taken against your website. On the move? Why not take this guide with you, just hit ‘download’ at the top of the page for a handy pdf guide! I hope that you find this guide useful, and if you have any questions please fire away in the comments, or just say hi @dbseo – Dan Butler. Quick Start What is Micro Data? Micro Data (like RDFa and Microformats) is a form of semantic mark-up designed to describe elements on a web page e.g. review, person, event etc.
What is Schema.org? 1. 2. 3. 4. [How To] Create Landing Pages that Convert & Rank Well in Search. Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it too? (Image source) You want a landing page with through-the-roof conversion rates. You also want that landing page to possess top-ranked search results. Can you have both? The answer is yes. This post will show you how to develop a landing page that gets conversions, while ranking well at the same time. How to Get Shockingly High Conversions You’ve probably heard some of the “secrets” for a successful landing page. It’s average advice. Here’s the kicker, though. Why? In order for people to convert on your page, they first have to arrive at your page. Great-converting landing pages and SEO are in an “it’s-complicated” relationship.
You get the idea. This article isn’t about putting pretty pictures on a landing page or crafting the right verbiage to use in your call-to-action. When these two get together — SEO + CRO — you have the beginning of a beautiful relationship. 1. Divs are simple bits of HTML that group various elements on a web page. 2. How to Optimize Responsive Design for Conversions. Screaming Frog Guide to Doing Almost Anything. Screaming Frog Guide to Doing Almost Anything: 55+ Ways of Looking at a Tool So, I admit it: I love technical SEO audits. Some of you may cringe at the thought of combing through a site for potential architecture issues, but it’s one of my favorite activities—an SEO treasure hunt, if you will. For normal people, the overall site audit process can be daunting and time-consuming, but with tools like the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, the task can be made easier for newbs and pros alike.
With a very user-friendly interface, Screaming Frog can be a breeze to work with, but the breadth of configuration options and functionality can make it hard to know where to begin. With that in mind, I put together this comprehensive guide to Screaming Frog to showcase the various ways that SEO, PPC and other marketing folks can use the tool for site audits, keyword research, competitive analysis, link building and more! To get started, simply select what it is that you are looking to do: Basic Crawling Sitemap. 30 tips for awesome presentations. EXIF Data the Next Step in Images & Local SEO? How to Run a Wildly Successful Online Contest - Supreme Strategies | San Diego Inbound Marketing. Contests are a tried and true way of building brand exposure and gaining precious eyeballs in today’s attention-scarce market. They’ve been around for ages, yet there are so many businesses that are simply doing them wrong.
When I say wrong, I mean that they’re either: Leaving a LOT of exposure on the tableNot using the information that they get effectivelyMaking simple mistakes that prevent their contest from ever leaving the ground The good news is that these are pretty simple mistakes to correct! Note: This post is LONG. What is PunchTab? *If you already know what it is, skip this section* If there’s a frontrunner in the “online contest promotion app” marketplace, it’s got to be PunchTab.
Here’s how it works: Participants can sign up to your contest via Facebook login or email submission to earn one entry into the contest. Choosing How Long to Run Your Contest and What to Give Away What to Give Away Contest Length Extra Entry Breakdown Follow / Become a fan / Like / Google +1 Tweet Comment. Find Your Site's Biggest Technical Flaws in 60 Minutes. The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
I've deliberately put myself in some hot water to demonstrate how I would do a technical SEO site audit in 1 hour to look for quick fixes, (and I've actually timed myself just to make it harder). For the pros out there, here's a look into a fellow SEO 's workflow; for the aspiring, here's a base set of checks you can do quickly. I've got some lovely volunteers who have kindly allowed me to audit their sites to show you what can be done in as little as 60 minutes.
I'm specifically going to look for crawling, indexing and potential Panda threatening issues like: Architecture (unnecessary redirection, orphaned pages, nofollow) Indexing & Crawling (canonical, noindex, follow, nofollow, redirects, robots.txt, server errors) Duplicate content & On page SEO (repeated text, pagination, parameter based, dupe/missing titles, h1s, etc..) Let's meet our volunteers! Craziest Audit Checklist on the Internet. Craziest Audit Checklist on the Internet Update: Okay, it’s not an update per se, but I didn’t want this tip to get lost at the bottom of the post.
If you want to be alerted when I add new items to the tools doc or audit checklist, just go to Tools > Notification Rules. You can choose to be notified when any changes are made or choose particular tabs. For anyone who’s done a site of any kind — technical, architecture, SEO, PPC — you know audits can be intimidating, time-consuming, and chaotic. Basically, the things migraines are made of. My goal with this post is to reduce that feeling of overwhelm by providing a framework for audits. I presented on this topic at Search Love Boston. Audit Checklist and Tools Doc Central to my presentation was a audit checklist Google Doc with roughly 300 checkpoints (and growing).
I cover how to use it in the slide deck, so I won’t repeat myself here. Audit Presentation Tips 1. When you’re tearing through an audit you know exactly what you want to say. 2. Site Audits: Deliverables, Follow Up, and Implementation. You could be the best SEO in the world, with the best recommendations your clients ever seen; but if this information isn’t presented and communicated in the right way, the sad fact is that your hard work probably won’t change a thing. A couple of weeks back, Dan and I ran a very enjoyable Mozinar on this very topic.
(A huge thank you to everyone who listened in!) If you did miss it, feel free to check out the recording and download the slides here. Rather than talking through the ins and outs of technical SEO, we really wanted to dive into what, in our experience, makes the difference between a site audit being left on the shelf, compared to a document that can potentially turn a business around. On the back end of the Mozinar, we had a ton of great questions. Many focused specifically on the delivery and follow-up process, and how we approach this particular part of the job. Sales kick-off and briefing Q: How much should I give away during the sales process? Kick-off and briefing. How to Perform the World's Greatest SEO Audit. The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Now that tax season is over, it's once again safe to say my favorite A-word... audit! That's right.
My name is Steve, and I'm an SEO audit junkie. Like any good junkie, I've read every audit-related article; I've written thousands of lines of audit-related code, and I've performed audits for friends, clients, and pretty much everyone else I know with a website. All of this research and experience has helped me create an insanely thorough SEO audit process. And today, I'm going to share that process with you. This is designed to be a comprehensive guide for performing a technical SEO audit. SEO Audit Preparation When performing an audit, most people want to dive right into the analysis. A thorough audit requires at least a little planning to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Crawl Before You Walk Crawling Tools Crawling Configuration Ask the Oracles URLs 1. Microsoft SEO Toolkit Review. There are a lot of good SEO tools out there and I use loads of them.
Like many SEO professionals I use tools daily and I will often pick one tool over another depending on the needs at the time. Recently I came across the Microsoft SEO Toolkit and have been blown away at how thorough it is as an SEO tool! In this post I will run through some of my favourite features and reasons why everyone should download it for their sites. I have been playing with this tool since the beginning of the year and (like most of us) I haven’t read the instructions so this review is based on all the cool stuff I have found through clicking away and learning as I go. If I missed any other useful features please let me know as I would love to use them too! So, to the tool! What does it do? Really the question should be ‘What doesn’t it do’ because it is so comprehensive that it can take days (depending on the site size) to trawl through all the data it gleams from a site. The Main Categories How do I use it?
A Technical SEO Guide to Crawling, Indexing and Ranking - State of Search. Organization. The Future of Cross Platform Publishing. Unnatural Links Recovery: Emerging from a Manual Penalty. Google’s Data Highlighter and a view into the future of SEO. 13 Semantic Markup Tips For 2013: A Local SEO Checklist. Introducing "x-default hreflang" for international landing pages. Building Mobile-Optimized Websites - Webmasters. Author Crawler Tool. Change Tracking: Monitor Competitors' Websites for SEO.
Link to your website - Google+ Help. Direct Connect - Google+ Help. How to Build an Online Community for Your Business. The Fundamentals of Building and Managing Your Community.