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!
Don’t Panic! A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Surviving SEO Changes STILL WITH US?! I hope so. Because I’M still here and trying to trick my body that I don’t need coffee! We’re going to talk about how to survive SEO changes. Or how not to get hit by a car. Up first is Mark Munroe. Sometimes its not easy to survive in this industry. How to protect yourself from algo changes: We’re told just write great content! Google’s Goals For Panda Gives people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possibleReduce rankings for low-quality sitesProvide better ranking for high-quality sites The same statements can apply to most Google updates PandaMay DayAbove the Fold Freshness. Google is always moving toward the same thing. Do not chase the algorithm. To Survive and Thrive – Think Like Google Think like a Google Product Manager. Good Search Experience User searches on Google –> User clicks through to site –> They shut down their computer and go. Poor Search Experience You have to focus on the experience because good content is not enough. Recommendations
10 Content Ideas To Improve Organic Visibility In the past series of articles, we focused on determining what keywords were already generating business for a web site and then optimizing your existing pages to improve organic results for those keywords. In this and some future articles, we’ll cover adding new content to a website as well as other web venues to improve organic visibility. When we work on a comprehensive marketing project for a client, we first learn about their business and then discover what marketing tactics their competitors have employed. At the same time, we learn what web venues are available to focus our marketing towards. Next, we develop a strategy that includes many tactical options including content for their site and other web venues, social marketing, referral site development and link building, etc. Together, we decide which of the tactics to begin deploying. Keyword Research Quite a bit of our content ideas for a specific client are developed as we do keyword research. 1. Tip: Sell Yourself On These Pages 2.
Types of Social Media Content to Boost SEO I’ve written often about the benefits of going viral in both content and marketing strategies. Increasingly, however, social media content (a.k.a. viral content) does more than increase brand recognition and site traffic: it can also boost your SEO signals. As search engines pay more and more attention to social signals, going viral is rapidly becoming one of the best ways to build links, attract attention, and establish authority and legitimacy in your field. How Social & SEO Are Linked Let’s start with the obvious: social media builds links. If one site is getting thousands of social shares, it sends three clear messages about your site to search engines: Your site is activeYour site is currentYour site is invested in the needs of your audience Search engines boil down to one basic concept: helping users find what they’re looking for. Viral content is like the mass endorsement of the public; a giant thumbs-up formed from thousands of hands. Viral Content = Valuable Content 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.)
I'm Being Outranked by a Spammer - Whiteboard Friday What do you do when you are being outranked by a spammer? It's one of the most frustrating things that an SEO can face, but before jumping to conclusions it's important to understand what exactly is happening. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives us helpful advice with many important steps to follow if you discover that a spammer is outranking you. Howdy SEOmoz fans! Search Engine Marketing - Nine Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO Expert If you're not an SEO expert, you might wonder what to ask when hiring SEO staff or consultants. How do you tell the difference between someone who knows exactly what he or she is doing and someone who just knows a lot of lingo? To help out, Rand Fishkin created an interview primer for a "Whiteboard Friday" video at the SEOmoz blog. General Knowledge. What is rel=canonical? Strategy and Tactics. How would you create a site to rank for this set of keywords? → end article previewRead the Full Article Membership is required to access this how-to marketing article ... don't worry though, it's FREE!
The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research Utilising the power of the keyphrases that people use online has enabled me to make a full-time income since February 2009. I’ve spent the last two and a half years of my life doing nothing but using my own tactics, coupled with powerful resources, to analyse industries in order to get more website traffic. And, in-turn, make more money. This is known by many as Keyword Research. It is this keyword research that has allowed me to get 981,000 unique organic search visitors to a 3 month old website, grow blogs faster than I ever thought was possible and – more than anything – allowed me to be free from a boss and the 9-5 grind. I say this because I want you to understand how important keyword research actually is. My aim with this article is to show you the dozens of uses that keyword research has, unique ways to find popular terms, and how to capitalise on your findings. As I hope you expect of me by now, I have dedicated days to this blog post and given it my all. The Quick Win Title
What Makes an Effective Link Builder 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. Good link builders are a special breed of SEOs. There are a lot of solid SEOs in the industry, but effectively building links is much different from keyword research, copywriting, and technical analysis. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes an effective link builder. Whether you’re an SEO looking to improve your own skillset or a manager looking to hire a new link builder, these are the characteristics of an effective link builder. SEO is one of the few industries where my history as a competitive video game player, an epic geared raiding Warlock, forum admin and hacker became a marketable skill. I’m an effective marketer online, not because I have formal marketing training, but because I understand online communities intimately. Creativity is one of the things that is difficult, maybe impossible, to teach. Ingenuity is intellectual hustle.
16 Chrome Extensions for Link Builders Whether or not you’re a Chrome user, be aware that this browser offers several extensions that make life a lot easier for link builders. Since I use Chrome for all of my link building, I decided to share a few productivity boosters that have saved me a ton of time finding & analyzing prospects, reaching out to those prospects, and so much more. 1. This extension is essential because of its SERP overlay feature. 2. If you need to do large scale prospecting in the SERPs, SEOquake is great. 3. Out of all the broken link checkers online today, Check My Links is probably the fastest. 4. Although not as fast as CML, Domain Hunter Plus is another broken link checker that has a lot of great features. From here, you can export the broken links as a CSV with OSE data included, check to see if the domains of the broken links are abandoned and available to register, as well as click on the two numbers to see OSE data to that particular broken URL. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.