The 6 Month Link Building Plan for an Established Website You've probably seen the extremely comprehensive noob guide to online marketing by Oli Gardner, or the companion noob guide to link building from Mike King, you've also likely seen one of the many posts or presentations on SEO for startups (here, here and here) - suffice to say there is plenty of reading material for building new web properties but what about link building for an established website? There are an abundance of link opportunities (and challenges) that are pretty unique to an established website. I decided to compile a public Trello board which is based on some of our internal boards for clients to help you to visualise the process I am about to run through. Please bear in mind that this is not a six-month SEO plan so we won't be covering site audits or keyword research for example (although you should read this post if you are planning to conduct an SEO audit), I will be focusing on the acquisition and optimisation of links and content for links. Quick links: By month Month 1
How to Build and Operate a Content Marketing Machine Content Marketing is hot. White hot. SEO and digital marketing thought leaders are declaring that Content Marketing is the next big thing. Even Rand is touting its importance. The strategy of Content Marketing makes sense: instead of pushing messages about your product at prospects, pull prospects towards you by publishing content about your prospects’ interests. Search rank, traffic, leads and all sort of goodness flow from this approach. So the conversation is no longer about if or why an organization should practice Content Marketing. So if you’re wondering “How?” The Machine First, let’s take a look at the machine, all of its pistons, cogs, smokestacks and miscellaneous parts. Now we’ll go over the machine, part by part. Goals & Plan What is the goal, the end output for your Content Marketing Machine? Your plan then becomes to create a content-powered path that takes your prospect from where they are today to the end goal. Team So you’ve got a plan. Ideas Production Audience Development
Identifying and Fixing Your Worst Landing Pages 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. Lately, I’ve been working on a lot more conversion-based projects, and one of the easiest and quickest improvements is to pick out the landing pages that aren’t performing and give them an overhaul. This post explores a core process that I usually work from. Finding your worst pages I’m going to use Google Analytics in my examples because most of us have it, but I believe all of these reports can be replicated in the likes of Omniture, etc. When I’m looking for landing pages that are underperforming, some of the metrics that I take into account include: Bounce rate Navigation summary Conversion rates Filtering Before I talk more specifically about each of these metrics, I want to touch on the power of using filters in your web analytics. You could use /product/ as a filter in order to check your product pages. Bounce Rate Navigation Summary Conversion Rate 1.
The Ultimate Guide to Content Planning A transition is in effect. The web is maturing and like any form of media that has gone before it that can mean only one thing: That content is now at the epicentre of audience creation once again. The introduction of Penguin, as we know, is forcing every online business to re-examine how it ‘does’ online marketing and begin looking for ways to grow reputation, reach and visibility via content rather than the link building practices of old. As Google turns up the algo to promote great content and social gives us all access to the social graph and the network effect it offers there has never been a better time to get your content game in shape and pull together a killer strategy for your brand. I recently wrote a piece for another digital marketing site that goes into a little more detail around why content is coming to the fore and so for extra context it is certainly worth a read. How to Plan Stage one of any great content strategy is the plan. Understand your Brand Understand your Audience
4 Ways to Stop Your Landing Pages from Being a Giant Fail You know your landing page sucks, right? That’s why you’re reading this. But why? Are you a talentless hack, have no staff to help you, or are you hindered by I.T. to make the pages you want? Either way, these 4 things to avoid should help you improve your conversion rates: 1. Providing too much text on a product or lead gen landing page can overwhelm or even intimidate visitors, causing them to miss your central sales message and abandon ship. The above landing page is lengthy (we even cut it off), it wouldn’t be so bad if they’d broken it up a bit (chunking) with some images or video, but paragraph after paragraph just doesn’t lend itself to conversion. The content may be useful, but less reliance on text and some more visually pleasing elements would help this page, a lot. Having said that, there is a movement towards long landing pages that using internal “smooth scrolling” navigation (as opposed to multiple pages) that are working too. 2. Fail. So, why the fail? Headlines should be:
An Eight-Step Plan to Get PR-Driven Links In a past life I worked exclusively in traditional print and broadcast PR, where digital coverage was viewed as a bonus. But since landing a job as a PR consultant at Distilled, all of that has changed. My goals have shifted. Previously my goals were things like brand awareness and changing audience perceptions—and these were driven by press coverage. But, while these goals still come in to play, I have a new goal too—to build links. So, eight months down the line, I feel it's time to share what I've learned. An eight-step plan There are a few tried and tested methods for PR driven link-building, like guest posting and pitching for by-lined articles, but these can be slow-burning processes. What I'm going to talk you through is a process which, if invested in and executed well, is much more likely to result in multiple links from high quality, authoritative news sites. There's no quick fix. For any marketing campaign you should be looking to use multiple channels. Step one: Find the story 1.
Google Now Shows You Your Most Recent Links Google has added a new option for downloading your links in Google Webmaster Tools. You can now click on a “download latest links” button. The latest links download option will download your links that Google Webmaster Tools discovered but do so sorted by date. Google will have the link in one column and in the other column list out the date Google discovered the link. Matt Cutts tweeted the feature upgrade last night, saying: You can now download links from Google *sorted by date*. Googler, John Mueller, shared a screen shot of the new button: And here is a preview of how the links look when you download them: This may be one of the more useful feature upgrades to the link reporting tool within webmaster tools. Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News
The Ultimate Social Media Profile Chart, Social Network Profiles in Share Email Share 241 Email Share Below is a list of some of the most popular social media sites, all arranged by category (i.e., bookmarking, blogging, news, etc.). Besides the obvious factor that these sites allow you to get involved in their communities, they also allow you to create a unique profile which includes your own custom URL, a link (or sometimes links) back to your site and information about you and/or your company. While engaging the features and communities of social media site can be very beneficial to your business, social media profiles additionally help you to accomplish two things: build inbound links to your site and help manage online reputation. – Logo and link to site’s home page – Refers to title that will appear on your profile page. – Simply an area in the profile where you can add a brief description about yourself, your company or even the services you offer. – Are links followed or nofollowed? – Brief description of what social media site offers. Custom Yes No
On Page Factors Correlation Data Sometimes the least interesting results are the most interesting. Long gone are the days of stuffing meta data and H1 tags full of keywords and getting high rankings, all SEOs worth their salt know that. What we will see, over the course of this post is a shocking lack of correlation for the traditional factors that are drilled into all newcomers to SEO by a media machine fuelled by outdated information. Many industry leading pundits have touted such factors, and sentiment surveys run by SEOMoz show that many experts are likely to be massively out of touch with the true state of SEO. In the coming days we will also see some fascinating results for other apparently less “in vogue” factors. In this post we will examine the correlations I have found for 41 on page factors using Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient and shed some subjective light on the possible meaning of these findings. Quick Recap TheOpenAlgorithm is a project to bring more science to SEO. Data Analysis Title Tags Heading Tags
Online Ads Hit New Record: $2.83 Billion a Month Internet advertising is having a banner year — its best ever, in fact. We already saw a record first quarter for the industry. Now, according to a biannual report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, online ad revenues climbed to an astonishing $17 billion in the first half of 2012, or around $2.83 billion every month. That represents 14% growth compared to the first half of 2011. Search advertising such as AdWords — traditionally the strongest sector — is still in the lead, accounting for 48% of all online ad sales. Banner ads (21%) and Craigslist-style classifieds (8%) are slipping slightly, while video ads are holding steady at 7% of the total spend. And the much-touted mobile advertising market? The study, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, is compiled directly from information supplied by online ad sellers, and is widely considered the most accurate gauge of the industry's health. How big can the online ad business get?
The Hidden Cost Of Cheap SEO & Social Media Labor Fact: All businesses, large or small, want to save money wherever they can. I understand this. I sympathize with this. I know how devastatingly costly it can be to launch, maintain, and grow a business. So why would you trust your website and your online reputation— the very first introduction your customers will have with your business — to an inexperienced amateur or a too-cheap scammer? In life and online, you get what you pay for. Still not buying it? Image Credit: ByronShell via Flickr What Happens When You Try to Take the Cheap Route 1. What You Get: Google Penguin. Google hates link spam. Buying links is the overt way to take the cheap-and-easy route in linkbuilding (and scheming link builders abound), but it’s not the only one. An experienced SEO may have a well-established network of connections to start a linkbuilding campaign, but you’ll pay for those connections. Don’t buy your links. 2. What You Get: Google Panda Cheap, poorly-made content does nothing. 3. What You Get: Errors.
Google's EMD Update: the numbers - HP Group Blog Only got 5 minutes? skip to the bottom for the TL;DR version. Just over a week ago now (September 28 to be exact), Google released what is being called the “EMD Update“. You can follow that link for a bit more background, but in essence this update was the long-awaited solution to the apparent problem of low quality Exact Match Domains ranking in the SERPs. Shortly after the update, Mozcast showed a big dip in their chart for EMD Influence: The EMD ‘problem’ has been around a long time. I won’t get into my views on the EMD issue right now, but here’s a great post by Martin MacDonald that is close to my opinion: Why EMDs should stay. From looking at the Mozcast EMD Influence chart above you would be forgiven for thinking that this had a massive impact on SERPs, but in truth most search terms witnessed very little overall movement, as can be seen on SERPmetrics Flux on the day: The Real Impact of the EMD Update Average Ranking of Exact-Match Domains across 5000 keywords So, who got hit?
WordPress Google SEO Tips 2012 WordPress Google SEO Tips 2012 Branding Social Media: One of the big changes to hit 2012 will be the focus on branding. Make sure your business stands out from the crowd and has its own identity. The more unique you sound, the better this will be towards your own identity and hence you will stand out from your competitors. Regular posting schedules: The more content you publish, the better chance Google will pick up on it and it also enables more crawling of your site. Unique Content: Nothing new here, right? Add multimedia to your blogs: Now more than ever does Google want to see video and high quality images added to your content releases. Add more video: Take interviews, add real life footage of products or services Every post needs images: Google sees multimedia as an essential part of the user experience, how do you look compared to your competition? Update Poor Content: Specifically, check for duplicate content. Visual Aids: One of the posts I wrote was on infographics.
Predatory Thinking and Robots – Brighton SEO September 2012 Friday 14th September kicked off another great BrightonSEO event which was just as full of antics and inspiring presentations as last April’s. Remote control cars, scooters and shooting NERF nail guns at cut outs of Justin Bieber! A big shout out to Kelvin, the sponsors, the speakers, attendees and everyone else involved in the event! Here is my recap of the best from the Brighton Dome. Dave Trott @davetrott – Predatory Thinking In hindsight Dave kicked off with my personal favourite presentation of the day. £18.3 Billion was spent last year in the UK on ads, with 89% not remembered, 4% remembered positively and 7% negatively. He breaks advertising down into 3 simple steps; impact, communication and persuasion and stresses the importance of impact. He gives a few examples of upstream thinking. Dave has his own book out entitled “Creative Mischief”, so check it out! Antony Mayfield of @brilliantnoise – Do You Speak Brand? Stephanie Troeth @sniffles – Speaking your User’s Language