Eight tips for promoting your content to help obtain backlinks for SEO
Even if you create outstanding, quality content, if you don’t promote it fully, it will not give you the full value you need from your investment. Regardless of how shareable content is, to get the most valuable, relevant links requires online promotion through a variety of different channels.
You may send a few tweets about your latest blog, but if no one is listening to begin with, your content assets are likely to be lost in the ether. This is content marketing without the marketing... There are a number of things you can do to promote your site content effectively and drive high quality traffic to your site; here I'll highlight eight.
Tip 1: Social media promotion
Social Media platforms are one of the most popular and effective methods for promoting your…
A useful summary of changing consumer search behaviour and mobile SEO best practices
This infographic highlights again the growing importance of mobile marketing; in this case showing its impact on search marketing. We're reminded that there are now more than 4 billion connected smartphones and it's anticipated that mobile usage will overtake desktop use by 2014. So don't miss out is the message! Although the headline on the infographic focuses on Google's Siri, it also has a useful summary of the alternatives for optimising mobile search.
This Infographic from Alchemy Viral explores consumer usage, best practices for mobile SEO and the improvements of Siri to support consumers.
Best practices on mobile SEO
Here is a summary from the infographic of best practices for mobile SEO to consider.
Responsive web design. Considered industry best practice and is recommended by Google. This includes using CSS…
Widely expected (and useful) new tool introduced
Google have recently launched a new tool to its Webmaster toolkit, giving you the ability to identify and remove (at least in Googles eyes) unnatural or spam inbound links (from other sites to yours).
Google have become more active in notifying webmasters of problems with inbound links, this now enables you to remove the offending link(s) from Google's link graph without contacting the owner of the other site.
You may have received a message from Google in the past saying that they have identified unnatural, spam or paid links to your website, this usually left you having to identify the potential problem links and approaching each website to get the links removed. Not a massively effective process and neither is it a good use of your time. Bing also launched a similar tool earlier this year.
Here is an explanation of this new tool from Googles, Matt Cutts
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This is the 12th step in my 12 part series on SEO. In this article I’m looking at the role of voice-of-customer programs to help SEOs learn what is, and isn’t, working on their website, helping to inform optimisation and testing programs. It’s going to be short and hopefully sweet.
Why is Voice-of-Customer relevant to SEO?
Consider this scenario: You’ve got a webpage ranking well for a primary keyphrase. It’s driving muchos traffic, but your bounce rate is over 90% and has blown the site average for organic landing pages. As a result, you start to see your ranking drop. The search engines are starting to think your webpage isn’t so great after all.
You can dig into your web analytics data to find out what is happening – visits, bounce rate, time-on-site etc, but...
What web analytics data won’t tell you is why that’s happening
This is where voice-of-customer (VoC) programs can help. VoC techniques…
More DIY tips for SEO
Whenever I'm training I'm nearly always asked for useful tools that aid the digital marketing process. This is particularly the case when discussing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the process of getting better search engine rankings.
I have therefore drawn up this introductory guide to the SEO process for marketers, starting with an introduction to search engine spiders Robots. We'll also discuss two of the free tools/techniques that are available from Google to assist you with this initial phase of SEO.
First step:Help Search Engine Spiders or Robots read your pages.
Spiders or Robots are bits of software that read your pages to find new and updated pages, and returns the content to the Search Engines to be indexed. If they can't read your site, then…
3 DIY SEO approaches to start SEO if you're not an SEO expert
This post discusses a few of the relatively straightforward "do-it-yourself" things you can do in-house to improve your SEO, before you decide to call in outside help. I hope it will also be helpful to small business or startups who don't currently have budget for SEO. As SEO specialists we're often asked by friends, families or colleagues "where do I start?", "What matters?". These are the areas I recommend as a start.
Where to start your DIY SEO?
If you’re not well versed in Search Engine Optimisation (explanation), then the task of optimising your website can appear to be extremely daunting. There is a lot of jargon to learn, numerous horror stories floating about and lots of conflicting opinions to consider.
You have to understand all these issues before you can actually start…
5 Steps to an effective SEO migration from an old to a new site
Whether it's upgrading hosting, improving your URL structure or simplifying information architecture upgrades to your web presence are inevitable for every company.
As more companies reach the limits of their current web investments, many are worried that significant change will impact their organic listings and SEO performance. I've even seen a company maintaining two websites, frightened that merging would reduce their organic rankings, even though it was near impossible for users to find anything.
Whether you are an in-house marketer or an agency specialist, in my experience if you are able to plan ahead and factor in SEO migration tactics to your project you will find a smooth transition. Often the very fact you engage with the search engines can provide improved rankings on the other side.
In this article I look at 5 tactics to help you in the…
A reminder about the importance of Google's 2012 Venice update and Google+ Local for local business services
Did you notice how, earlier in the year, the results Google produced for local queries changed dramatically to give even more prominence to local search? We thought it was worth a reminder, because quite a few companies we've spoken to weren't aware of this and it's really important as a potential source of leads if you have a local business.
The update was quite hidden in Google's February announcement of 40 search quality updates, which maybe explains why it didn't have prominence. The relevant part of this update explaining the differences to local search is:
“Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”]. This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
"Improved local results. We launched a new system…
Our review of backlink analysis software tools and web services
Link analysis has always been an integral part to search marketing efforts. As with all marketing, you need to benchmark where you are and what your competitors are doing in order to put the right work in place and also to track performance. Within the last two years this process has become easier with a wider range of tools now available to aid you.
Search specialists will definitely know all of these and many more, but this list is aimed more at client-side marketers who want to benchmark their link quality against competitors, review SEO agency performance and spot opportunities for partnering with other sites, for example blogger outreach.
Comparison of data quality of backlink analysis tools
Added references to this excellent review of data quality from backlink analysis tools from Richard Baxter at SEOGadget. Don't purchase a subscription or use…
A review of Google's key site quality-related algorithm changes in 2012
You will have heard that the Google update known as ‘Penguin’ was rolled out earlier this year; the 24th April 2012 to be precise. It came at a time when Google had rolled out a number of other updates, some more significant than others.
Given the negative effect on ranking for some sites there has naturally been an awful lot written about the Penguin update, however I can’t help but feel that there has been some confusion over what Penguin addressed and how to tell if you were a victim or not.
In this post I will discuss just what Penguin is likely to have affected, the other updates around this time (that some webmasters could have confused with Penguin), and what to do to recover if you have been affected by these updates.
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