Over a month after the Google Farmer update rolled out in the US, the SEO world seems to have settled back down again. As with all Google updates the winners are left breathing a sigh of relief while the losers are frantically trying to correct their strategy and regain their previous rankings & traffic levels. I hope the ideas here help if you're in the latter category.
If you have yet to read about the Google Farmer update the following articles are good background:
Rand Fishkin covers off what the SEOMOZ team have noticed after the update
Search Engine Land gives you further insights into the update
But for us, this is the best summary of the impact - it's a compilation by SISTRIX showing how article sites were affected by the Google Farmer update:
The most dramatic is the number of keywords that these sites…
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary
As a big advocate of inbound & content marketing, this article on SEOMoz really caught my eye, so I wanted to alert you to it. It's great to see people that live and breathe SEO like Will Critchlow talk more about the link between content & search performance. Afterall, without content, what is there to comment on, share, link to, tell your friends about.
[WHAT] - a piece of content receives the link
[WHO] - someone places the link
[WHERE] - a piece of content contains the link
In his article, Will shows through examples of large, switched on companies how it is possible to scale quality content creation to produce a seemingly never ending stream of amazing content. He also reminded me of one of the best articles ever written on creating content that will naturally attract links. All bloggers should know the 5 main hooks and decide if and when…
How can I see my rankings in Google? 5 tools to consider.
This is the question we often hear as I'm sure you do! Our answer is that rankings aren't where you should start when reviewing how well your SEO is working. We have showed how it's best to start with your analytics which will show you actual traffic, leads and sales generated through your SEO efforts. But at the end of the day, marketers still want to know their rankings and rightly so - they do provide a benchmark even in these days of personalised, real-time search. These software or web services report on your position in different search engines, in different countries, for different search terms. The five tools we recommend considering include some of the best known, most widely used ranking tools and a…
Using internal links help your SEO rankings
For SEOs, internal links are great since they will directly affect your rankings for these reasons:
They control the flow of link equity flow (based on Google's PageRank) around a site - pages within your site structure which have a higher PageRank tend to rank better
The anchor text within the hyperlink tells the search engine what the destination page is about. If a link contains "click here" or "more" this won't work as well as if a specific product or service name is included.
Images which are linked to other pages use the "Alt text" help determine which keyphrases the page ranks for
You control these links unlike backlinks from other sites so you can feature different terms in the anchor terms based on the phrases you are targeting
What types of internal links are there?
Not all links are created equally. When Google was launched they were treated…
Our review of a new free guide to link-building
In January 2011 a guide oddly named "Becoming a Clockwork Pirate" was launched. While finding the title slightly weird I then read the subtitle which reads: "A Field Guide To Creating Links For Search & Social Success". Now this is something that caught my attention. Written by Kelvin Newman this guide is a lengthy, very detailed ebook, with over 60 pages, but if you are willing to give it the time you will get an unbelievable amount of value & inspiration from it.
The guide covers ideas & tactics on generating traffic, inbound links & developing brand awareness and while 60 pages sounds like a lot believe me the ideas will start to flow the more read. Its not that the guide is full of amazing things you will have never heard of, its much more that a lot of tactics are in…
Over the past few months it has been hard to escape stories about Bing. A recent post on Search Engine Watch which goes into some nice growth figures for Bing really made me sit up and listen.
Some of the numbers quote in this blog from Search Engine Watch should start make you wonder how & when Bing fits into your search strategy, for example:
Searches on Bing last month increased by 21 percent
Bing passed Wikipedia on compete’s list of top 50 websites
Bing saw its share of searches jump from 10.6 percent to 12.81 percent for the same period
Compete reported that Bing closed the year with a 105.36 percent increase in unique visitors -- the largest yearly growth among the top 50 sites.
You can view all the stats & full story from Search Engine…
As part of my series of blog posts on link building techniques I have decided to look at how we can use tools and build a process to analyse a competitors backlink profile to help create a list of target sites for you to approach. After all, if your competitor can be on that website then why can't you?!
If you're new to the term "backlink" it's simply a link from another site to yours which Google may count to boost your ranking if it considers it's a quality link.
The key to this process is getting the appropriate data about yours & your top 5 / 10 competitors (in search) back links so you can filter & prioritse the actions off the back of it. Both you and your competitors are going to have backlinks which do very little for your website…
Importance: [rating=5]
Our commentary: Here we're alerting you to an exciting new information-sharing and learning technology. It's very early days for the service - it's in a closed alpha and launched around November 2010. But it's already getting rave reviews and satisfaction ratings from users and I found it interesting to take a look.
So what is Qwiki? Qwiki describes its technology capability as "to evaluate and enrich any static text "€“ transforming it into a beautiful, interactive experience with zero human effort "€“ it can be applied to virtually any corpus of information.
Here's an example for an individual:
TEDx SF 2010 - Juan Enriquez from Qwiki on Vimeo.
View more examples of Qwiki.
For me, Qwiki looks to be a great visual way of learning - think of it as a combination of Wikipedia or Google Knol with a TV documentary. The voiceover is very futuristic - like from a Sci-fi…
No keyword searches to build a strategy off? No problem! Or an opportunity at least
Value: [rating=5]
Our commentary: A recent blog post from Rand @ SEOMOZ really caught my attention this week. In many markets for natural search there is data & tools that can help you plot a strategy and get rough ideas of potential results (in terms of traffic). See Dan Barker's post on keyphrase gap analysis.
But for the remainder where a service or product is new, so there is low awareness, or the audience is not yet online SEO may appear to not offer an opportunity to generate awareness about your new products.
This case where there is little or no data specifically about it, is more interesting / exciting to me and forces people in the search industry to think a lot more…
My review and recommendations on the best article sites for SEO
This is quite a tricky question to answer since the best article sites do change depending on the industry & audience you're targeting. So to start on any new sector a trial and error approach has to be used where you trial publish and through analysis refine the list to the most effective set for your business.
Still, I thought I'd share this list on my views of the top article publishing websites with some core metrics as well as my experience with each of them. A selection of these sites can often be used as a tactic in your traffic acquisition / seo strategy. Please add to / comment on the list in the comments area at the bottom of the post.
Each score is out of 10. 10 equals excellent.
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