Best of John Around the Internet

I write on a number of different industry blogs. Some of my posts have been very well received, others did not get the airtime I had hoped. Here are my top 5 posts from this site (by social mentions) and my posts from around the Internet.

Johnfdoherty.com

Google’s Hidden Author Search
In this post, I uncover a way to search Google by author. I also provide a bookmarklet to use for your own purposes, as well as provide a Screencast video about how to use it.

Minimum Viable Keyword Research
This is the basics of keyword research, the minimum you need to know in order to start doing keyword research for your own website or blog.

Brand Voice Marketing (aka Shut Up About Yourself)
Don’t just talk about yourself on your site. Produce the content that your users want to see. Provide them information and knowledge, not self-promotional drivel.

11 Ways to Drive Traffic To Your Website
There are many general posts about driving traffic to your site. This one links to many resources that can help get you started with the different traffic avenues.

SEO is Not Your Whole Marketing Strategy
This post was inspired by seeing companies who think that SEO will solve all their problems. I disagree and think that companies need to realize that SEO is a part that fits into a larger online marketing strategy.

SEO for Longtail
In this post I detailed some ways that I have seen to rock the longtail of SEO for clients in new niches, or niches where head terms do not exist readily. The community loved it!

How Distilled Stole my Page Title
In this post I saw where the title tag on a post I wrote was being changed by Google to match the anchor text of a link.

Making SEOmoz’s SERP Analysis Tool More Awesome
Here I took SEOmoz’s SERP Analysis Tool and created an Excel Spreadsheet to spin you a lot of graphs to do competitor research with.

If I did SEO for Everywhereist I Would…
I gave my friend Geraldine DeRuiter some friendly advice. She loved it.

Link Prospecting with Twitter Tools and APIs
I built a tool in Google Docs that uses the Twitter API and Moz API for link prospecting. This tactic also uses FollowerWonk to find influencers.

Learn SEO
My advice to new SEOs about how to learn SEO as fast as possible. Beyond “be curious”, this is practical advice for any beginner.

Moz

A Linkbuilder’s Gmail Productivity Setup and Outreach Templates from Industry Experts
This post details my setup in Gmail for maximum linkbuilding and email productivity. I also reached out to some industry expert friends who were happy to provide me with some example outreach emails to share.

Getting Rankings into GA Using Custom Variables
I worked with my friend Mike to create a custom variable to pass rankings data into Google Analytics. Rankings directly in Analytics so you can see your quick wins? Bonus!

7 Google Analytics Advanced Segments I Love (and you should too)
Here I gave my favorite Google Analytics advanced segments to use for slicing and dicing data.

Social Network Spam and Author/Agent Rank
Following my talk at SMX East about using Facebook and Twitter for SEO, I wrote this post about social network spam and how the search engines might catch it. Worth the read for the graphs, for sure.

How Google +1 Affected Social Shares and +1 Adoption Rates
I did a lot of number crunching to see how the adoption of the Google +1 button was going, and how it affected social sharing. The results surprised me.

The Tweet Effect: How Twitter Affects Rankings
I did some testing at my old job about Twitter affecting rankings. I found some interesting causation.

Distilled

Producing Great Content With No Budget (The Equity of Content Production)
This post came about because of people complaining about not having money to produce content. I outlined the three types of equity people have to create content. You need at least one – time, money, talent.

Penguin Strategies for Diagnosing and Recovering
I provided my methodology that I use when diagnosing an algorithm update on a website’s traffic, and also gave away an Excel spreadsheet that will be useful to SEO professionals.

Beating the Panda – Diagnosing and Rescuing a Client’s Traffic
Here I outlined how I diagnosed and then rescued a client from the Panda update.

Guide to Google’s New Tablet Search
In those post I dissected the tablet search that Google launched, pointing out some of the intricacies and how SEOs might use them to their advantage.

Google Loses Twitter Stream, Wins the Search Game
I gave my opinion on why Google+ is a great thing, why it will survive, and why Google no longing having direct access to Twitter’s firehose API is best in the long term.

Google+
I was privileged to write a first look at Google+ on the Distilled blog. It was an exciting day.

Wordstream

3 Ways to Scale Linkbuilding with Google Docs
I wrote a guest post for Wordstream, complete with a Google spreadsheet template, for teams to use to scale linkbuilding when they do not have funds for expensive CRMs like Buzzstream.

The Everywhereist

Dispatches from Occupy Wall Street and the NYC Subway
I wrote a guest post for travel blogger Geraldine Deruiter, who I met through my work because her husband runs SEOmoz. Geraldine saw my photos of life in NYC and asked me to write this post. I was glad to share!