Professional SEO , Photographer, and Traveler
You all know I’m a big fan of Microsoft Excel, and I love building Excel templates that help you do your work better. You’re in luck, because today I’m releasing to you an Excel template that I love.
I call this one the Competitor Backlink Prospector. Now, SEOmoz has the Labs Competitive Link Finder, but this tool has never quite worked the way I’ve wanted it to. So, I took it upon myself (inspired by my old coworker Ethan Lyon, who is now at SEER) to create this spreadsheet. Continue Reading…
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of doing a webinar entitled “A Guide to Content Marketing” alongside Greg from Zemanta. During the hour-long session, we sought to give tips and tricks about content marketing for everyone from a small business operator to professional SEOs listening in as well.
My favorite tip, one that I use frequently, is the value of having a place where you can store ideas as soon as they arrive. Often, ideas that go into your idea-holder will not see the light of day, but some are good enough to be expounded upon further and then written to the point of publishing.
Help me help you
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post called “If I did SEO for @everywhereist, I would…“, wherein I gave Geraldine Deruiter, Rand’s wife, advice for her travel blog about some things she could do to her site to improve her SEO.
Through this, she asked me to do a bit of work. I implemented all of the recommendations that I made for her, and through this we saw this traffic increase:
It’s probably not a secret anymore that I love Microsoft Excel for data crunching. Nothing makes me happier than getting a whole mess of data and making sense of it. While I’m definitely not an Excel ninja on the level of Mike Pantoliano, I’ve learned a number of tricks in the past couple of years to help out a lot with my work. Whether it’s keyword research, building a sitemap, or cleaning up URLs and finding duplicates in rows, here are eight of my favorite Excel functions that make my life easier every day.
For all of these, the data is in cell A1, unless otherwise noted.
Stick these in your list of functions!
Continue Reading…
Today I logged into my Analytics account to check some stats and take some screenshots. When I did, I was dealt a great surprise:
On Monday, February 13th, I presented at a meetup called NYC Faith+Tech, which was founded by my friends from Faithstreet. They asked me to present on SEO 101, to help people know what SEO is and what they can do on their site to make it friendly to search engines.
I took at 10,000 foot view. There is so much more I could have gone into, and next time I’ll take my friend’s advice and walk people through optimizing a website. I realized as I put this presentation together that going back to the very basics on something you know well is very challenging to do!
If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it.
On simple blogs or websites, navigation is usually quite straight-forward. You organize your site into categories, or funnels, of information or articles. You link to your most important pages and try to minimize duplicate content.
When you have a large ecommerce, travel, or other large site, however, sometimes this is not enough. If you have millions of pages, and want as many as possible to be indexed and ranking well, you simply cannot, nor would you want to, link to every page. Imagine this scenario where the only difference is color -
Let’s be honest. It’s going to be impossible to make all of these pages unique and ranking-worthy.
Or to use a skiing example, where the only difference is length – Continue Reading…
This morning I was doing some searches for a client using some common websites and I saw this when searching for “Facebook Login”:
When you click this, IT TAKES YOU DIRECTLY TO FACEBOOK!
In November I went to a meetup that was put together by a couple of friends of mine who are doing a startup that I think has some real potential. The title of the meetup was “Establishing Your Online Presence”. What struck me, though, was that not many people understand how to launch their online presence. The two people who spoke, who are both wonderful people who are doing cool things with technology, were both struggling to figure out how to get people to use their (I think) extremely helpful offerings.
If you are in the same boat, allow me offer you some things to think about that might benefit you.
I recently discovered the new tool Rapportive. This tool has revolutionized my life, and I am not even doing any hardcore linkbuilding at the moment.
Why is Rapportive so great? Let me show you.
Rapportive is an add-on to Gmail that shows you the information about people that you are emailing. Let’s see what happens when I go to email Rand: Continue Reading…
I'm the Director of and a SEO Consultant with Distilled in New York City. I've worked in the Internet world for 3 years and around the world of SEO the whole time, though I've focused on it full-time since October 2010. Previous to Distilled I worked as an in-house SEO. Prior to that I ran a book publishing company from Switzerland. The thoughts on this site are my own.
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