John Doherty

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Expedia’s Brilliant Page Type Strategy

John Doherty — August 14, 2012 — 5 Comments

Every now and then I come across a strategy that is absolutely brilliant and need to share it with the world. I recently came across a strategy like this from Expedia, while doing competitor research for a client. At Distilled, we talk about page types a lot, which basically means your site’s taxonomy. These are all examples of page types:

Categories
Product pages
Guides
Homepage

Expedia is combining a few of these in a really smart way that is helping them rank these pages well.

They are putting their guide content on their city hub pages, and getting links for travel guide related keywords that are partial match anchors for their main keywords!

Let’s take a look. Continue Reading…

In Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Google Testing Reader Subscriptions in Search Results

John Doherty — August 11, 2012 — 1 Comment

Today I was working on building out a new site, which involved adding some functionality to a WordPress site that I started last night. I wanted to add breadcrumbs to the theme, so I remembered that Joost de Valk has the correct WordPress code for this on his site.

I searched [yoast breadcrumbs code] and was returned this SERP - Continue Reading…

In Search Engine Optimization

Oops I Spammed The Internet

John Doherty — August 9, 2012 — 23 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, when I announced that I am writing an ebook about blog marketing, I decided that I should step up my broader marketing game a bit and send out an email to my contacts. Continue Reading…

In Marketing

Make Your Employees Rockstars

John Doherty — August 7, 2012 — 3 Comments

I live in New York City, the greatest city in the world. And because it’s the greatest city in the world, it’s the place that people of all types flock to. And many of these people are absolutely amazing at what they do, and get snapped up quickly. But guess what? Not only do they get snapped up quickly, but they get recruited heavily as well. And New York recruiters are fierce and devious. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been duped by a recruiter who has posed as someone in my industry and added me on LinkedIn, only to message me right after I accept and try to get me to talk about a job! I’ve also had them call me at work (AT WORK) numerous times and try to have a chat with me. Really? You think I’m going to chat with you while I’m at MY JOB??

You might not be able to pay what the big agencies can pay, and you’re most likely not Apple or Google that pay an INSANE amount of money to their employees (and especially developers). So, you have to beat this big guys at their own game.

How? By making your employees rockstars, whatever that means to them. Continue Reading…

In Miscellany

Diagnosing SERP Volatility

John Doherty — August 3, 2012 — 11 Comments

One of the perks of working agency side is access to a plethora of tools and a plethora of Analytics accounts across verticals. I also watch the Google SERPs religiously and use a few tools (SERPmetrics and Mozcast) to keep an eye on the algorithm and flux. It’s always good as an SEO/online marketer to keep an eye on the search results and see the changes broader.

Today I looked at the SERPmetrics flux capacitor and saw this: Continue Reading…

In Search Engine Optimization

Do Real Industry Stuff

John Doherty — July 31, 2012 — 12 Comments

Just last week I was sitting in the audience in the Westin in Seattle where I heard Wil Reynolds give a talk that was basically titled “Do Real Company Stuff“. Intriguingly, a few days before I had a brief exchange on Twitter with Branko, who I greatly respect and greatly enjoy his insights. He had just published this post on SEObook about small businesses and Google’s recent algorithm updates.

I wrote another post as a response to what he and others have said about outing, but I’m publishing this one instead after hearing Wil’s talk. Continue Reading…

In Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Dealing Responsibly with Unnatural Links Messages

John Doherty — July 23, 2012 — 8 Comments

Google recently sent out a new batch of the unnatural links notices. The blogosphere went nuts as usual with very little information. On Friday, Matt Cutts posted on Google+ to try to satiate some of the madness. Here is what he said:

Of course this did not satisfy most SEOs.
Continue Reading…

In Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized

Interview with Jonathon Colman of REI

John Doherty — July 17, 2012 — 18 Comments

I have never interviewed someone on this blog before. Every now and then, though, I come across someone who I think deserves to have more exposure in the industry because they add a lot of value and in genuinely an awesome person. One of those people to me is Jonathon Colman. He’ll introduce himself here in a minute, but he and I got connected online earlier this year, and since then I think we’ve both taught each other a lot. I’m looking forward to properly meeting him in person this next week as I’m in Seattle for Mozcon, and it is a pleasure to have the first interview published on this blog to be with him!

Find him here on Twitter and here on Google+. And he shares some awesome photos on Google+ too.

In Uncategorized

The Anatomy of A Viral Marketing Product Launch

John Doherty — July 12, 2012 — 23 Comments

“Virality” has been the talk of the Internet, and especially blogging and marketing, worlds for a bit of time now. In my day-to-day I work with and have a lot of conversations with startups whose investors are constantly pushing them to “make the product more viral”. I’m not convinced that “virality” within a product is necessarily a positive, as a lot of people have been frustrated by the forced sharing that is now occurring throughout Facebook and the social web.

Where virality is useful, though, is when launching a new product. Everyone has a book or product idea, but relatively few know how to market their product well, especially pre-launch, to have the maximum number of people possible ready and willing to buy, share, and promote the product for you once it launches.

So how do you build virality into a product launch? How do you build this set of people? This is the question I am going to tackle today.

In Marketing

New Tool – Quora RSS Importer

John Doherty — July 10, 2012 — 9 Comments

Back in April at Linklove, I presented on Tools of the SEO Trade. In that talk, I talked about somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 different tools available for use. I built out a couple for people to use as well (for free), and today I want to talk about one of them.

Introducing the Quora RSS Scraper Importer

One of the tools I built out, which is actually a tool that I built back in January or February for a client, is a Google Spreadsheet that imports the most recent Quora posts based on a Quora category. I’ll explain this further down, but if you’re impatient you can:

Download and Copy the Spreadsheet