John Doherty

03 May

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 17 comments

Tools for Creating Editorial Calendars

We’re all realizing the value of content and content marketing when it comes to SEO and earning rankings, especially with all the algorithm updates from the past year and the recent Penguin update as well. Content is more important than ever, and even the most skeptical are coming around to see that the time for content marketing is now.

All of that is well and good, but it does us no good if we don’t know how to create an editorial calendar for content creation. So let’s examine some tools that can help us do that. Just like a lot of processes that we think “Man, I wish I had a tool for that”, sometimes you need to try a few to figure out which one works best for you. These should get you started. Read more about Tools for Creating Editorial Calendars …

27 Apr

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 17 comments

Identifying Link Patterns with SEO Tools

The other day I was doing competitor backlinking strategy analysis for a client of mine. Essentially, they wanted to know the backlink strategies of their competitors so that they could see where opportunity exists. I want to share the strategy that I used with you, so that you can use it to fairly quickly and easily identify your client’s (or your own) main competitors, and even further which competitors you need to examine more closely for their backlink strategies. Read more about Identifying Link Patterns with SEO Tools …

19 Apr

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 17 comments

Linkbranding – A Linkbuilder’s Marketing Mindset

Linkbuilding is always a hot topic in the industry, with people wanting to know how to build more and better links faster while putting in less time. Linkbuilders have historically just thought about “how can I get more links with better anchor text”? It doesn’t matter where you get the links from, in their estimation. Rather, it matters that you get the right anchor text.

I think this is the wrong way to look at linkbuilding. At the very least, it’s shortsighted and doesn’t give you the full impact that thinking about linkbuilding in a different way could. I call this type of linkbuilding linkbranding.
Read more about Linkbranding – A Linkbuilder’s Marketing Mindset …

16 Apr

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 2 comments

SEO Presentation from General Assembly

On Sunday I taught a class at General Assembly, a startup incubator, to a group of Chinese entrepreneurs from the 2012 ECSEL Fellows Program. Basically, they are all entrepreneurs who are running companies that have been dubbed as important to the Chinese future and are pushing forward in their respective industries to make change. Some […]

04 Apr

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 36 comments

Explode your Keyword List for Linkbuilding Magic

You know what’s better than ranking for your head terms? Ranking for your head terms plus the longtail variations of those terms that can also drive great traffic. Once you get outside of the head term fixation, you realize that incredible value exists in the longtail of keywords. In fact, over 80% of queries are considered “longtail”, according to this graph:

What I am going to do today is show you how to blow out your keyword list using tools like UberSuggest and Soovle so that you can identify the terms around your head terms so that you can create content and build links to your site using all of the related terms, still rank for your head terms, AND capture the longtail traffic!

29 Mar

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 17 comments

Competitor Link Prospecting in Microsoft Excel

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. Read more about Competitor Link Prospecting in Microsoft Excel …

27 Mar

John Doherty Posted in Miscellany 11 comments

The Difference Between Winners and Losers

Do you cringe when someone says “I could have done that”? Whether it is a blog post, a new startup, or a piece of modern art, people say it all the time.

I have come to realize that there are two kinds of people – those who do and those who say they could. Those who win are the doers and those who don’t never move into the realm of the unknown and thus keep saying “I could have done that.”

The point is, you didn’t.

What separates the doers from the could-have-dones? There are a few key characteristics, which funny enough are the same characteristics that I often see being written about as characterisitcs of entrepreneurs. Read more about The Difference Between Winners and Losers …

22 Mar

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized No comments

Content Marketing Webinar Video

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.

13 Mar

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 36 comments

Eight Useful Excel Functions for SEO

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!
Read more about Eight Useful Excel Functions for SEO …

08 Mar

John Doherty Posted in Miscellany 21 comments

The Rise to 10,000 Visits Per Month

I finally get to write the “How I built a 10,000 visits/month site” post. This is that post. In February, I finally crossed the 10k visits mark, which was a goal I had set for myself. For some reason, 10,000 visits is the number that a lot of people choose to measure success by, whether it’s subscribers, money made, or visits.

This is actually a difficult post for me to write. Often these posts say “I did [this] and I tripled my traffic and built a huge following”. These posts frustrate me and others because they are such rare occurrences that they are not repeatable, or they give people false hope.

What I hope this post will show you, from my experience over the past year of writing on this site, is that blogging takes hard work. Add on a day job (in my case, switching jobs AND cities), a social life, hobbies, other sites, speaking engagements, and family (if you have one), or even traveling, and blogging gets REALLY difficult to do consistently. Then add on the fears of not doing well and combine that with perfectionism, and blogging becomes even tougher.

What I want to do is show you real numbers. I want to show you the events that have been paramount to my blogging success (if I can even call it that). I’ll show you how the traffic numbers going up is pretty even with the number of Twitter followers I have.

I also want to tell you both the things I have done, as well as the things that I have not done, to build the traffic to my site. What you read may surprise you.

05 Mar

John Doherty Posted in Linkbuilding 5 comments

Determining the Need for Linkbuilding

People often come to us and say that they want linkbuilding. I assume that this is because many people are under the understanding that SEO = linkbuilding = rankings. While there have been posts written about why this is not true, this scenario plays out again and again.

I bet this happens to you as well, if you are an SEO consultant or work in an SEO agency. Sometimes it is quite difficult to know whether or not to take them on. On the one hand, the money is nice. On the other hand, we have to do what is right for the client and not always what is right for the office bank account or personal wallet.

The goal of this post is to provide you with a framework for success when deciding whether or not to take on a client for linkbuilding. I’ll walk you through what I check before I agree to take on a client for linkbuilding, which will hopefully help you to do the same.

Google Looks Out for The Good Guys (A Response)

On Tuesday Wil Reynolds published a post on SEOmoz entitled “How Google is Making Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO“. I enjoyed the read and Wil’s passion behind it (it’s one of the first posts in a while that I’ve read quite in-depth), and I don’t disagree with the principle behind his post, but I think the examples don’t match up and the post doesn’t convey what he set out to convey (sorry Wil). In fact, I disagree that Google is screwing us over and I don’t think their wording is telling us what Wil’s post is telling us it is. If anything, they are lying by omission by not talking about outreach, but we all know that outreach is necessary for content.

Instead, I think Google is dealing with a broken algorithm and are dealing with it in a different way. I do agree, though, that what Google says works isn’t always what works best, but they do not deny that anchor text works. In fact, they know spam is a problem. Why else would they have a spam report? However:

I personally think Google is moving in the right direction and actually dealing with this issue in a way that will fix the problem, not require them to keep fixing a broken algorithmic problem that will always have holes for people to exploit.

I’m going to break this post into a few sections. First, talking about “good SEO”, because I find the discussion worthwhile. Then, let’s talk about deserving to rank, if you should decide it is necessary for you to rank. Finally, I’ll show some examples that will hopefully give us some hope that Google is indeed fighting, and starting to win, this battle. Yes, we’re going to talk about Search Plus Your World (SPYW), which I am increasingly liking.

In case you were wondering, I have deliberately chosen to not respond to Wil’s post point by point. I am trying to get at the heart of the issue of what he was talking about, that Google is not doing anything to help out the good guys. I’m no Google fanboy, but I disagree.

Three Tenets of Content Marketing

This post is about content marketing, which is a hot topic these days and one that I fear is a bit nebulous to people. Tom Critchlow recently wrote The Time for Content Marketing is Now on the Distilled blog, where he gave some very inspirational and actionable insights into content marketing. I read this post by Michael Hyatt recently as well, and while it does not go nearly as in-depth as I would have liked, he’s on the right path. Great content before traffic and rankings.

I’ve also recently been disheartened by the amount of low-quality content that many people online seem intent on creating. Whether it’s bad infographics, recycled blog posts, or content for the sake of content because someone’s been told to “have a blog” and “update it frequently”, we are inundated with an overload of content that adds nothing to the global conversation.

I also saw this tweet from Russ (who I GREATLY respect as an SEO and a friend):

What is the difference between “content marketing” and a “video”. Seems like most examples are glorified commercials online.

— rjonesx (@rjonesx) February 24, 2012

That’s what this post is about. Showing what great content is outside of video (but including it as well). Adding to the content marketing conversation. Read more about Three Tenets of Content Marketing …

21 Feb

John Doherty Posted in Excel for SEO 18 comments

Bucketing Link Prospects for Link Outreach

Linkbuilding is always a hot topic within SEO, and different schools of thought exist. There’s the Throw Away Your Form Letters approach, and then there’s the school of form letters are great, just make them personalized. I did a lot of linkbuilding at my old job, and am doing some now for clients, and I prefer to take a more nuanced approach.

Different targets require different approaches. Let’s break the types of link prospects into three groups:

High level – these are the most important links. High quality sites.
Mid-level – these are valuable sites, but maybe not as hard to get.
Low-level – when you need mass.

Let’s examine the different approaches required for each.
Read more about Bucketing Link Prospects for Link Outreach …

15 Feb

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 6 comments

My SEO 101 Presentation from Faith+Tech

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 […]

Author: John Doherty