John Doherty

11 Feb

John Doherty Posted in Linkbuilding 46 comments

Google’s Hidden Author Search (plus Bookmarklet and Video)

Google has an author search. Did you know that? We’ve been talking about author authority for some months now, and in earnest for about the past five or six. When rel=author was announced back in June, the SEO world went nutso talking about “SEO is dead” and “The Era of Linkbuilding is Over” and “We all have to go in-house now” and all sorts of craziness.

07 Feb

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 27 comments

Minimum Viable Keyword Research

Keyword research is often a large undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be. You can do keyword research quickly to find the right terms to target for a blog post or article quite quickly. Keyword research only becomes a large undertaking when you have a large site that has never had SEO done on it before, and even then there are tips and tricks that can be used to do keyword research in a scaleable way, or at least to prioritize sections of your site to conduct keyword research on first.

The goal of this post is to teach and provide you the tools and strategies you need to do minimum viable keyword research for a new article in a brief amount of time. This applies whether you are going for a new head term (like with the Linkbait Guide on Distilled) or for a longtail SEO strategy.

06 Feb

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 2 comments

Why You Are Your Company’s Best Marketer

“You can hire an outside firm, but you’re always your best marketer.” – Abraham Lincoln

I’m an online marketer working for a marketing agency, working with big brands and small scrappy startups to drive more traffic to their sites via online means, usually through great content. But when a company brings us in to be their marketing, I want to scream and then point them to my post SEO is NOT Your Whole Marketing Strategy.

02 Feb

John Doherty Posted in Linkbuilding 10 comments

15 Linkbuilding ProTips

Recently at our Distilled-a-thon in London, Phil Nottingham decided that he was going to ship some pro-tip videos, which are short videos of under a minute in length, where we gave away some actionable soundbites. We have a lot of really smart people in Distilled, so I decided to go watch them for myself.

HOLY MOLY. The content on our Distilled Youtube page is amazing, with tips being given by everyone from our CEO (Duncan) to our PR Exec (Lexi) and many others, including Analysts and Consultants who are stuck in every day moving the needle for their clients. Watch and learn! Read more about 15 Linkbuilding ProTips …

30 Jan

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 4 comments

Considerations for Facets and Filters in eCommerce

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 –

http://www.example.com/shirts/ralph-lauren-red-polos
http://www.example.com/shirts/ralph-lauren-blue-polos
http://www.example.com/shirts/ralph-lauren-yellow-polos
http://www.example.com/shirts/ralph-lauren-pink-polos

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 – Read more about Considerations for Facets and Filters in eCommerce …

26 Jan

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 3 comments

Shipping is Scary [Video]

This week, during our all-company meeting in London which we are affectionately calling the “Distilled-a-thon”, we had a day that we chose to call a “ship-a-thon”. The goal of this day was for each and every person in Distilled to “ship” something that would make the company better.

My big ship for the day, along with Will Critchlow, Mike Pantoliano, and Geoff Kenyon is something that scares me a lot, but is incredibly exciting. Incredibly exciting because it will be really cool, but scary.

The lesson for yesterday: shipping is scary.

How to Noindex and Organize Categories and Tags in WordPress

Duplicate content can be a killer for websites, especially blogs and news sites, if the organization is not handled correctly. Often websites such as blogs and news sites are organized into categories and are then interlinked by other means such as sidebar widgets, related post plugins, and tags in WordPress. With all of the different ways of organizing sites, though, and the reality of pagination, we can quickly get into a hot mess of closely identical pages across our site that do not add value to the user experience and could be treated as duplicate content by the search engines.

So how do we decide what content we want the search engines to index and rank, and once we decide how do we make this happen?

In this post I am going to introduce you (or remind you, if you already know about them) to a few meta tags, placed in the <head> section of your site, that will help you with dealing with duplicate content. At the end, if you’re using WordPress, I’ll show you how to do it using Yoast’s SEO plugin.

SEO is NOT Your Whole Marketing Strategy

I work with companies of all sizes in my job as an SEO Consultant at Distilled in New York City (the best city in the world). I have a Fortune 500 company that you have definitely heard of, a hotel chain you have definitely heard of, and two startups that you may not have heard of (yet). I love it when a company “gets” SEO and wants to bake it into their company. In fact, I tweeted this tweet today after spending a full day at one of my startup clients working with them:

I realized today just how much SEO ties into a whole business. If only more business people understood that…

— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) January 13, 2012

I get stoked when companies start to get SEO, but I have one thing to say:

SEO is NOT your full marketing strategy

10 Jan

John Doherty Posted in Search Engines 6 comments

Google Showing Official Sites in Instant Search

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!

03 Jan

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 9 comments

SEO for Longtail

Oftentimes in SEO, people hear about “head terms” and the value of doing keyword research to try to capture large search terms that will bring lots and lots of traffic to your site. While I do not wish to give the impression that this is not a valuable endeavour (it definitely it), there is much more to SEO than just head terms. Let me tell you from personal experience, there is nothing worse than having a boss who thinks that getting the #1 ranking for that one term is going to win them the Internet, and that is all they want to focus on.

A lot of value exists in the longtail of traffic, those 3+ word terms that drive a lot of traffic to your site through fairly unique queries. Let’s look at some numbers, graphs, and statistics from different sites around the web that hopefully will show you the value of longtail traffic.

Let me also point out that SEO for the longtail has changed since the Panda update and since Google started hiding our search referrer data for logged-in users. While these have changed HOW we go about our work a bit, they have not changed the WHY or the importance of it.
Read more about SEO for Longtail …

27 Dec

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 6 comments

The Power of Guest Blogging

I’m often asked to guest blog on websites. I do so because I love writing, but what is the purpose of guest blogging? Why do it? Why allow others to guest post on your site? How do you even find these relevant people?

Those are all questions I will try to answer today, with some real data to back it up from an SEO and traffic perspective.

ETIQUETA CANONICAL RETRASA CON GOOGLEBOT EN LA WEB CONTRA INDICE DE MOVIL

Attention: This post is the translated version of the Canonical Delays post. It is for testing purposes with the hreflang=”” parameter.

Recientemente he estado notando una tendencia interesante cuando publique blogs. Cuando mis posts publicar, automáticamente Twitter por un plugin llamado WordTwit. Mis mensajes son siempre indexados dentro de dos a cuatro minutos.

Lo que estoy notando, sin embargo, es que mis mensajes son cada vez más la indexación con el parámetro, al igual que “utm_source = rss?”: Read more about ETIQUETA CANONICAL RETRASA CON GOOGLEBOT EN LA WEB CONTRA INDICE DE MOVIL …

20 Dec

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 2 comments

Canonical Tag Delays with Googlebot in Web vs Mobile Index

I have recently been noticing an intriguing trend when I publish blog posts. When my posts publish, they are automatically tweeted out by a plugin called WordTwit. My posts are always indexed within two to four minutes.

What I am noticing, though, is that my posts are increasingly being indexed with the “?utm_source=rss” parameter, like so:

Click to Enlarge

16 Dec

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 7 comments

When Data Disproves Assumptions

Back in August I mentioned in this post that one of my goals for this site was to double RSS readers by February 7th, which would mark 1 year since I started this site.

Well, let me tell you that I think I need to set loftier goals. At the time, I had 41 RSS subscribers. As of the 13th of December, I have 123!

Here are the statistics:

15 Dec

John Doherty Posted in Social Media One comment

Facebook’s Timeline Goes Live [Video]

I do not often write about Facebook on here, as I don’t do a lot of client work involving it, but today’s launch of the Facebook Timeline feature worldwide has drawn a lot of attention and I’ve had some exchanges with friends. Check this one out on Facebook: To help people learn the new Facebook […]

Author: John Doherty