John Doherty

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 …

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.

14 Jan

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 18 comments

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

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.

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:

12 Dec

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 2 comments

You Need an Online Marketing Strategy

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.

Should I use a Rel=Canonical or 301 Redirect?

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the world of SEO today, especially in clients minds and with their technical teams, about when to use a 301 redirect and when to use the rel=canonical tag. My goal with today’s post is to explain the differences and talk through some of the nuances to help you think through which one pertains to your situation. Every situation is different, so take the time to read and figure out which is better for you.

17 Nov

John Doherty Posted in Technical SEO 37 comments

Lessons from Google about URL Lengths

A few weeks ago, I was reading through some posts on the official Google blogs, such as InsideSearch, WebmasterCentral, and the GoogleBlog. I was taking notes and sharing a few links via the Tweeters, and while doing such I noticed a link like this:

Search queries data is....what?

13 Nov

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 5 comments

SEO: It’s all about the Content. And everything else.

We hear frequently that “content is king”, which I am coming to believe more and more, but the more that I come to believe that Content is King, I realize that content is nothing without other stuff done right. If you have a site with incredible content that deserves to rank, yet your site is terrible, you don’t deserve to rank. This is a waste of awesome.

28 Oct

John Doherty Posted in Technical SEO 2 comments

Beginner’s Guide to the .HTACCESS File

Linkbuilding gets all of the love in the SEO community, but we often forget that technical SEO is the solid foundation upon which linkbuilding and SEO are built. If you don’t have your information architecture, redirects, and solid code in place, a lot of your efforts will be wasted.

Today I want to talk about the .htaccess file. There are many ways to implement 301 redirects (remember that 302 temporary redirects are bad news), but if you are using an Apache server, the best way to implement a redirect server-side is via the .htaccess file.

Note: if you’re not hosting on your own server, you must check with your hosting provider. Some hosting providers, such as Bluehost, will help you out with redirects, or at least redirecting a domain you bought for ORM reasons.

26 Oct

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 7 comments

Meta Tags that will NOT help SEO

Sometimes as I am browsing through the Interwebs, I come across something that dumbfounds me. Sometimes this dumbfoundery is completely blatant and in plain sight. Other times, however, the goodness is hidden beneath the surface.

I’m talking about hidden gems within the code that someone read somewhere would help them out with SEO on their site. And while I wish I was kidding about these following incredible meta descriptions, I am not.

Hear me loud and clear folks:

These following meta descriptions actually exist in the wild of the Internet and do not help your SEO. Do not use them on your website.

Now that I have that off my chest, here are some amazing meta tags that I have found on the Internet.

On Being Afraid of Failure

Can I take a minute to write a personal post on here? This blog is usually all about SEO tactics, but today I’ve been doing some thinking and reflecting.

I come from a family that is really smart and well educated. I mean really smart and really well educated. My father has his PhD in institutional analysis. My mother is working on her second Masters degree, this one as a mathematics specialist. My older brother is in a fully funded MD/PhD program at Baylor College of Medicine, and my younger brother is a genius who will one day be an ambassador or something to a foreign country, helping to keep our country safe.

And I have a Bachelors degree from James Madison University in Virginia (a good state school). I work for the best SEO consultancy in the world, hang out with some awesomely smart people, and am trying to make waves in New York City.

And guess what?

I’m petrified of failure.

17 Oct

John Doherty Posted in Excel for SEO 3 comments

Here’s a Paid Links Backlink Profile Visualized

While I’ve posted a few times about SEO Excel spreadsheets, and I’ve used link profiles a couple of times in blog posts, I’ve never been able to show what a backlink profile full of backlinks looks like. Back to the beginning A healthy backlink profile is one that has links of all types. It is […]

11 Sep

John Doherty Posted in Miscellany 3 comments

Getting Things Done is about Quality, not Quantity

I’ve been reading a number of books and blogs recently about business. I recently got sent a copy of Tony Hsieh’s “Delivering Happiness”, thanks to Zappos Service. I’ve also been reading Michael Hyatt’s blog Intentional Leadership, where he shares a lot of tips about productivity and leadership. Both have impacted me in big ways. Let […]

29 Aug

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 36 comments

Three Phenomenal Excel Spreadsheets for Link Analysis

Do you ever say to yourself: “I really wish I had a spreadsheet that would give me awesome graphs about my link profile distribution”? No? Just me? I doubt it. Some days we need to have a quick way of visualizing our link profile to know where we stand. All linkbuilders and SEOs are looking […]

18 Aug

John Doherty Posted in Linkbuilding 10 comments

Retargeting Old Contacts for New Links

Today I want to talk about a simple tactic that you should try if you have been working on linkbuilding for a specific site for a while and have had some blog posts written about your site, without links. The Skinny At my old job, my coworker had been working on building links to the […]

19 Jul

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 6 comments

Forget about Global Rankings Already. Seriously.

Why do some SEOs spend so much time checking and worrying about global rankings? I read and hear constantly from different SEOs where their current pet terms are ranking, their badges of honor if you will. We go through insane efforts to depersonalize search results to check rankings and SERP displays. But why? Here’s […]

09 Jul