John Doherty's Blog

24 Feb

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 13 comments

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 …

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