John Doherty's Blog

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 […]

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