John Doherty's Blog

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.