All of the articles contained in this category are about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the practice of helping websites appear more prominently in search engines such as Google and Bing. Most of these articles are around the more technical parts of SEO, especially SEO for Wordpress, but you will also find articles about linkbuilding, social media for SEO, and Microsoft Excel for SEOs.
I pretty much exclusively work on very large sites when I do consulting. I am 100% of the “fewer clients, more focus and money” school of thought when it comes to consulting, thus I keep my consulting light to run Credo. Over the last four to five years, I have worked almost exclusively on these […]
Recently I’ve been investing in a new channel for Credo which is starting to show real dividends. That channel is a well-known one that I think a lot of people have forgotten about.
Last week, I had the immense privilege to be a guest of Jason Calacanis‘s on This Week in Startups. For those of you who don’t know, Jason is the founder of LAUNCH, which helps startups grow through education and financing. Jason is an angel investor, and LAUNCH hosts a few conferences throughout the year as […]
I recently read this post entitled The Curse of the Full Stack Marketer. I tweeted a few brief thoughts (a brief rant really) around this post, but now I think it needs a longer treatment. I also realize that there have been a few posts written as follow-ons but I’ve purposefully not read them so as to make this my own thoughts.
I think that there are a few elements at play that make this an interesting and tough topic (especially as someone who feels the tension very personally). Those include:
Let’s unpack each.
Read more about The Full Stack Marketer’s Valley Of Sorrow …
Marketers produce content. We produce a metric ton of content every day, actually. We’re told to create great content and to keep producing great content.
*cue the parody “Great content is killing me”*
Not only do we produce content on our own sites, we also produce content and put it on other sites (which some deem pretty insane). Let me get this straight – We’re creating high-quality content, that takes up our own creative energy and time, so that someone else can put it on their site. And we’re doing it for a freaking link??
If you’re just doing content for the sake of a link, let me say that you’re doing it wrong. Yes, I’ve worked in SEO for a while now. Yes, I know the value of a link. Yes, I can put the monetary value on a link, and I have. Yes, I still think about links first when I scan a piece of content.
BUT. What if I told you that you can still get all of this and more? Read more about Leveraging Editorial, Self-Placed, and Owned Content for Marketing …
Growth hacking has become a buzzterm in the past 6 months, ever since this post written back in April by Andrew Chen. There’s even a growth hacking agency in New York City (linked at the bottom of the post) and startups are starting to hire growth hackers to help them scale up their user base faster.
I’ve heard the growth hacker term thrown around a lot, and have experienced both positive and negative reactions to it from people I know.
The goal of this post is to define down what a growth hacker is, how this integrates well into online marketing, and then to give a few examples of some growth hacks I’ve either seen or heard about that have helped tech startups grow. Read more about SEOs are Growth Hackers …
I’ve seen an alarming trend recently in startup websites. Most want to follow this model:
It’s not uncommon to see this sort of page on a startup’s website:
It’s super simple, just a few points, and a form (and this even asks for your phone number. Talk about asking for too much on the first date). And the reality is that it’s not going to rank for anything substantial because there is simply nothing useful on the page for the search engines to index and rank.
Today let’s talk about the difference between squeeze pages (directed towards conversion) and ranking pages (that can also convert, but will do so at a lower conversion rate). Read more about Building Landing Pages That Rank for SEO …
Just last week I was sitting in the audience in the Westin in Seattle where I heard Wil Reynolds give a talk that was basically titled “Do Real Company Stuff“. Intriguingly, a few days before I had a brief exchange on Twitter with Branko, who I greatly respect and greatly enjoy his insights. He had just published this post on SEObook about small businesses and Google’s recent algorithm updates.
I wrote another post as a response to what he and others have said about outing, but I’m publishing this one instead after hearing Wil’s talk. Read more about Do Real Industry Stuff …
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:
Let’s examine the different approaches required for each.
Read more about Bucketing Link Prospects for Link Outreach …
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
Read more about Should I use a Rel=Canonical or 301 Redirect? …
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:
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.
Read more about SEO: It’s all about the Content. And everything else. …
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.
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.
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 […]