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.
Apparently yesterday on SEO Twitter there was a back and forth between a Times journalist and a bunch of self-styled SEOs. I thankfully missed it somehow (I guess because I don’t follow the journalist and missed all the replies, and no one was subtweeting her), but upon looking back at it the flow went: Journalist […]
On August 29th I gave a webinar about SEO monitoring in partnership with DeepCrawl, which is a site auditing/crawling tool that I’ve used for years and gotten to know the team at over the last year or so. You can see the landing page here and their recap and voice recording here. Here’s the presentation I […]
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 […]
I get a lot of “outreach” emails trying to get me to add links to websites from my own sites. Of course, what these poor junior “outreach specialists” don’t know is that I’ve been in this game for a lot longer than they have and I’ve both sent and received my share of really bad link building emails.
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.
In my line of work, it’s common to get the “how soon can I expect results?” question from new or prospective clients. Many SEOs say that it takes a few months to many months to really start seeing results. And whatever you are seeing after 2 to 3 months pales in comparison to what you will see at 12 months if you are doing SEO right.
I’ve always struggled to pitch the longterm value of SEO and that it takes time for many reasons:
One of the reasons why I love having my own site(s) is that I can show specific case studies.
Happy two weeks before Christmas! Q4 is always a busy time for marketers, but hopefully you’re finding some downtime to hang out with your family, remember that life is pretty darn good, and do some good reading! I read this Jim Rohn quote recently that resonated: “Poor people have big TV’s. Rich people have big […]
I’m (unfortunately) pretty outspoken about politics this year, as any of my friends on Facebook will tell you and most of my Twitter followers know. I’ve avoided writing about politics here so far. And I’ll continue that with the brief mention that you should have a plan for voting tomorrow. With that out of the […]
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 don’t do much solo consulting these days, but when I do it is almost completely with digital marketplaces (if you want to chat with me about your marketplace, you can do it here). These sites always struggle with mass duplicate content issues, which is likely why you are here today.
A marketplace (like my own B2B marketplace Credo) seeks to balance both the supply and demand sides so that a) sellers can make a profit from their involvement and b) buyers have enough variety/choice to have a great experience on the site or service.
Read more about Solving Enterprise SEO Duplicate Content Issues …
Sometimes in life we know that something needs to change, but we keep putting it off until it becomes big enough of an issue to force our hand and cause a change. For years, I’ve been wanting to move my sites off of the disparate cheap shared hosting where they previously lived and onto WPengine for a long time.
In the last few months of 2015 I realized that my livelihood moving forward, as long as I work for myself, is all going to come through my own channels. I have become convinced over the years, after seeing slow and fast sites, of the importance of speed for websites. While it often won’t help smaller sites from an organic perspective, on very big websites with millions of pages you can see a lot of improvement in both traffic and conversions by speeding up your sites.
All of my sites are on WordPress at this point because of the easy extendability of the open source platform. I began my career online developing on the Joomla platform and still remember looking at plugins that supported SEO friendly (SEF is what they called them) URLs. While Joomla worked fine for what I needed at the time, WordPress has moved ahead of them leaps and bounds so basically all my websites have been exclusively WordPress since 2011. I tried building out a few sites with other providers (SquareSpace, Shopify, etc) but they didn’t really suit my needs as someone with a web developer background who wants the freedom to extend things as I wish.
These are the reasons I switched. Some of them affect SEO, some of them don’t. All of them could help you build your business. Read more about Why I Switched My WordPress Hosting to WPengine …
I’m sick of SEO packages. You know the kind, where you get an email asking you to send them a proposal for what you would do for their company and what your packages and pricing are. I’m tired of companies that offer things like “10 blog posts for $150.”
Why?
This is old school small scale thinking. If you want 10 blog posts for $150 and your hourly rate is $30 per hour, write a blog post every 30 minutes for 5 hours. I bet the quality will be a lot higher than paying someone random to do it for you. Marketing “packages” don’t work. Marketing that works isn’t a product that is plug and play for every business. Depending on your business and who your customers are, and your current stage of company, different channels are going to work better or worse for you to actually get you results.
I’ll give a lot of businesses asking for packages the benefit of the doubt because they don’t know what else to call them, but the language underlying it signals to me that they view marketing consulting as transactional – I give you this and I get that. I’m sorry, but that’s not how marketing works. That’s not even how business works! If business were that easy, everyone would run their own business.
The other day I saw Rand Fishkin’s tweet linking to this article that shows that, as Rand says, “evergreen content that ranks beats everything else:”. I am, of course, inclined to agree and because I can’t keep my mouth shut on topics like this I tweeted this: @randfish HotPads got Lifehacker coverage in 2011 that […]
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 …
I don’t often write about technical SEO issues anymore on this site, but I have over time often come across questions about when it is best to use a 301 vs a 302 vs a canonical tag on duplicate content. I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about each in depth with the pros and cons of each, as well as a few examples of when to use them. Read more about When Do I Use a Canonical Vs a 301 Redirect Vs a 302 Redirect? …