Search Engine Optimization Articles

08 May

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 9 comments

SEO for Photographers

Being both a travel photographer and an SEO Consultant, I have taken a keen interest in how images get found online. I don’t have enough time to dedicate to my photography site, but I’ve learned a thing or two about SEO for photography along the way to becoming an SEO professional.

Because of this I was happy when Feuza Reis, a New Jersey wedding photographer, asked to interview me for a video blog that she has been doing on her site. I agreed and so we had a great 30 minute chat about SEO and photography. Have a listen and I’d love to have your feedback!
Read more about SEO for Photographers …

27 Apr

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 17 comments

Identifying Link Patterns with SEO Tools

The other day I was doing competitor backlinking strategy analysis for a client of mine. Essentially, they wanted to know the backlink strategies of their competitors so that they could see where opportunity exists. I want to share the strategy that I used with you, so that you can use it to fairly quickly and easily identify your client’s (or your own) main competitors, and even further which competitors you need to examine more closely for their backlink strategies. Read more about Identifying Link Patterns with SEO Tools …

19 Apr

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 17 comments

Linkbranding – A Linkbuilder’s Marketing Mindset

Linkbuilding is always a hot topic in the industry, with people wanting to know how to build more and better links faster while putting in less time. Linkbuilders have historically just thought about “how can I get more links with better anchor text”? It doesn’t matter where you get the links from, in their estimation. Rather, it matters that you get the right anchor text.

I think this is the wrong way to look at linkbuilding. At the very least, it’s shortsighted and doesn’t give you the full impact that thinking about linkbuilding in a different way could. I call this type of linkbuilding linkbranding.
Read more about Linkbranding – A Linkbuilder’s Marketing Mindset …

12 Apr

matt-gratt Posted in Search Engine Optimization 6 comments

Making Google Look Smart – The Sustainable SEO Strategy

*Note from John – This is a guest post by Matt Gratt, who recently struck out on his own to follow his dream of being an entrepreneur. Matt is someone I’ve respected for a while, so it’s a pleasure to have him guest post here! You can find him on his blog, Twitter, or Google+.

While you can’t put glasses on a search engine, you can make it look smart.

This was an eventful couple of months in SEO – BuildMyRank and other blog networks were de-indexed and shut down. Google began sending webmasters warnings of negative links. And expert SEOs have reported that major aspects of anchor text weight have changed.

So what does all of this mean? And more importantly, how can SEOs continue to deliver the traffic, sales, and ROI that clients expect and businesses need in this time of unprecedented change?

We need a sustainable strategy – not a series of escalating tactics. And the sustainable strategy is very simple…

Make Google look smart.

Make Bing look smart.

Make whatever panopticon of vertical search engines, semantic text crawlers, Siri-like smart agents, and social decision engines the future brings look smart. Read more about Making Google Look Smart – The Sustainable SEO Strategy …

04 Apr

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 36 comments

Explode your Keyword List for Linkbuilding Magic

You know what’s better than ranking for your head terms? Ranking for your head terms plus the longtail variations of those terms that can also drive great traffic. Once you get outside of the head term fixation, you realize that incredible value exists in the longtail of keywords. In fact, over 80% of queries are considered “longtail”, according to this graph:

What I am going to do today is show you how to blow out your keyword list using tools like UberSuggest and Soovle so that you can identify the terms around your head terms so that you can create content and build links to your site using all of the related terms, still rank for your head terms, AND capture the longtail traffic!

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

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

03 Jan

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 9 comments

SEO for Longtail

Oftentimes in SEO, people hear about “head terms” and the value of doing keyword research to try to capture large search terms that will bring lots and lots of traffic to your site. While I do not wish to give the impression that this is not a valuable endeavour (it definitely it), there is much more to SEO than just head terms. Let me tell you from personal experience, there is nothing worse than having a boss who thinks that getting the #1 ranking for that one term is going to win them the Internet, and that is all they want to focus on.

A lot of value exists in the longtail of traffic, those 3+ word terms that drive a lot of traffic to your site through fairly unique queries. Let’s look at some numbers, graphs, and statistics from different sites around the web that hopefully will show you the value of longtail traffic.

Let me also point out that SEO for the longtail has changed since the Panda update and since Google started hiding our search referrer data for logged-in users. While these have changed HOW we go about our work a bit, they have not changed the WHY or the importance of it.
Read more about SEO for Longtail …

27 Dec

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 6 comments

The Power of Guest Blogging

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.

John Doherty

Category: Search Engine Optimization