Collaborative writing with storyline.io

Yesterday, I read about a great site called storyline.io. It’s a site for collaborative writing. That isn’t something new by itself but this site is well executed. You have 5 minutes for writing a paragraph and one minute for proof-reading it. What I especially love is that the community is still quite small but active. Also the amount of trolling seems to be very low. This leads to some pretty good stories. Here’s probably my favorite. It’s a comedy called The Activity Club. It’s only a few paragraphs long, so go ahead and read it. One problem is that stories don’t tend to end because there’s no length specified. So, one writer may want to bend the story to go to the end while the other tries to lengthen it. This could be a great addition, maybe with variable length?

A few years ago I used a similar site which wasn’t that well executed but was nonetheless fun. I think it’s a gentle way to get into writing because you don’t have to pressure to do all the work. Post a line and you’re done – just 6 minutes of writing, that’s it.

Reading Best of inbound: July and Augsut

July
Content Marketing: an other view

  • UX is important
  • Make it easier for your visitors / customers to solve their problems
  • Let users create content
  • Sponsor events
  • Think about adjacent fields

100 Lessons Learned from 10 Years of SEO

  • Don’t link-build too fast
  • Meta descriptions help your CTR
  • Work on a good product
  • Stay creative and don’t obsess with algorithmic details
  • Big brands are slow – you can beat them
  • Keyword research is the basis of all your activites(!)
  • Learn about internet marketing / CRO(!!)
  • You need to work together with other teams
  • Don’t try to screw your competition over – try to learn from them
  • Don’t build links, build customers – your ingenious tactics will probably be destroyed by google anyway
  • Talk about your what you’ve learned
  • Have a strategy
  • Profit should be your top goal

Importance of Determining SERP Competition

  • How many organic links are on the site? What are the other elements?
  • Check for synonyms, singular/plural, etc.
  • Use Google Ads, Insights to find attractive keywords
  • Look for verticals

August

SERP Analysis

  • Identify your 5 – 10 core set of keywords
  • Use Google’s Contextual Targeting tool (adwords) to find ideas and group them in 3 different buckets based on volume
  • Start with the lowest bucket and work up
  • Higher domain authority, harder competition
  • Start scraping the SERP: URL, Domain Authority, Page Authority, #indexed links, #linking root domains
  • What types are the backlinks? Import backlinks into Link Detective
  • Broken Links? Do some broken link building
  • Lots of low level backlinks? Easier competition
  • Link Diversity (#Links / #Root domains) low or high?
  • Check root domains for same IP / C-Blocks

HQ Link Building Tactics

  • How can your service help universities / students? Create a unique landing page and get links
  • Local charity events
  • College logos on your product
  • Offer useful tools for businesses which help them for free
  • Organize a (local) event
  • Egobait & Infographics
  • Sponsor your product for an event

Reading Best of inbound: April to June

April

Anchor Text Optimisation Best Practices

  • Variation: synonyms, plural/singular, adjectives, combine keywords, natural language,
  • Branded keywords
  • Natural links: click here, go, link, url
  • Onsite: self-explanatory title tag, URL, h1 tag

Ultimate Guide to Increasing Ecommerce CR

  • Great product presentation: HQ images, copy, videos, customazation
  • Free shipping(!)
  • Clear sales and special offers
  • Make it easy to buy: no registration required, fast support, etc.
  • Persistent shopping cart
  • Offer live chat / support
  • Process indicators: 3 easy steps, for example
  • Offer multiple payment options
  • Improve your search(!!)
  • Create better filters
  • Product reviews
  • Test: UX, A/B, MVT

Ecommerce SEO in 2012

  • Content creation became very important
  • G+ is become more important thanks to rich SERPs
  • Schemas, XML Sitemaps and Site speed
  • Product can be content: esp. customization, product hacks, APIs, UGC, etc.
  • Videos

On-Page Optimization of Ecommerce Websites

  • Customer reviews: collect them, negative reviews are great
  • Q&A content
  • Incentivize social sharing; think about affiliates in an other way
  • Breadcrumb navigation
  • Phone number as trust and support signal

May

Noob Guide to Link Building

  • Your highest anchor text distribution should be branded
  • Use share of voice to calculate possible financial impact of higher ranking
  • Special content
    • Egobait: crowd sourcing, best of, interviews, awards
    • Data viz, e.g. infographics, videographic – precontact influencers
    • Ebook and guest post
    • Blog contest
    • Throw an event: meetup, conference, party, dinner
  • Learn about your audience: social listening, Facebook, prospecting
  • Quick wins
    • Ask for links
    • Profile links
    • Directories
    • Local organizations: BBB, Chamber of Commerce, etc.
    • Joining the conversation: boards, blog commenting, Q&A

June

How to perform a great SEO Audit

  • Start crawling the website as bot (no css, cookies, JS)
  • Accessibility
    • Robots: .txt, meta tags
    • Errors
    • XML Sitemap
    • Flash / JS
    • Site performance
  • Indexability
    • site:example.org vs. actual counts
    • Are you ranking well for branded searches?
    • Penalized? Check first, if the page is really penalized
  • On Page Factors
    • URLs: short (<115chars), relevant keywords, subfolders, use hyphens instead of underscores
    • Check for duplicate content (parameters in URLs)
    • Content: at least 300 words, it is valuable?, keywords?, easily readable?, indexiable?
    • HTML: Markup, titles, meta-description, h1, frames, canonical?
    • Images: alt tag and file name
    • Outlinks: trustworthy sites, relevant, anchor text, links broken?
  • Off Page Factors
    • Popularity: gaining traffic, compare to others and backlinks
    • Trustworthyness: Google’s safe browsing, siteadvisor, hidden keywords
    • Backlinks: how many unique root domains? What percentage if nofollow? Natural anchor text distribution? Relevant backlinks? How popular/trustworthy/authoritative are the backlinks?
    • Social Engagement: retweets, +1s, fb likes, etc.
  • CI (see next section)

Guide to Competitive Research

  • Questions:
    • What is their link building strategy?
    • How do they use social media?
    • SWOT their strategy
    • How do these elements work together, i.e. digital strategy
  • Backlinks
    • Top Backlinks: What can are they?
    • General Backlinks: Content marketing, guest blogs, etc?
  • Anchor text: distribution, coupled terms, branded?
  • Link Building
    • Press releases
    • Directory submissions
    • Blogger outreach
    • Content marketing
    • Infographics
    • Social bookmarks
    • Local influences
  • Social Media
    • Where are they active?
    • How do they promote their estate?
  • Observe continuously: google alerts, twitter search, etc.

Guide to Link Building with Local Events

  • Event page on your website: info about the event, etc.
  • Find event directories for your city
  • Look out for event data providers
  • Always do CI
  • Search for local blogs / groups who could be interested in your event
  • Advanced: 2nd tier linking the event site, citation building with your local address, schemas, search for external speakers
  • Build a email list, create wrap-ups, ask for links
  • My tip: encourage attendants to blog and twitter about the event