Reading Best of inbound: January

I can remember when inbound.org launched publicly in February this year. It’s a great site, like hacker news for online marketing – however, sadly with less discussions. Even if you read inbound daily, you may miss some article or forget another over time – so I decided, to read the top 25 (up to 50) most popular each month and summarize the insightful ones. Like always, these are mainly notes, i.e. I won’t write down things that I talked about before. Enjoy!

Introducing Scrape Rate – A New Link Metric

  • Scrape rate: number of intitle:“your post title” / number of checked posts (at least 1 month old)
  • Guest blogging: host blog with high readership vs. blog with high scrape rate

Google+ SEO: The Ultimate Guide
Great guide, however extremely long. Check it out, if you’re interested.

Strategic Link Building: Why You Don’t Need To Outrun Lions

  • SEO isn’t about cracking Google – it’s about beating your competitors for a keyword
  • SERP and competitor analysis should be a key component
  • Look into more developed country markets to see the future of your country market
  • The rest of the article is an interesting case study

Second Tier Link Building for ROI

  • Links aren’t just useful for SEO
  • For example, an article reviews your product, ranks quite high
  • If you push that article, it may rank higher and gives you more referral traffic and conversions
  • Often low competition => just push the article instead of your own site, esp. if the article just reviews your product alone

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

  • Use AdPlanner to find related sites / communities
  • Create graphics / illustrations that can be shared
  • Conduct keyword search for writing posts
  • Reference to useful other posts (internal & external(!))
  • Guest post and invite guest blogger: http://myblogguest.com/
  • Interact with other people: social media, commenting, boards, etc.
  • Create contests, ranking and similar vanity objects
  • Competitive intelligence(!)
  • Don’t give up

Why These 3 Ranking Factors Matter (but Nobody Seems to Care About)

  • Authorship Markup: builds trust & stands out; How to add author information in search results
  • Freshness: content change of page, new links, age of page
  • Category Authority: Focus on a very narrow topic, create tightly linked content, build links

How to increase the odds of your content going viral

  • The right format: easy to find, compelling visuals, print version gets more shared – make them the standard
  • Get buying from your influencers before you publish it
  • Get content from influencers: reviews, survey, opinion, lessons learned
  • Topic, Timing, Seeding: Topical news, Mo – Thu for B2B
  • Analyze everything and test!

Golilocks SEO

  • Start with mid- to longtail keywords on new sites and go into highly competitive keywords later on
  • Mix keywords, related words and synonyms
  • Split your budget into content and marketing for the content
  • Grow your site strategically using data from analytics & CI
  • Diverse anchor texts
  • Point links to the most relevant pages & boost pages that need more attention
  • Mix different link qualities
  • Gradually build new links and try to get viral campaigns going

5 Forms of Scarcity

  • Classic limited stock: “only 2 books left”
  • Geographically limited stock: “currently out of stock at the store in Boston, but in stock online”
  • Real time scarcity: basically all flights
  • Auctions: Holland, English, n-price auction, etc.
  • Treasure hunts / limited offers