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

Reading Best of inbound: February and March

February

Complete list of link building strategies
This is just insane – tons of different strategies and you can even filter them!

The New SEO Process

  • Opportunity Discovery: What opportunities arise with regard to:
    • Business Objectives – what’s the goal?
    • Market research, keyword research, site audit, etc.
  • Content Strategy
    • Ideation
    • Content build
  • Technical Development
  • Social Strategy
    • Link strategy
    • PR
    • Contests, Events, Social Media
  • Measurement
  • Optimization

Link Building resources
an other insane list

Quick Queries For Link Wins

  • Do you have sponsored something but didn’t get backlinks?
  • Find sponsorships under $100, that give you a backlink
  • Find interviews you did
  • Do the same for your competition!

Broken Link Building Guide: From Noob to Novice

  • Pointing out dead links on an other site and recommending others
  • Find broken links: look for high authority sites and high authority pages
  • Contact owner but without any urls in the initial mail if possible
  • Get Link!
  • 301 Redirect Broken Link: If a 301 exists that points to an other location

Buying Links is Shallow, Short-Term Thinking. Buying Blogs? Now that’s a Strategy.

  • Look for blogs in your niche (which may covered you)
  • Propose a monthly payment and a lump-sum at the end of a 3 year period
  • The blog will then move to your domain – but you won’t influence the writings
  • You will help to boost the traffic, improve the UX and design

Findings about how graphics affect conversions

  • Images can reduce readership
  • Try to put the image above the fold
  • Headlines below an image are 10% more read than above the image
  • 80% of people read headlines
  • Captions are read 300% more than body -> try to catch attention and bring the reader back into the text
  • Don’t break the left margin
  • Images without clear relevance are useless
  • Avoid obvious stock photos, poor quality images and oversized faces

March

Link Building Tools We Use at Distilled
Distilled is one of the finest online agencies and Will Critchlow lists some great tools they use.

Incorporating video into your link building strategy

  • You can start for about $1000 producing videos
  • Look for students or graduates from film schools
  • Video in content almost triples the avg. number of links
  • Video is a form not a content – if a video is better than text, make a video
  • If your videos don’t provide value, then they are useless
  • Film in high quality – high quality audio is the most important
  • Create (if feasible) indexable transcripts
  • Make sure that you include a link to your site in the embed code
  • Create Movie schemas and video sitemaps for better indexing

AuthorRank

  • Reputation as a content creator – could influence the SERPs
  • Different Ranks for different topics
  • Google+ as a identify platform and rel=author as your signature
  • AuthorRank could be influenced by shares, time, comments, etc.

How Sitelinks are quietly costing you conversions

  • Under certain circumstances google may swaps your website for a sitelink
  • Monitor analytics and webmaster tools frequently to avoid some problems

Google Places Ranking Factors

  • Places math broader categories if available; e.g. pizza => restaurant
  • Business name is matched: “Alfonso’s pizza” works better than “Alfonso’s Restaurant” for “pizza”
  • 5+ reviews help
  • Category term in reviews helps
  • The physical address is not extremely important but influences the results
  • Average review score matters: score of 1 penalizes heavily

How to Uncover 100s of New Longtail Keywords in Minutes

  • ubersuggest uses google suggest to get new keywords
  • Use these keywords to get even more longtail keywords
  • Now you can add search volume, competition, etc. and work with them

How to rank product pages for SEO

  • Limit global navs -> exploit categories
  • Clear anchor texts
  • Canonical links
  • Similar pages should be interconnected
  • Minimize cross-category links
  • Related products work well: 5 – 10 max
  • Short urls
  • Keep product categories alive

Using a Glossary to Rank and Build Links

  • Helps providing internal keywords
  • Can get you inbound links
  • Enter public resource lists
  • People maybe going to quote you
  • My tip: Find people how search for definitions and prove it

SEO Experts discuss link building for affiliates

  • Interesting, unique product pages: videos, copy, images, comments
  • Guest blogging on vertical and horizontal reach
  • Create a good about us page
  • Ask the product provider if they use your review as a testimonial
  • Create infographics / widgets
  • Ego bait, interviews and crowdsourcing can help you to produce more content
  • Get active in your product’s community
  • Create useful press releases
  • Blog commenting
  • Compare your product with competitors
  • Be as unbiased as possible

Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing
Incredible extensive post about creating a editorial calendar – take a look and be amazed!

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