Blog

26/07/2013

How Mobile Search is Changing the Culture of SEO

Over the past 2 years, the increased usage of mobile devices within search has opened up a whole host of new opportunities for search engine optimisation. The way that we report on our campaigns have changed and in particular, the way that we look at keywords has dramatically altered.

The Death of the Keyword

photo credit: leg0fenris via photopin cc

Ok, maybe that’s slightly over-dramatic and, if I’m honest, I don’t think we’re anywhere near seeing the death of the keyword. What I definitely have noticed is the difference in the way that we track our SEO campaign performance.

Traditionally we would start an SEO campaign by targeting some keywords that are relevant to the client’s niche, location, products/services, etc. When it comes to the end of each month we would drop through our nice little report that said ‘keyword X is now on page X position X’. This kind of reporting has now become increasingly difficult, especially since the introduction of personalised search, heavier localised results and a far greater number of blended search results – it’s actually become almost impossible to say the definite ranking of any given keyword within the SERPs because it is so dependant on lots of contextual factors.

26/07/2013

In Search Engine Weekly Roundup, SEO

Search Engine Weekly Round-up #35

The Search Engine Weekly Round-up is a quick collection of the finest articles from the online marketing world that have been released throughout the week. In the 35th instalment of this content round-up, we have articles which look at the apparent death of SEO, link building tools and tips, as well as a look at the efficacy of keywords in email subject lines.

SEO is dead, if you ignore all that growth
Martin MacDonald
Follow @searchmartin
This first post comes courtesy from Martin MacDonald, and is a rebuttal to a rather controversial article which cropped up on the Guardian website, which was yet another “SEO is dead” post, claiming that social was the way to go. Suffice it to say, it ruffled a few feathers in the SEO community, with essentially everybody calling it a load of bollocks. That’s where this post comes in; Martin dissects the situation, looking at the admitted massive growth of the influence of social media, and where the cited Guardian post was incorrect.
Also, the whole situation can be summed up in one tweet, via Rishi Lakhani:

5 Reasons SEO is DEAD: . . . . . . . . . . . Dont be silly. SEO cant die as long as search engines exist.

— Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) July 24, 2013

Tweet Martin’s blog: Tweet

23/07/2013

In SEO

Another Reason to Avoid Building Spammy Links

Most of us know the risks involved with buying links, automating link building through spammy tools and using the likes of Fiverr.com for link building. It can often be looked at by webmasters as a cost effective link building strategy, and if I’m honest, it can work great for a couple of months. It’s not exactly a long-terms strategy though.

A New Opportunity for Spammy Webmasters

Whilst working on a recent Google Penalty Removal project, I found that some webmasters have been trying to squeeze every last penny out of their websites by demanding payment for link removals. Here’s one of the replies I had from a webmaster asking for $100…

Thank you for contacting us.

Since the software we are running does not allow to simply search for the link the search has to be done manually.

Do to the amount of time this takes we charge $100 per link removal.

Please make a paypal payment to XXXX@XXXX.com and your link will be removed within 24 hours.

Best Regards

We actually sent them a full list of the exact link locations on their website (http://www.poetic-dictionary.com/), so I’m not sure about what manual work needs to be done here. We have had a few directories come back to us in particular; some of them only asked for a small amount of around $10, which we accepted when there was genuinely some time involved on their part.

19/07/2013

In Search Engine Weekly Roundup

Search Engine Weekly Round-up #34

The Search Engine Weekly Round-up is where I look at the finest articles, talking points and news from the week from the worlds of SEO, Marketing, Social Media, etc. This week looks at advanced ecommerce SEO, link building tips, landing pages and the role of social media managers.

Advanced SEO for Ecommerce – Maximising Keyword Spread
Nick Eubanks
Follow @nick_eubanks

The first post in this week’s round-up comes from Nick Eubanks, who has taken an in-depth look at an maximising keyword spread, something which he described as being similar to a condor approach – looking to limit risk whilst increasing profit, or in this case, keyword opportunities.
This post runs through several examples of how maximising keyword spread can prove to be fruitful in the SERPs, and offers vast amounts of insight in to how you can actually go about developing this process yourself.
During this process, Nick speaks about how you should conduct a proper keyword performance audit, utilise your site’s hierarchy to pass relevance, as well as use similar content in place of products, all with the endgame being to rank for as many fruitful keywords as you possibly can. This is a truly superb post, and is certainly a highly valuable resource to have.

Tweet Nick’s blog: Tweet

19/07/2013

In Link Building

The Funniest Link Building Moments of 2013, so Far

I’m an avid fan of link building and I continually come up with link building “exploits” and methods, as a link builder it’s part of the fun of the job! Literally every time I see a new CMS hits the shelves I crawl through various pages, both design wise and it’s HTML/PHP.

So, without further ado, here’s the funniest Link Building moments of 2013 so far –

The “Error” Exploit –

This was apparently used to stop manual link checkers from finding your backlinks when Penguin 2.0 came out, I found it on a forum post that I’d found when searching a pretty big SEO Forum when penguin 2.0 was released.

An example of this was a site, the thread creator personal messaged me:

http://themanualseo.com

I told him the first time he showed me this, that it had an “Error establishing a Database Connection” he then said for me to scroll down, following my scroll down I spent the first 20 minutes laughing. The next 10 minutes was spent crying from the fact that there are people actually using this method out there.

18/07/2013

In SEO

The Comprehensive List of Free SEO Tools

I looked around the internet and throughout Google, I found a lot of list based posts on free SEO tools but not a full comprehensive list that gets updated regularly with new finds!

I decided to go about creating this full list of Free SEO Tools, so you guys don’t have to go crawling through the few million results you’ll get for free SEO tools!

Last Update: 18/07/2013

Keyword Tools –

Keyword Suggestion Tool by iWebTools

UberSuggest by Alessandro Martin

Keyword Density Analyzer by IMN

Adwords Keyword Tool by Google

SEO Cloud by SEO Chat

URL ReWriting by SEO Chat

Keyword Optimizer by SEO Chat

Keyword Stripper by SEOBook

Keyword Wrapper & Negative Keyword Wrapper by SEOBook

16/07/2013

In Link Building

Finding Deep Backlinks with DuckDuckGo

The NSA

Since the NSA and Edward Snowden scandal hit our screens, 100s of thousands of Internet Users have quit the big search engines which have been giving your information over “willy nilly” especially with the recent Microsoft fiasco with Bing and Outlook data. These users have flocked to a “zero tracking search engine” aka DuckDuckGo – Effectively, it’s a search engine which keeps no user logs, no private data and you can’t signup to anything on the site. I decided to check it out and have been playing around with some pretty cool stuff on it.

By far my favourite part of DuckDuckGo is that it actively promotes its competitors at the end of it’s listings, just incase you couldn’t find what you were looking for that is!

DuckDuckGo Competitor

12/07/2013

In Search Engine Weekly Roundup, SEO

Search Engine Weekly Round-up #33

The Search Engine Weekly Round-up is where I look at the finest articles, talking points and news from the week from the worlds of SEO, Marketing, Social Media, etc. This week looks at the value of long-tail keywords, tools mentioned at Mozcon, the results of a link building survey and alternatives to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

The Value of Long-Tail Keywords
Tom Roberts
Follow @tjproberts
Whilst a lot of SEOs put plenty of effort into going for the big terms in order to bring in traffic and conversions, Tom Roberts tells us how targeting long-tail keywords can prove to be much more efficient in the long run. Though a long-tail term will bring in a fraction of searches as opposed to what a short-tail term brings in, as Tom states in this post, they’re much easier to rank for, and can be done on a much larger scale, and can certainly convert.
This post looks at the conversion funnel, a seasonal example of how targeting a long-tail term is infinitely quicker, easier and overall better than targeting a similar short-tail term as well as how you can find these long-tail terms through tools such as Ubersuggest.
Tweet Tom’s blog: Tweet

10/07/2013

In Content Marketing

43 Free Directories to Submit Your Infographic to

The Back Story

With Infographics still being a killer tool in the Inbound Marketing world, and with us recently creating an Infographic for a client – I was set the task of submitting the Infographic across the world.

So, like any good online marketer does, I setup an outreach target list of some of the best and most importantly – free directories to submit an infographic to!

The List –

1. http://infographicsonline.com
2. http://www.reddit.com/r/infographics
3. http://theinfographics.blogspot.com
4. http://www.nerdgraph.com/
5. http://infographixdirectory.com/
6. http://infographicsite.com
7. http://infographicjournal.com
8. http://www.loveinfographics.com
9. http://www.graphs.net/
10. http://www.bestinfographics.info

09/07/2013

In SEO

An Unbiased Review of Rank Ranger SEO Software

The Rank Ranger tool provides you with the ability to track keyword rankings (yourself as well as competitors), run domain and backlink analysis, find keyword ideas, view the analytics of your site, all aided by the integration of Google Analytics/Webmaster Tools, MajesticSEO, Moz and Ahrefs, as well as access to hundreds of search engines.
With all of this information that is provided, you can use it to create customised white label reports.

After having used this tool for a little while now, I’ll be going over the specifics of what this this tool has to offer, as well as providing some thoughts from my experience with the Rank Ranger tool.