02:28
Suresh
SEO Blogs
It’s always good practice to keep updated on the world of SEO with the top SEO blogs.
Below I’ve outlined a few of my personal favorites, covering search engine news, tips, and algorithm changes.
Search Engine Land – One of the biggest blogs on search engine news and information.
SEOmoz – One of my favorite SEO blogs, I’m also a contributor, split between the main blog and the YouMoz blog, filled with good SEO articles.
SEO Book – Aaron Wall creates some truly great articles, love him or hate him, you should be reading his blog.
Matt Cutts – Head of Google’s webpam team, you should probably listen to him or something.
Search Engine Journal – Great blog for link building, PPC, and optimization information.
Google’s Blog – Google’s main blog, not much on SEO specifically, but it’s good to know what Big G is up to.
SEO Guides
Blogs can be an incredible source of information.
Unfortunately, for the newbie, they are too split up: info is spread throughout hundreds (or thousands) of posts.
These complete guides offer a more thorough offering on learning SEO.
Google’s SEO Start Guide – Official Google guide to getting started with SEO.
Beginner’s Guide to SEO – The most essential read for beginners, and it’s pretty too!
The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors – Excellent visual guide to SEO.
SEO Copywriting Guide – The SEO Copywriting guide is a must read
Marketing Terms – Confused about what “SEO”, “SEM”, “PPC”, or “inbound marketing”? Learn all of the necessary phrases here.
Search Engine Ranking Factors Guide – Another great guide, this time on ranking factors, from SEOmoz
Simplifying SEO Guide – Great guide on how to keep SEO simple.
SEO Cheat Sheet – Another must read for website owners from SEOmoz.
SEO Tools
SEO can be an immense time sink if you aren’t careful.
Definitely check out a few of the SEO tools below that can save you countless hours and a ton of frustration.
Just be sure not to spend too much time playing around with the tools instead of actually using them!
Google Keyword Tool – If there is one “getting started” tool that you must learn about, it’s this one. Know it well, you’ll use it forever (or at least as long as Google is around).
SEOmoz’s Tools – A comprehensive suite of tools that I’ve started to fall in love with. It’s paid (and a premium price), but very useful.
Google Webmaster Tools – If you are going to play Big G’s game (whitehat style), you need to use their tools.
Open Site Explorer – A individual SEOmoz tool that’s perfect for checking competitor’s backlinks, as well as other metrics. More comprehensive if you’re a pro user.
Serp IQ – One of my recent favorite tools to emerge on the market, tons of great uses from competition analysis to keyword discovery, this tool is insanely fast and has a ton of great features.
Scribe SEO – A super useful tool (especially if you are focusing on WordPress SEO) because it breaks down keyword density to perfection.
SpyFu – Great for spying on your competitors, specifically their advertising.
Wordtracker Keyword Tool – A classic, must use for keyword research.
Market Samurai – Still one of the best keyword analysis tools on the market, perfect for checking SEO competition, although it runs somewhat slowly (Adobe Air).
SEO Forums
Although guides and blogs can offer a ton of essential information, sometimes you are going to have questions.
Forums are a great spot to get these questions answered.
Webmaster World – One of the oldest forums for website owners.
Digital Point Forum – Useful, but can be a time sink: remember, it’s always better to do more work and less reading.
Search Engine Watch Forum – Very popular forum tied to Search Engine Watch.
Conferences
A bit advanced for most, but a great way to really dive into SEO is to know about (and go to) the many search engine related conferences.
SES Conference – SES is the leading global event series about search and social marketing, with a focus on tactics and best practices.
Blueglass – BlueGlass’ Internet Marketing Conferences have quickly become known in the web marketing circles as being premier events for learning the latest strategies, interacting with the speakers and networking
Search Marketing Expo – Another leading search engine conference.
Branding at the individual, small or even medium level is a difficult endeavor. However, there are little excuses for inadequacies these days as Google makes it more difficult to rank with content marketing that isn’t “brand friendly” – that is, tactics that are one-off gray or black hat link building techniques.
Today, we must function as brands, and the reality is that although we imagine companies like Kellogg’s and SeaWorld as the behemoths of brand marketing – companies with lackluster websites but still the ability to generate links eight times quicker than us – we are very capable of reflecting a similar identity online due to benefits of miniature scale we can create for ourselves through the proper marketing channels that brands often experience and build on offline.
Link Building with Momentum in Mind
We’ve left behind the term “link building” and must instead focus on identities like “link development” through content marketing. If we build our businesses and link development competencies with the idea that we must build scale, we’ll be a lot more successful with our efforts because we will develop competencies.
What does this mean?
No more one off guest posting for links. Yes I am guest posting here, but I am doing so with the intention of building authority and referrals, and actually, the link matters little to me because I don’t do much SEO for my own blog. Hopefully some of you follow my blog or follow me on Twitter, which will create an audience that will multiply my future efforts online.
If I simply blog for a link, that effort is reduced. If you want to create scale (as you should), you’ll do similar. Yes, the link is valuable, and you should aim for a combinatory effect with your guest posting, but your sole intention should never be the link itself. In the new world of content marketing, it’s no longer a valid excuse.
Creating A Snowball Promotion Strategy
Many brands have the benefit of content that serves itself, and only need to release it into the wild to see the benefits it can create online. Us small peons don’t, right? Well, the reality is that we do. We can’t ever be Kellogg’s or SeaWorld, but we can have the “publish” button that sites like SEOmoz enjoy – when thousands of eyeballs view their content all at once.
This comes from deliberate, long practice of developing audience through mechanisms like guest posting in the target markets our audience operates in. Constantly releasing great content online and then creating introductory “sticky” promotion elements will create the brand mechanisms others enjoy. What are these introductory sticky elements?
Twitter accounts – getting potential customers to follow us
Facebook accounts – getting potential customers to like us
YouTube accounts – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
RSS feeds – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
E-mail marketing – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
I say “introductory” because these allow you to remarket to your consumers for free – and are a few steps to the secondary, more powerful sticky element, SEO. If we guest post or do PPC advertising, if we never capture audience intent through one or more of these sticky elements, we lose the potential to scale, because our cost per acquisition continually rises.
This creates a negative brand efficiency if they do not, as customers, follow/like/subscribe to content they enjoy – as such an engagement is an introductory buy-in to your brand identity.
So this means your job, as a marketer, is not to initially think about how you might get thousands of sales, but how you will create the snowball promotion effect every time you release something online. Because if you do not generate that snowball, even if you create a viral sale effect, it will eventually become nothing.
Brands have that snowball effect – which is why every Apple event is covered and talked about once one word is leaked out – and why Six Flags can immediately touch thousands of eyeballs on their brand when a press release is opened up. They built it, but they had it bad compared us – they didn’t have the benefit of online, free promotion mechanisms to do it. They had to do it through high cost per acquisition activities like billboard, display and television advertising.
Build the brand snowball by:
Leveraging the maximum amount calls to action to social accounts on your sidebar, after blog posts, and occasionally, within blog posts, without appearing spammy
Most often releasing content to interested markets asymmetrical to your own, such that they might have interest in future relevant content of yours
Promoting content through all social channels relevant to your own and not to channels where there isn’t much application (such as Pinterest for Daily Blog Tips)
Creating memorable and brand-identifiable social accounts that are easy to type in, easy to find, and match the company sales mission across all available properties
Creating A Brand Effect in SERP Results
As you build those accounts, you will begin to effect a real change in the search results, depending on your vertical. For example, SEOmoz, a now established “brand” in SEO, has the benefit not just of ranking well that being a brand provides, but also getting a higher clickthrough rate because of it.
It is likely a higher clickthrough rate is a positive signal to Google to actually rank you higher, which then gets you even more clicks – and more links, and so it goes. But that’s not where it stops to create a “snowball effect”. Obviously, hopefully you’ve now established some search result rankings, and some sales. From here, build on that efficiency and “snowball effect” by multiplying effort.
Do this by:
Signing up customers immediately for e-mail newsletters such that they can serve as content promoters even if they can no longer be upsold
Immediately leverage a secondary call to action such as “follow us on Twitter/like us on Facebook!” after they’ve completed a conversion event
Creating content that is good enough to be talked about through word of mouth, bringing new customers back to your website to then be pulled into future promotion efforts through social and email campaigns
Using rel=author where applicable to create brand identity/quick identification when potential customers use your services online
Hopefully posts like this can help push you to start creating your own mini-brand online. SEO isn’t dead, but I believe winning a competitive vertical by sustaining a business on one-off linking strategies truly is.
Google Launches Tool to Let You Block Links
A while ago I talked about the Penguin update, and about how many webmasters and site owners were now doing something we would never have imagined a couple of years ago: they are contacting other sites to stop linking to them and to remove previously placed links.
Well, it looks like Google notice all the buzz and decided to go along. Yesterday it announced a Disavow Links tool inside the Webmasters Central. If you have low quality or spammy sites linking to you and would like to remove those links you can now use that tool and Google will take care of it.
Until a couple of years ago most bloggers and webmasters would track the PageRank of their sites almost religiously, and use it as street cred on most situations. A PR2 or PR3 was average. PR4 or PR5 was pretty good. PR6 was pro level, and anything above that was reserved for the Internet moguls.
Every three months or so Google would also update the nominal PageRank (the one you could see using a toolbar or an online service), and people would go crazy about it. The folks who saw their PR increase would celebrate and brag. The ones who got downgraded would complain bitterly.
Myself included.
I remember one update when this blog got a PR7. As you can imagine I was pretty happy. Too bad it didn’t last long. On the next update it went down to PR6, which I believe is the current PR.
Anyway over the years people started talking less and less about the PageRank of websites, probably because we started to understand that it was just one out of hundreds of factors that affected your search rankings.
In many situations it would be hard to see a correlation at all between PR and search traffic, as we had cases where a site lost most of its PR while its search traffic surged.
The last time I checked the PageRank of any of my sites was probably two years ago, and I don’t see many people talking about it or about PageRank updates either.
So my question: are we finally over the PageRank hysteria? Are you still tracking it? Have you heard about any updates lately? Let me know what you think with a comment below.
It’s always good practice to keep updated on the world of SEO with the top SEO blogs.
Below I’ve outlined a few of my personal favorites, covering search engine news, tips, and algorithm changes.
Search Engine Land – One of the biggest blogs on search engine news and information.
SEOmoz – One of my favorite SEO blogs, I’m also a contributor, split between the main blog and the YouMoz blog, filled with good SEO articles.
SEO Book – Aaron Wall creates some truly great articles, love him or hate him, you should be reading his blog.
Matt Cutts – Head of Google’s webpam team, you should probably listen to him or something.
Search Engine Journal – Great blog for link building, PPC, and optimization information.
Google’s Blog – Google’s main blog, not much on SEO specifically, but it’s good to know what Big G is up to.
SEO Guides
Blogs can be an incredible source of information.
Unfortunately, for the newbie, they are too split up: info is spread throughout hundreds (or thousands) of posts.
These complete guides offer a more thorough offering on learning SEO.
Google’s SEO Start Guide – Official Google guide to getting started with SEO.
Beginner’s Guide to SEO – The most essential read for beginners, and it’s pretty too!
The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors – Excellent visual guide to SEO.
SEO Copywriting Guide – The SEO Copywriting guide is a must read
Marketing Terms – Confused about what “SEO”, “SEM”, “PPC”, or “inbound marketing”? Learn all of the necessary phrases here.
Search Engine Ranking Factors Guide – Another great guide, this time on ranking factors, from SEOmoz
Simplifying SEO Guide – Great guide on how to keep SEO simple.
SEO Cheat Sheet – Another must read for website owners from SEOmoz.
SEO Tools
SEO can be an immense time sink if you aren’t careful.
Definitely check out a few of the SEO tools below that can save you countless hours and a ton of frustration.
Just be sure not to spend too much time playing around with the tools instead of actually using them!
Google Keyword Tool – If there is one “getting started” tool that you must learn about, it’s this one. Know it well, you’ll use it forever (or at least as long as Google is around).
SEOmoz’s Tools – A comprehensive suite of tools that I’ve started to fall in love with. It’s paid (and a premium price), but very useful.
Google Webmaster Tools – If you are going to play Big G’s game (whitehat style), you need to use their tools.
Open Site Explorer – A individual SEOmoz tool that’s perfect for checking competitor’s backlinks, as well as other metrics. More comprehensive if you’re a pro user.
Serp IQ – One of my recent favorite tools to emerge on the market, tons of great uses from competition analysis to keyword discovery, this tool is insanely fast and has a ton of great features.
Scribe SEO – A super useful tool (especially if you are focusing on WordPress SEO) because it breaks down keyword density to perfection.
SpyFu – Great for spying on your competitors, specifically their advertising.
Wordtracker Keyword Tool – A classic, must use for keyword research.
Market Samurai – Still one of the best keyword analysis tools on the market, perfect for checking SEO competition, although it runs somewhat slowly (Adobe Air).
SEO Forums
Although guides and blogs can offer a ton of essential information, sometimes you are going to have questions.
Forums are a great spot to get these questions answered.
Webmaster World – One of the oldest forums for website owners.
Digital Point Forum – Useful, but can be a time sink: remember, it’s always better to do more work and less reading.
Search Engine Watch Forum – Very popular forum tied to Search Engine Watch.
Conferences
A bit advanced for most, but a great way to really dive into SEO is to know about (and go to) the many search engine related conferences.
SES Conference – SES is the leading global event series about search and social marketing, with a focus on tactics and best practices.
Blueglass – BlueGlass’ Internet Marketing Conferences have quickly become known in the web marketing circles as being premier events for learning the latest strategies, interacting with the speakers and networking
Search Marketing Expo – Another leading search engine conference.
Branding at the individual, small or even medium level is a difficult endeavor. However, there are little excuses for inadequacies these days as Google makes it more difficult to rank with content marketing that isn’t “brand friendly” – that is, tactics that are one-off gray or black hat link building techniques.
Today, we must function as brands, and the reality is that although we imagine companies like Kellogg’s and SeaWorld as the behemoths of brand marketing – companies with lackluster websites but still the ability to generate links eight times quicker than us – we are very capable of reflecting a similar identity online due to benefits of miniature scale we can create for ourselves through the proper marketing channels that brands often experience and build on offline.
Link Building with Momentum in Mind
We’ve left behind the term “link building” and must instead focus on identities like “link development” through content marketing. If we build our businesses and link development competencies with the idea that we must build scale, we’ll be a lot more successful with our efforts because we will develop competencies.
What does this mean?
No more one off guest posting for links. Yes I am guest posting here, but I am doing so with the intention of building authority and referrals, and actually, the link matters little to me because I don’t do much SEO for my own blog. Hopefully some of you follow my blog or follow me on Twitter, which will create an audience that will multiply my future efforts online.
If I simply blog for a link, that effort is reduced. If you want to create scale (as you should), you’ll do similar. Yes, the link is valuable, and you should aim for a combinatory effect with your guest posting, but your sole intention should never be the link itself. In the new world of content marketing, it’s no longer a valid excuse.
Creating A Snowball Promotion Strategy
Many brands have the benefit of content that serves itself, and only need to release it into the wild to see the benefits it can create online. Us small peons don’t, right? Well, the reality is that we do. We can’t ever be Kellogg’s or SeaWorld, but we can have the “publish” button that sites like SEOmoz enjoy – when thousands of eyeballs view their content all at once.
This comes from deliberate, long practice of developing audience through mechanisms like guest posting in the target markets our audience operates in. Constantly releasing great content online and then creating introductory “sticky” promotion elements will create the brand mechanisms others enjoy. What are these introductory sticky elements?
Twitter accounts – getting potential customers to follow us
Facebook accounts – getting potential customers to like us
YouTube accounts – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
RSS feeds – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
E-mail marketing – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
I say “introductory” because these allow you to remarket to your consumers for free – and are a few steps to the secondary, more powerful sticky element, SEO. If we guest post or do PPC advertising, if we never capture audience intent through one or more of these sticky elements, we lose the potential to scale, because our cost per acquisition continually rises.
This creates a negative brand efficiency if they do not, as customers, follow/like/subscribe to content they enjoy – as such an engagement is an introductory buy-in to your brand identity.
So this means your job, as a marketer, is not to initially think about how you might get thousands of sales, but how you will create the snowball promotion effect every time you release something online. Because if you do not generate that snowball, even if you create a viral sale effect, it will eventually become nothing.
Brands have that snowball effect – which is why every Apple event is covered and talked about once one word is leaked out – and why Six Flags can immediately touch thousands of eyeballs on their brand when a press release is opened up. They built it, but they had it bad compared us – they didn’t have the benefit of online, free promotion mechanisms to do it. They had to do it through high cost per acquisition activities like billboard, display and television advertising.
Build the brand snowball by:
Leveraging the maximum amount calls to action to social accounts on your sidebar, after blog posts, and occasionally, within blog posts, without appearing spammy
Most often releasing content to interested markets asymmetrical to your own, such that they might have interest in future relevant content of yours
Promoting content through all social channels relevant to your own and not to channels where there isn’t much application (such as Pinterest for Daily Blog Tips)
Creating memorable and brand-identifiable social accounts that are easy to type in, easy to find, and match the company sales mission across all available properties
Creating A Brand Effect in SERP Results
As you build those accounts, you will begin to effect a real change in the search results, depending on your vertical. For example, SEOmoz, a now established “brand” in SEO, has the benefit not just of ranking well that being a brand provides, but also getting a higher clickthrough rate because of it.
It is likely a higher clickthrough rate is a positive signal to Google to actually rank you higher, which then gets you even more clicks – and more links, and so it goes. But that’s not where it stops to create a “snowball effect”. Obviously, hopefully you’ve now established some search result rankings, and some sales. From here, build on that efficiency and “snowball effect” by multiplying effort.
Do this by:
Signing up customers immediately for e-mail newsletters such that they can serve as content promoters even if they can no longer be upsold
Immediately leverage a secondary call to action such as “follow us on Twitter/like us on Facebook!” after they’ve completed a conversion event
Creating content that is good enough to be talked about through word of mouth, bringing new customers back to your website to then be pulled into future promotion efforts through social and email campaigns
Using rel=author where applicable to create brand identity/quick identification when potential customers use your services online
Hopefully posts like this can help push you to start creating your own mini-brand online. SEO isn’t dead, but I believe winning a competitive vertical by sustaining a business on one-off linking strategies truly is.
Google Launches Tool to Let You Block Links
A while ago I talked about the Penguin update, and about how many webmasters and site owners were now doing something we would never have imagined a couple of years ago: they are contacting other sites to stop linking to them and to remove previously placed links.
Well, it looks like Google notice all the buzz and decided to go along. Yesterday it announced a Disavow Links tool inside the Webmasters Central. If you have low quality or spammy sites linking to you and would like to remove those links you can now use that tool and Google will take care of it.
Until a couple of years ago most bloggers and webmasters would track the PageRank of their sites almost religiously, and use it as street cred on most situations. A PR2 or PR3 was average. PR4 or PR5 was pretty good. PR6 was pro level, and anything above that was reserved for the Internet moguls.
Every three months or so Google would also update the nominal PageRank (the one you could see using a toolbar or an online service), and people would go crazy about it. The folks who saw their PR increase would celebrate and brag. The ones who got downgraded would complain bitterly.
Myself included.
I remember one update when this blog got a PR7. As you can imagine I was pretty happy. Too bad it didn’t last long. On the next update it went down to PR6, which I believe is the current PR.
Anyway over the years people started talking less and less about the PageRank of websites, probably because we started to understand that it was just one out of hundreds of factors that affected your search rankings.
In many situations it would be hard to see a correlation at all between PR and search traffic, as we had cases where a site lost most of its PR while its search traffic surged.
The last time I checked the PageRank of any of my sites was probably two years ago, and I don’t see many people talking about it or about PageRank updates either.
So my question: are we finally over the PageRank hysteria? Are you still tracking it? Have you heard about any updates lately? Let me know what you think with a comment below.
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