Posts by Jon Quinton

Jon is an SEO Consultant at SEOgadget, a digital marketing agency specialising in conversion rate optimisation, large scale SEO, keyword research, technical strategy and link building in high competition industries. -- More articles and bio from Jon Quinton
Visit Jon Quinton's website

A Few Things I Learnt From Freelancing

desk

Before my current job I spent quite a few years freelancing as an SEO and have always wanted to write a post about the experience. This isn’t a guide to going freelance, but it does discuss some points that I think anyone considering taking the leap and working for themselves should think about. A lot of people consider being your own boss and working from home the ultimate dream; getting up when you want and taking the odd day off when you don’t feel like working. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. If you do decide to go it alone you’ll find yourself working twice as hard as your counterparts with ‘proper jobs’. Be prepared to be up early, work late into the night, work weekends and deal with problems when you’re on holiday. In short, there is no such thing as true ‘time off’. Added to that you’re going to have to quickly learn how to run a business and suffer the mistakes when you make them.

There are also some immense benefits, but not in the way that most people expect. One guarantee is that you will come out the other end with a work ethic that I don’t think you can develop in any other way. If you’ve had to deal with being in a situation where you do the work or face earning no money; suddenly most day to day issues simply won’t be a problem anymore – you’ll just fix them because it’s what you’re used to doing. Not being tied into a particular role also means you can develop in the way that you want to, when you want to. If there’s a training event you feel you need to attend you can; if you decide to spend time developing a new skill you can. (more…)

Getting Your First SEO Job – How to Stand Out

sos-featured

As an industry we’re extremely lucky to be enjoying a time that is full of opportunity. Whilst many businesses are suffering from economic problems, it seems that the SEO industry is struggling to hire quick enough. With no formal qualifications or courses, a career in SEO isn’t most graduate’s first choice for their entry into the jobs market. If you speak to most successful people in the industry you’ll hear a very familiar story of ‘falling into’ SEO without really realising what they were getting into. Many people have come from a range of different jobs including traditional marketing, web development and pretty much every career you can imagine and found that SEO started to become a part of their current role. Others (like myself) simply got intrigued with how it works!

Despite all of this opportunity, speaking with many people who are looking to recruit staff you’ll hear that finding the right people is tough, even when you’re looking to fill junior positions that don’t necessarily require any pre existing experience. From a job hunters point of view it might be easy to find job opportunities and get an interview, but how do you stand out from the crowd and get the job you want? There’s some great material available with some fantastic advice on how to land a job in SEO, but I thought I’d chip in with some thoughts based on my own experience. (more…)

Understanding Your Link Profile – Part Two

links

Hopefully if you are reading this then you’ve already read last month’s part one. If you haven’t already read it then I’d suggest doing so or this won’t make a great deal of sense! In part one I went through some basics such as collecting data from tools such as Open Site Explorer and Majestic; moving on to explain how you can pull in domain page rank using SEO Tools for Excel and checking whether or not your links are live with the custom filters in Screaming Frog.  The idea behind part one was to help you to get to the point at which you can quickly filter through your data and identify links that might be worth considering for removal.

(more…)

Understanding Your Link Profile – Part One

sos-feature

I’ve always believed that link building without knowing what your current link profile looks like is a bit like flying blind. Especially with the recent goings on, as an SEO you really need to have a good understanding of who’s linking to you, and in what context those sites are linking. Ideally, you should have a good handle on anchor text distribution,  page rank distribution and also a solid idea of what your competitions link profiles look like – i.e do you fit in or does your site stand out like a sore thumb?

As a minimum step when starting a link building project, I’ll make sure I take a good look at the client’s current link profile, focusing in on what the anchor text looks like; and to try and ascertain what sort of link building has been conducted in the past. That helps me to make some decisions about what anchor text to target, and what I might be up against. Key to this is being able to quickly gather the data you need and organise it in a way that tells the right story. (more…)

8 Link Building Tools I Couldn’t Live Without

tools

I’d say roughly 80% of my time as an SEO is spent link building. It can be a tough challenge sometimes, but I always find it satisfying to see the fruits of my labour coming through. Whilst I strongly believe that link building is all about hard graft, and that you should be able to do the job with all but an email address; the following tools certainly make my life a lot easier. Included in this list are tools that I use for a variety of things such as valuing a link prospect, right through to identifying poor quality links that I might want to consider removing. (more…)

SEO from Another Angle

slash

I’ve had many conversations with people (usually in the pub) who seem convinced that SEO is not something they need; and I’m always tending to take the line that if it can be tailored in the right way, SEO should be able to provide benefit for anyone or any business. In fact, I quite enjoy bending the rules of a traditional SEO campaign and really making it work for the business or project in question. Whilst trying to rank for big keywords might not be something everyone wants or needs, perhaps protecting branded search or driving traffic to campaigns as and when they happen would be a good fit.

To make more sense of this, I thought I’d walk through an example plan for a musician’s or band’s website. Ranking for something like ‘band’ or ‘blues band’ probably isn’t going to get you too far, and as a goal it might not be the best way to go. I personally think that it would be far more beneficial to get people to the right places as quickly as possible. So as a musician writing your own material who has no real need to rank for something big; what do you need people to find and interact with quickly? (more…)

Digesting the EU Cookie Legislation

footprint

Perhaps it’s been the way in which the new legislation has been communicated, but there certainly seems to be an air of confusion. At SEOgadget we’ve been doing quite a lot of work recently to better understand the directive ourselves, and also to work out how best to advise clients on the most appropriate action to take. Rather than writing a definitive ‘how to comply’ type post, I thought it would be pretty interesting to put down some thoughts on the matter, and discuss some of the more confusing aspects of the legislation.

The challenge here is that we’re advising on a legal document, and whilst we understand cookies and the part they play in websites, we’re definitely not qualified lawyers. If your clients are seriously worried about the possibility of picking up a fine it’s probably best that they seek proper legal advice. However, the chances of receiving a fine as a first resort look pretty slim; the most likely form of punishment (if any) is a warning stating that your website does not comply, complete with details of where you’re going wrong. That being said, it looks like this is here to stay so it’s well worth at the very least gaining a good understanding of how this could affect yours or your clients sites. (more…)

Link Building – Learning Lessons from Sales and Business

money-keyboard-@-sign

At the weekend I gave a presentation at Think Visibility ‘Link Building Lessons from Swiss Toni’ which was all about taking lessons from sales and successful business people, and seeing how we can apply that to link building. I thought it would be good to go into a bit more detail as to the ideas behind the session. The whole thought process started from my mild obsession with business and being inspired by people who ‘just do it’. It got me thinking that there’s a pretty strong tie in with link building and sales. From finding potential link opportunities, to getting your outreach and pitch right to maximise your success rate – these are all things that great sales people have learnt to master.

When I talk about ‘sales’ I’m definitely not referring to the irritating kind of people that call you up with a well rehearsed sketch of BS; I’m talking about the skill of identifying what other people need and then tailoring your pitch to suit. In my mind this is all about trying to create a ‘win, win, win’ type of situation where everyone comes out on top. Relating that back to link building in a guest posting situation the blog should be ‘proud’ to publish the content, their readers should enjoy it enough to share/link to, and you of course get the link and some traffic. If you can provide stuff that genuinely benefits other websites and their audience, your chances of future links and an ongoing relationship increase dramatically. (more…)

Ranking Reports that Inspire Focus and Decision Making

ranking-google-colors

Reporting on the success of your SEO work by using ranking reports alone doesn’t really paint a full picture. Good SEO should be about way more than just improving rankings; for starters is your client making more money, how’s their organic traffic growing, what does their brand look like online? Using ranking reports in conjunction with other metrics can provide a wider picture of how your website is performing and help to educate the client as to what they are getting from SEO, and what areas might need more attention.

However, despite explaining other important KPI’s and trying our best to explain how to measure true success and value; the one thing clients often want to know about first is where their pages are ranking. Sometimes this question can come before discussing traffic, conversions and other such metrics that actually make a real difference to their business. (more…)

Open Source Ecommerce Platforms – No Such Thing as A Free Dinner

dinner-check

This is my first post here at State of Search, so I’ll start by saying how pleased I am to be part of the clan!

I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about something that’s been on my mind for some time; open source ecommerce platforms and what you need to consider from an SEO point of view. Getting ecommerce SEO right is no mean feat; there are so many challenges involved that can quickly spiral out of control and become the thing of nightmares. So how come there are so many open source platforms available for very little investment that claim to be ‘SEO friendly’ to the point where you won’t need outside help?

This post really isn’t supposed to be a rant, it’s more about laying out some practical advice for anyone considering using a free or low cost ecommerce platform as an alternative to paying a developer to build a bespoke site to your specifications. There are plenty of people that choose to run ecommerce sites as a part time business perhaps grown from a hobby, and as such the start up budget often won’t be enough for a bespoke build teamed up with advice from a top SEO agency. You can bet your bottom dollar that the successful ‘cottage industry’ style ecommerce businesses are the ones where the owners had the foresight to make some SEO considerations at the very start of their projects. (more…)