Posts by Paddy Moogan

Paddy Moogan is an SEO Consultant working for Distilled in their London office. He manages campaigns for a number of clients across a range of industries as well as managing one of the internal SEO teams at Distilled. He has also spoken at various UK SEO conferences including Think Visibility, LinkLove, SES and SAScon.

Is Paying for SEO Tools Worth It?

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I used to be a bit of an SEO tool junkie. Whenever a new tool was announced I’d drop everything and go find out what it did, signup for a free trial or even start paying for it straight away if I was really impressed.

But my life as an SEO didn’t start like this because I didn’t have the money to invest in tools, I built my first website using Notepad and a free FTP program. Even when I started to learn SEO properly and get my sites ranking, it was a while before I could afford to buy a website creator and some spamming link building software. I learnt most of my skills the hard way, I really wanted to take the easy route and let tools do the hard work for me, but I genuinely couldn’t afford to.

Looking back, I think I was making up for lost time when I started signing up for every new tool that came along! I seem to have gone back the other way now as I only use a small amount of SEO tools each and every day.

The fact is, you probably don’t need to pay for SEO tools in order to learn your trade or get results. But in many instances, they can sure make your life a hell of a lot easier and free up your time to work on more interesting tasks. But how do you know when to invest? How much should you invest? How do you know that a subscription is worth keeping?

Hopefully I can help answer some of these questions as part of tools week here on State of Search. (more…)

11 Technical SEO Tools you Should be Using

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As an SEO, I use a wide range of tools to help me with my job.  There are loads of tools out there and being honest, I often forget about some of the ones I have available to me.  Today I wanted to show you the contents of my bookmarks when it comes to technical SEO.   I’ll talk about the tool itself and highlight some SEO tasks that it can help with.

I will be talking about XML Sitemap Validator, Bulk HTTP header response checker, W3C Internationalization Checker, Web Page Speed Test, SEO Toolkit for IIS, Built With, Schema Creator, Reverse IP lookup, Spy on Web, Check Websites on same IP C Class and Screaming Frog. (more…)

A Technical SEO Guide to Crawling, Indexing and Ranking

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Technical SEO can often be brushed aside a bit too easily in favour of things like content creation, social media and link building. However I’ve always believed that there are many opportunities for increasing traffic by looking inwards rather than outwards. One of the biggest areas of this for me is to make sure that your website is as accessible as possible to the search engines.

It’s quite simple really – if the search engines can’t crawl your website efficiently, you’re unlikely to rank. Even links and social shares won’t solve severe accessibility issues so the knock on impact is that your link building will look inaffective. This is the last thing you want because link building can be hard anyway, you don’t want to cripple yourself before you’ve even started

So in this post I’m going to talk through some of the key areas you need to think about when it comes to making your website accessible. An accessible website means that all target pages will be indexed and have the opportunity to rank for your target keywords. (more…)

Easy step-by-step guide to finding low quality links

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2012 was an amazing year for link building, a lot changed and to be honest I’m glad those changes happened. I think it is necessary in order for our industry to grow up and be taken more seriously in the marketing space. A lot of us add a huge amount of value to businesses, it’s time we were recognsised for that rather than relying on and being remembered for low quality tactics that should never have worked in the first place.

The first step for many is to undo the work previously done and this starts with finding the low quality links that may have been built many years ago. If you’ve been hit by a penalty, then you’ll also probably want to get them removed. This post is a step-by-step guide to finding what are likely to be low quality links.

This post will use a number of tools to help, however you need to use your own judgement and common sense too and not remove links which are clearly not hurting. I heard stories of people emailing Yoast to remove links from his site – that is just crazy. (more…)

Planning a Link Building Campaign

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Whilst some of my more successful link building efforts have been more along the lines of opportunistic and ad-hoc rather than planned to perfection, I still prefer to plan as much as I can wherever possible. Link building can be hit and miss at the best of times so you want to do everything you can to make sure you stand as much chance as possible of getting the links you want.

This post will outline the top level process that I’d recommend for planning a link building campaign with lots of things you need to consider. (more…)

How non-SEO Books Have Taught me to be a Better SEO

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I really enjoy reading books that aren’t strictly related to my job as an SEO but can be applied in some way.  The truth is that we’re often overwhelmed with the amount of SEO content that is thrown at us everyday, I purposely try to avoid a lot of it and try to do catchups at certain points of my week rather than getting distracted from the task I’m on.  Although that is easier said than done!  I do wish that there were more posts from SEOs about non-SEO elements of their job, I’m talking about things like:

  • Managing people
  • Managing projects
  • Working with clients
  • Selling projects
  • Influencing change

There are more but I’m sure you get the idea.  It is this side of the industry that I wish people wrote about more, so in the spirit of this I wanted to share some of my learnings on non-SEO issues and introduce you to the books that gave me those learnings.  This is a good time to point out this list that Sam wrote not too long ago which talks about business and marketing books that SEOs have found useful. (more…)

The 3 Link Building Tools I Always Use (And How I use Them)

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I’m often asked what link building tools I use.  The truth is, that I don’t use that many and the ones that I do use aren’t that fancy.  There are loads of tools out there and the market is certainly very saturated right now, but I always find myself using the same tools over and over again.  I admit that my process for link building may not be the most mind boggling, but it works for me even if it does take a bit longer!

In this post I’m going to talk about the tools that I use the most and for fairness, include a few others that I use but perhaps not as often. (more…)

How Google may Discount Infographic Link building

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The root of this discussion stems from this comment from Matt Cutts in an interview with Eric Enge back in July. Straight away there were people saying the sky was falling on infographics and SEOs should stop doing them.  Even I found this an over-reaction and I’m not the world’s biggest fan of infographics.  I’ve seen some truly awful ones that are not only badly designed, but are just plain wrong in their fact checking and presentation of data.

There is an argument here though – if these “bad” infographics still get links, which was the goal of it, it doesn’t matter.  If the goal of an infographic is to get links and it does, one could argue that the design, data and presentation doesn’t matter.  But that is me talking as a pure link builder.  I feel this is the type of thing that Matt is getting at with his comments.

But let’s take a closer look at his comments and try to not just interpret them, but say what this could mean in reality.  I’d like to open a discussion about what Matt actually said and if they really are looking to discount these links, how could they do it? (more…)

How to Scale eCommerce SEO

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This post was inspired by a question I had via email from Grant Horejsi following my SEOmoz blog post on eCommerce SEO. The question was a great one and related to scaling SEO across an eCommerce website which had thousands and thousands of products. This is a common situation to be in and one which I’ve experienced a lot. So this post is going to go into detail on how to scale SEO recommendations across a large eCommerce site.

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5 Ways to Increase your Link Building Efficiency

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We all know that link building is hard. It takes time, effort and patience to get good quality links. So any minor tweaks or improvements to your process and the tools you use can have a big effect on your hit rate. Below I’ll talk about five small tips and tricks to help with your link building which will not take loads of time to execute and put into your existing process. (more…)

Link Building Through Blogger Outreach

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Last week I was kindly invited to speak at the latest Search London meetup in London which is organised by Jo Turnbull. The topic I spoke about was Link Building through Blogger Outreach.  I know that this is an area that many people are interested in so I wanted to turn my slides into a blog post which will hopefully help many of you who build links.

Being honest about link building, it isn’t that easy. But it can be made easier with the right processes and the right tools. I’m going to outline a process for content based link building which will include the use of a number of tools.
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Tools to Increase Social Engagement and Drive Conversions

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Something that I’ve been working on with several clients lately is utilizing their social channels to connect and engage with their target audience.  I’ve been quite clear that the goal of this should tie back to the business goals and they shouldn’t be doing it “because social media is cool and everyone is doing it”.  For me, if you are going to dedicate time and resource into social, it needs to drive conversions for the company.  Obviously these conversions vary from company to company, but for most it will mean driving sales.  If you can keep this in the back of your mind when defining your social strategy, it will keep you much more focused on what you need to do.

With that in mind, below is a list of tools which can help you engage with your users on different social channels.  Not all of these tools will be applicable to everyone and I’d recommend you choose the ones which will help you connect with where your audience hang out.  If you’re not sure of this yet, you can do some more research and even test tools with a small campaign to test the water a little bit. (more…)

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