This is a guestpost by Sander Tamaëla, a freelance SEO Consultant.
In October a new client approached me with a question: Can you help me with trying to revoke a penalty? It happened to be that Google had just released their link disavow tool and this penalty was link based. In this post I want to share my three months of experience with using the disavow tool to get a penalty removed. (more…)
This the season for search marketers in retail to not sleep, as click volumes begin to rapidly increase and fluctuate throughout the busy festive online shopping season. To ease some of this stress, we at Marin Software have been analysing data from the 2011 festive season to help search marketers prepare campaigns for key dates and fluctuations.
We’ve been looking at spend, CTR, CPC, impression, revenue and mobile click share trends across Q4 2011 to identify key dates for your 2012 Christmas calendar. Off the back of this I wanted to provide nine practical and actionable tips to prepare campaigns for the festive season. So, here goes: (more…)
Once every now and then Matt Cutts answers questions from ‘the field’. This time the question came from AJ Kohn who asked about guest blogging.
Now we get a lot of guest post requests, we understand why, it gets links and attention. But is it really good for SEO? Matt tries to answer that question and kind of says “Yes, maybe, but it depends on who you are”. He talks about influential bloggers and about how guest blogging can be good to get attention, but he also seems to hint at that not all guest blogging is appreciated by Google. Which makes sense, he just says it a bit vague.
What do you think of what Cutts is saying here?
This is a guest post by Cedric Chambaz, EMEA Marketing Lead of Microsoft Advertising.
For several years now, an increasing number of small businesses have reaped the rewards of investing in search marketing as a way of reaching their target audience and delivering to them exactly what they seek. The obvious benefits – better targeting, clearer return on investment (ROI), cost efficiencies and others – are clear to many business owners, and as search continues to grow in popularity, the results only become more compelling.
However, while the benefits mentioned above are soon felt by those embarking on their first search campaigns, if you look past them there are also some more hidden rewards which SMBs might not at first connect with search marketing. Search is much more than just a lead generator; it can be turned into an incredibly powerful business intelligence tool, extending into parts of the business such as PR, product development, sales, merchandising and broader business strategy. All it takes is for marketers to think a little bit outside the (search) box… (more…)
Selling is a specialist art and is not something that just anyone can do well. Of course anyone can sell something given enough time to try and of course if they were say ‘slightly flexible with the truth’.
The difficulty comes when trying to create a sustainable brand, and because you want it to have some form of longevity you don’t want to suddenly be dealing with lots of complaints and bad PR.
Sometimes it is not who has the most experience or knowledge that really succeeds in this, it is the sales person that can actually put themselves in the buyers shoes and see things from their perspective. (more…)
I have my targets, my budgets and maybe my bonuses. In short, I’m good with excel. The way that I want to do my job is the most easy and secure way possible (remember I’m a manager, not a entrepreneur). But what kind of channels should I pick? (more…)
Agency / client relationships was a subject came up whilst having lunch with Bas in London recently. We got on to the subject of pitching for new business and SEO pitches in particular, as well as developing client accounts. What was apparent from the lunch was that my experience over nearly 20 years gave me some interesting perspectives on the subject so I was asked to share a few of my thoughts on the subject with you and hopefully you can share a few of your own, whether from a client or agency perspective. (more…)
This is a guest post by Chris Smith is a SEO Copywriter at Manchester-based digital agency Fluid Creativity, providing bespoke web design and SEO services to a range of clients. Like this post? Let us know!
When you think of SEO experts, who comes to mind? Matt Cutts, SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin, SEOBook’s Aaron Wall? We’re willing to bet that one person who definitely doesn’t figure in your thinking is professional miser and ex-frontman of The Smiths, Morrissey.
Inspired by this excellent post from Copyblogger on Eminem’s guide to becoming a writing and content marketing machine, I’ve decided to draw on inspiration a little closer to home for us here at Fluid. In a move that I’m almost positive would make Moz himself baulk, I’m going to spend the next few hundred words trying to convince you that The Smiths entire career and discography can actually be interpreted as a series of important lessons for people working in SEO, particularly in regards to content.
Odd? Definitely. Far-fetched? Not as much as you’d think. Without further ado, here are some of the vital SEO lessons we can learn from Manchester’s favourite miserable sons (sorry Joy Division). (more…)
This is a guest post by Stuart P Turner. Stuart is a trained philosopher, casual procrastinator and experienced search marketer. He has worked in digital agencies and as a freelance consultant over the past five years, across a range of UK and international clients. Stuart currently resides in Sydney and works for specialist search marketing agency Outrider. When he is not busy sharpening his SEO skills on the APAC market, he is typically lost in a book or staring whimsically out into the antipodean skies.
Two recent posts on inclusion and sexism in the digital industry inspired this post; it is a subject I touched on briefly in a previous post I wrote on the subject of Twitter.
The manner in which we communicate online desensitises us. We say things we would never dream of saying in ‘real life’, which in turn leads to almost immediate polarisation of opinion and rife tribalism.
But isn’t the internet as much real life as an argument down the pub? Or a conversation over the dinner table? (more…)
This is a guest post by Laura Kluinhaar-Sloet, who is responsible for customer relations at Exxtra. Like this post? Let us know!
Somebody important must have said that creating content isn’t a main focus point for a website. There must have been someone, somewhere, on some conference, in a book, or on tv. It must have been said. Why? Because I meet website owners all the time that seem to be afraid of content. It’s either the ‘I’ll send over some brochures and you can copy that content’ attitude or the ‘everything we have ever written should be published on our website’ point of view (including that fabulous newsletter from 2002).
Nobody wants to be bothered with content, it seems. Why is that? Isn’t it the single most important thing on a website? (more…)
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…)
This is a guest post by Peter Handley, SEO Director of theMediaFlow. Like this post? Let us know!
Sometimes it’s easy for us search marketers to get lost in our acronyms – and let’s face it, there are a hell of a lot of them in this industry.
SEO, SEM, PPC, CTR, CPC, SMO, PR– there is absolutely loads of jargon flying around in our industry, and we are constantly coming up with new ways to shorten terms – who can forget one of the latest ones with GSPYW?
It’s easy to get trapped in your own bubbles and circles on platforms like Twitter and forget that we communicate with wider groups of people. My own Twitter account, whilst predominantly search marketing focussed also attracts followers based on music and food/cooking that I share. (more…)
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