Posts About ‘SEO’

The battle of the SERPs

battle-soldier

The areas of SEO and PPC are awfully close to each other and yet very different in their approach. SEO is about creating as much visibility as possible for relevant search queries. PPC is much more driven by ROI, visibility is not always as valuable as within SEO. Although the underlying techniques have similarities there are also some skills you just need for SEO or PPC. Therefore there are specialists in both disciplines. As a true search marketer though, I believe you should be skilled in both disciplines. And as a search marketer there’s only one place you really have to make the difference: The Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

The SERP is the battleground of search marketing. Although the most effect is clearly created within your website, the SERP is where your first and most important battle takes place. The battle for the visitor. It’s a direct battle with all your competitors. And you have to make sure you’re properly armed to be able to come out on top every time.

In this battle for the visitor there are two main strategies available: SEO and PPC. Some choose to fight this battle by just using SEO, others rely solely on the big guns of PPC. And some choose to bring out their complete arsenal to win the battle over the visitor and focus on a strong combination of SEO and PPC. (more…)

Getting Your First SEO Job – How to Stand Out

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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…)

Reputation management – Shady business or just great SEM?

8 months ago by Agnete Tøien Pedersen 2 Comments
reputation

Reputation management. A part of SEM that few want to admit that they do. Looked upon as shady business. Many thinks it is about removing search results or creating black-hat`ish spam to dominate the SERPs. But is it really shady business? N-O, not if you do it for the right reasons.

Reputation management is all about controlling the top 10 for brand related searches. Because your online reputation = your top 10 in Google. It is almost that simple.

In my opinion, reputation management is smart SEM that most companies (and also all people if you ask me) need to do, bad reputation or not. It is SEM with the goal of avoiding bad search results if, or when, the shit hits the fan. Reputation management is also the work to increase your overall online presence, aka. “traditional SEM”. It is controlling the SERPS for brand related searches, before someone else does it. Reputation management is all about a broad presence of great online content, content so strong and relevant that negative news stories, blog posts or forum threads can`t outrank them for brand related searches. It is what SEO and paid search should be all about; relevance and great content.

With that in mind, here`s my 8 most basic tips for reputation management, that anybody can do. No shady business, just relevant content! (more…)

How Google may Discount Infographic Link building

spam-infographic

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…)

Why you Should be Blogging as an SEO

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As an SEO I’ve always been very focused on learning. When I started I realized almost instantly that in a fast developing business like ours you need to be ahead of developments all the time. Therefore I made some choices to make sure I would be obligated to stay on top of the developments and know my stuff. One of the best choices for my development was to start blogging about search (and online marketing).

It all began when I decided to start a blog for my former employer. As the only contributor at the time I was forced to produce something with a certain amount of regularity. Based on the posts I produced there I was asked for some guest posts on different blogs in The Netherlands. Which finally led to me being asked by Bas to blog for State of Search. Which of course I gladly accepted although I knew it was a level of audience that would force me to achieve a higher level of blogging I was used to (and in different language as well). Later on I also picked up blogging on my own blog in Dutch on jeroenvaneck.com.

Almost 200 posts later I realize blogging for all these platforms gave me a lot of benefits. Much more than I expected. I recommend everyone who wants to be good in this business to pick up in blogging. And here are four reasons why you should. (more…)

What Google Wants vs What SEOs Want

Google vs SEO

A recent image shared by Carla Marshall from Sorbet Digital demonstrated to me how adversarial the relationship between Google and the SEO industry has become (see image below).

Google is basically waging a propaganda campaign of fear, attempting to weed out SEO agencies that use tactics Google doesn’t agree with by fueling paranoia and suspicion in our clients. (more…)

Understanding Your Link Profile – Part Two

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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.

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How to Scale eCommerce SEO

Paddy

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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Why doing a little SEO is worse than doing no SEO

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It’s hard not to constantly look to the future, our industry changes so rapidly and so dramatically that the next big thing could pass you by in the blink of an eye, without you even knowing about it. The SEO industry has come a long way over the last decade or so, and we’re almost free of the “spam-hobbit” reputation. I say almost because, let’s face it, the majority of people outside of the industry either have no idea what SEO is, or think that we spend our days writing spam comments and “clicking on results in Google until it goes to the top of the results” – if only it was that easy, seriously. On the flip-side of the coin, modern business owners are beginning to appreciate the amount of work and skill that goes into creating a successful SEO campaign. Some even understand just how vital it is to have the right SEO team behind them if they are ever going to compete in the world of online business. (more…)

Political SEO – Can it be done?

Obama-on-SEO

Here in the States it’s election season. I recently had a conversation with a campaign worker that said there is “no way” to SEO for a political election. Well my friends, we’re going to spend our day putting together a SEO strategy guide for those with political dreams.

I am going to cover the three most influential search optimization strategies out there for political SEO. The only thing I ask, if you have an idea for something to add – post a comment! (more…)

6 Common SEO Questions and 3 Tools to Answer Them

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With so many tools out there lately it’s difficult to stay up to date to test all of them and identify which SEO problem can they help you to solve –which should be their final purpose after all-.

To help a bit with this here I share 6 common SEO questions and 3 SEO tools -that I have already tested- to answer them easily: (more…)

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