A Way to Boost E-E-A-T? {Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness}
I belong to oodles of Facebook discussion groups about SEO and building niche sites. The advice ranges from terrible to outstanding. Today, I read a post titled “One Other Way to Boost E-E-A-T.” Let’s discuss whether this strategy does what the author of that post suggests it will. For those who aren’t already aware, E-E-A-T…
Are Blog Keyword Targets Necessary?
The following question was asked in an online discussion: “Should blogs always have keyword optimization in mind in H1’s and title tags?” Although I did not ask my partner Randy Ray for his opinion, I know from working with him for many years that he prefers to target some type of query (possibly more than…
What’s the Best Strategy for 100 Pre-written Blog Posts?
I see people ask this question several times every year. It almost never changes, except for the numbers. “I’ve written (purchased) [X] blog posts. I’m ready to launch my site. Should I publish them all at once or a few at a time?” I’ll say right now there is no single, universally correct answer (in…
Content Diversification SEO
Many people (including my partner Randy Ray) prefer to keep their Websites “focused” on a specific topic. So, if you start a site about sight-seeing tours in elephant preserves in Africa, you are probably reluctant to include content about your favorite Chinese cuisine recipes. If you just want to focus on what you do well,…
When You Should and Not Create More Content around A Keyword
You probably call it keyword cannibalization. You audit a Website and find 2 or more articles ranking for the same query – or at least targeting the same query in their page titles. According to the latest edition of the SEO Myth Handbook for Beginners, you must immediately panic and find a way to de-optimize one…
Why Optimizing for 0 Search Queries is Okay
Someone asked for help in an online discussion group. His situation: Working on a site that is already ranking well in hundreds of queries (for a given topic) with at least 101 searches per month. He needs ideas for where to get more “high value queries” – that is, queries with more than 0-100 searches…
How Do You Know If It’s Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is one of the Great Bogeymen of SEO, striking fear into the hearts of marketers and business owners since the early 2000s. It’s easy to find horror stories people share about duplicate content disasters. In my experience most of these are campfire tales, shared between people who didn’t actually live through the disasters….
The post How Do You Know If It’s Duplicate Content? first appeared on SEO Theory.
Guest Posts without Link Building
Guest posting has been abused for link building for so many years it’s now firmly entrenched in SEO mythology as a great link building strategy. It seems no matter how many penalties (manual actions) the search engines bestow upon people for using guest post links, the Web marketing world just keeps on linking. Guest posting’s popularity…
The post Guest Posts without Link Building first appeared on SEO Theory.
How to Manage Website Subduction
In geology subduction is the process by which the edge of one tectonic plate slides under another tectonic plate. Subduction is one reason why the Earth is considered a geologically active planet. It is by the process of subduction that continents and islands gradually move across the Earth’s surface. Website subduction works in a very similar…
Cocitation, Cooccurence, Context, and Proximity for People Who Get Confused
You folks in the online marketing world keep using these terms and, frankly, I can’t keep straight which of you know what you are talking about and which of you are just repeating nonsense. It’s not hard to find SEO…
What You Should and Should NOT Be Using Guest Blogging for
Now that My Blog Guest has been penalized by Google for distributing manipulative links, the usual chorus of “white hat SEO is dead” and “Google is destroying small businesses” has risen up to quell the facts. Before you jump on…
What Does Content Spam Mean?
Content spam. Until now you never actually saw the phrase on SEO Theory (although I did write this article for content spammers a few months ago. “Content spam” is not exactly the latest SEO buzzword but people are searching for…
The Secret is NOT to Write Longer Articles or Use Longer Words
It’s getting hard to read SEO blog posts any more. They are so boringly long and full of space-wasting and brain-numbing images that whatever points they try to make just fade away into the woodwork. And that must seem ironic,…
The Three-legged Stool of Content Has Gone Tipsy
For years I have been telling people that there are three types of content that are relatively easy to produce and which draw a lot of interest from random searchers: news, opinion, and humor. Over the past year, however, I have noticed the effectiveness of one of those options flattening out. The only explanation I can offer is that everyone is trying to do the same thing. Doing what your competitors do won’t help you differentiate yourself from them. So, everyone now seems to be chasing the news. I see this a great deal in affiliate marketing, where the hard core affiliates are trying to get more eyeballs on their calls-to-action. Many of these folks would rather put their tables with affiliate codes on the front page/root URL of their sites than actual news headlines, but even when you focus on the news you’re still running up against dozens, sometimes hundreds of other sites in your microniche that are all trying to attract search traffic with the same news. The thing about news is that people who want to stay informed about current events in a particular industry have mostly found the niche sites they will favor. Entering the field […]
Native Advertising Represents A New Search Frontier
With both Google and the Federal Trade Commission (and possibly other groups) warning publishers and advertisers against creating consumer confusion through “native advertising”, “advertorials”, or “guest content”, a lot of big publishers are pushing their native ads into the Dark Web. The Dark Web consists of those uncrawlable regions that search engines cannot or choose not to reach. Some native advertising is creative and entertaining enough to merit its own audience. Just as TV commercials can become wildly popular with viewing audiences, online advertising can stir discussion and build up loyal followings. But how are consumers to find all this native advertising? Brand loyalty will help surface some of the content through social media connections but presently there is no general purpose search tool available that allows consumers to look for all the native advertising their favorite brands publish. You have to rely on site search at the major publisher Websites, and if they are using a Google Custom Search Engine but blocking Google through robots.txt then you won’t find the native advertising. YouTube and Pinterest have proven beyond question that people search for and share commercial advertising. What’s more, some YouTube channels republish vintage and recent TV and radio […]
The Failure of Authorship, or, How I Learned to Live with the Blog
You might think from my email that everyone and their brother wants to write for SEO Theory. Of course, about 99-100% of the people who contact me for guest posting opportunities don’t actually look to see what the blog is about. At least, their emails don’t indicate they have any clue as to who I am or what I do or why they might NOT want to ask me for a guest posting slot. I do accept guest writers. Or, perhaps I should say I occasionally invite people I know and whose opinions I respect to write for the blog. Once in a while I can actually get someone to write a post that is published here. And you people LOVE those articles. If these guys wrote more often — well, maybe you wouldn’t feel like it was such a treat. Through the years I have received occasional invitations to write for other Websites. My past employers usually expressed grave reluctance at allowing me to create value for other Websites. Now that I am on my own, the invitations have stopped coming in. What’s up with that? Not that I have a lot of time to write about SEO. I […]
Dear Content Spammers: Old Articles Rank Just Fine in Google’s SERPs
Yet another weak SEO idea is now being elevated to the status of pseudo-fact: that fresh content somehow trumps old content in Google’s search results. It’s this kind of nonsense that really leads people to generate new waves of spam because they believe this crap and start following really bad advice. Stop and think about the sources of these strategies: people who told you to use PageRank sculpting, to use guest blogging for links, to invest in more infographics, to use flat site architecture. Their track record is rotten with the demise of thousands of Websites that followed their terrible advice. You can find these people in blogs, on forums, even in the news media, dispensing formulaic SEO buzzword advice that is based only only how impressed they were with someone’s presentation. They don’t look at the consequences of widespread adoption of “cutting edge” ideas that are surefire ways to win in the SERPs. And what’s worse, their readers are even less discerning. If you ever wonder why I am so critical of so much SEO philosophy, it’s because so many people in our industry do not learn from their past mistakes. “Oh, Google Panda screwed us! Wah! Oh well, […]
What SEO Bloggers Should and Should Not Share
There are too many of us out here blogging about search engine optimization, social media optimization, conversion rate optimization, optimization optimization, and cute gerbils on hang gliders. It’s become a huge problem because, frankly, people just do not pay attention to what is happening. Here is some tough love for all you SEO bloggers. If You Share the Emails You Send Out… I just read a great “how to” blog post that provides explicit details on the kinds of outreach emails that work and when to use them. There were not that many comments on the article but they were all pretty much in the “great post! can’t wait to destroy the value in this idea” category. You know, if your agency has developed a formula for reaching out to bloggers for links, the dumbest thing you can do is tell the rest of the SEO world what works and what doesn’t work. Your “loyal readers”, the people whom you are trying to impress, will take your email templates and use them and burn them so that in a few months everyone who blogs about anything from knitting needles to cat pictures will become sick and tired of seeing these […]
Embeddable Content Will Force SEO to Return to Its Roots
Embeddable content is gradually becoming more popular and homogeneous across the Web. Think of embedding a YouTube video, a Twitter widget, and a custom calculator widget on a page. In the old days we called these “mashup” pages. Today we call them — well, actually, we don’t call them anything. People have tried to move away from creating mashups with third-party content because the search engines came down hard on mashup sites for being too spammy, not unique enough, etc. And yet, as more people explore options for distributing content that doesn’t lead to a duplication of content we’re turning back to embeddable content. Really, you only have two choices when it comes to publishing content: host it on your site or use someone else’s remotely-hosted content on your site. And the search engines do tolerate embeddable content. But they are looking for that additional value that makes the content embedding secondary to the purpose of the page. Embedding Content Is a Fundamental Practice of Web Design You cannot get away from content embedding. We have been doing this as Web designers since the early 1990s when HTML tables were used to manage page layout and Netscape added frames to […]