Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope – Whiteboard Friday

randfish

Posted by randfish

While guest posting can be a wonderful way to build your authority and earn links, it takes a huge amount of effort, and it’s easy for marketers to start slipping down the “Guest Posting Slope of Madness.” One of Rand’s predictions for marketing in 2014 is that Google will begin to crack down on low-quality guest posts, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, he clears up some of the misconceptions that can lead to a downhill slide.

Whiteboard Friday – Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Sarah: Howdy Moz fans. This is Sarah Bird, and I am the new CEO and that’s why I am doing Whiteboard Friday. Today, we’re going to talk about guest blog posting because that’s SEO. Okay, so the first thing you have to do is think of something [Rand guides Sarah aside] …

Sarah to Rand: But I’m the new CEO, and that means I do the …

Rand: Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday, which I will still be doing for, well for a very, very, very long time to come I hope. Today I wanted to tackle a tricky topic. I know it’s going to be a controversial one because a lot of folks in the SEO space do a lot of guest posting and guest blogging, but there’s a challenge here. So I made some predictions last week, a couple weeks ago now, in the new year about what 2014 will bring.

One of those is that I predicted that Google will be taking some webspam action, essentially the Webspam Team will be building an algorithm to target guest posters, people who do a lot of guest posting and a lot of guest blogging at scale to get links back to their site in order to rank. This is a very common strategy that many, many folks use, and here’s why it’s a slippery slope.

So oftentimes we start up, up here. You’re sort of super white hat, and “Oh, yeah you know I’ve got some great stuff to share, but my site doesn’t get all that much traffic so maybe I should go and see if Huffington Post or Mashable or maybe the Moz Blog or any of these sources will take it because I have a great post.”

Hey, what do you know? A lot of the time if you have something relevant and useful and great to say and you have some great ideas to share, some great visuals, some data, fantastic. You can get those guest posts on those big sites. Then you start to slide down the slope a little. You think, “Oh, yeah, that Huff Post piece went really well, and hey, I got a link. I got a live link out of it. Maybe that link will help me rank a little better, boost my authority, and I don’t know, that’s kind of nice. I should do some more guest posts and get more links. Maybe I’ll find some sites that can send me some traffic and boost my profile and authority out in the sphere and get a few more links.”

This is still totally, pretty much fine, pretty much okay. But then you slide down this little slope. There’s this devious little part right here, between the I’m doing this for kind of authority boosting and traffic sending reasons and I’m just doing this for the link.

So you slide down the slope, and then you get, “Oh, man, finding decent sites that will take my guests posts is really hard, and I keep having to write really good stuff and come up with new ideas because they all want unique content. You know what? Maybe I’ll just start going to any places that I can go where I’ll get a link. Then eventually you slide down into this sort of total black hat territory where you are, “You know, I bet I could scale this and even automate it. I’m going to use a team of outsourced writers, and I’m going to use a team of outsourced placement specialists. I’m going to write some little thing to scrape through the links I download from OSC from my competitors and scrape through the Google results and find any place that’ll take a guest post, who’ve taken five or more with spammy anchor text before, because that’s what I want.”

Oh, brother. That’s why I call this the guest posting slope of madness. Madness! It is madness, because think about what happens here. Essentially you’re going down this slope, and maybe you’re seeing results, more and more results, but you don’t know whether these links and these links that you’ve slid down into are actually really helping you or whether the authority and the profile that you’ve built from these good ones and all the other good marketing activities and the things your product is doing and your brand is doing are helping you, and you might think these are. So you keep doing them and then bam! You get smacked by a Penguin or the guest posting algo or whatever it is that comes next, and you have to go and try and get these folks to remove all these links, you have to disavow them, you’ve got to send your reconsideration requests, you’re out of the search results for weeks or months at a time, usually months, sometimes years.

What have you done to your site? What have you done to your SEO? What if you had taken all this effort and energy and put it into just doing this stuff and then once you built up this authority doing most of the posting on your own site where people would be linking to you?

One of the frustrating things about guest posting that people forget all the time is that when you are putting content somewhere else, especially if that’s good content, especially if it’s stuff that’s really earning traffic and visibility, that means all the links are going to somebody else’s site. Somebody else is earning most of the attention awareness, and granted some of that is transferring on to you and that’s why we do guest posting. But you have to be aware of that, and that leads me into some flawed assumptions.

Flawed assumption number one: More links are always better. This is not the case. This is not the case. I have seen many, many sites with just a few, a handful, a few dozen to a few hundred great links far outranking their brethren with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of links. All links are not created equal.

Less editorial restriction is better. When you’re guest posting you’re like, “Oh, they’re so picky, these editors. Man, they want me to jump through all these hoops. Let me find some place that’ll just take whatever I’ll throw them.” Guess what? If they take whatever you’re throwing them, they’re taking whatever the rest of the Internet is throwing them, and we all know what the rest of the Internet looks like.

Number three: The link matters more than other factors, other factors like traffic and influence and credibility. Also not the case. I’ll be totally honest. I will take a great guest post that refuses to link to me or that only no follow links to me if I know that 5,000 or 10,000 people are going to read that piece and a few hundred people are going to re-tweet it and a few hundred people are going to like it on Facebook, because that is boosting my influence and my authority, and that is creating all kinds of things that will have second order effects that impact my SEO and my broad web marketing far better than just a link.

When should you guest post and blog? Well, like I said, if you’re trying to reach that new audience, that new audience that another site or page or blog has captured, great. Guest posting is a wonderful choice. For example, let’s say here at Moz we’re trying to reach into the design community. We might go to some wonderful web design sites, Smashing Magazine, for example, and say, “Hey. Would you guys want maybe a good resource on SEO for designers?” They might say, “Yeah, great we’d love you.” Perfect. That’s a perfect marriage there.

In addition to creating a relationship with another organization through content, I also love this. This is a great way to build some early stages of relationship with another company before you do a formal partnership, and it helps to see whether there’s kind of an overlap between your two organizations’ audiences, such that you might want to do a deeper kind of relationship, maybe a sponsorship or an investment together, project or product together.

Quick note here. For your marquis content, your best stuff, I strongly — see how I’ve underlined strongly — strongly suggest using your own site. Reason being, if you’re going to put wonderful stuff out there, even if you think it could do better on somebody else’s site, in the long term you want that to live on your own site.

The last note I’ll make is that Google’s Webspam Team has been telegraphing for nearly a year that they are coming after sites that are using guest posting tactics at scale. You’ve heard comments from Google’s Head of Webspam, that’s Matt Cutts. You’ve seen comments on the Google Webmaster blog. You’ve heard them talk about it at conferences. If you’re not getting the message, they are sending it directly to all of the folks in the SEO world that guest posting and guest blogging are targets for webspam in the future.

So just be very, very careful please and stay up and don’t fall down this slippery slope. All right everyone, thanks so much. Take care.

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Local SEOs Sound Off On Google+ Local Hijackings

Greg Sterling

Earlier this week Danny Sullivan reported on the hijacking of thousands of local hotel listings within Google+ Local. Those listings had been replaced by third-party hotel booking services. And while it’s unclear how long those third party links were in place, several knowledgable people have…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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Google’s Chris DiBona On Search Ecosystem Diversity

Aaron Wall

It’s hard to deny that some folks working at Google are geniuses. It’s also hard to deny the disconnect in their messaging.

As Google locked down their “open” ecosystem (compatibility as a club, abandonware, deleting privacy settings, extensions required to be installed from store, extensions required to be single-purpose, forced Google+ integration, knowledge graph scrape-n-displace, “We could either sue him or hire him,” etc.), I thought an interview of one of their open source evangelists would be entertaining.

Chris DiBona delivered:

Can you imagine if you didn’t have the malware protection and the process isolation of Chrome, that Chrome brought to other browsers? Can you imagine surfing the web the way it is right now? It’s pretty grim. There’s a lot of malware. You end up basically funnelling people into fewer and fewer sites, and therefore fewer and fewer viewpoints and all the rest.

Sometimes large sites serve malware through their ads. Ad networks are one of the best ways to distribute malware. The super networks core to the web ecosystem are home to much of the malware – even GoogleBot was tricked into doing MySQL injection attacks. But even if we ignored that bit, it doesn’t take much insight to realize that Google is achieving that same kill diversity “goal” through other means…

This Mozcast chart always looks the same. As the web grows, Google allows less and less of it to appear in search. http://t.co/PRX4NGHZfH— Dan Thies (@danthies) September 4, 2013

…as they roll out many algorithmic filters, manual penalties, selectively enforce these issues on smaller players (while giving more exploitative entities a free pass), insert their own vertical search services, dial up their weighting on domain authority, and require smaller players to proactively police the rest of the web while Google thinks the n-word 85 times is totally reasonable on their own tier-1 properties.

We have another post coming on the craziness of disavows and link removals, but it has no doubt gone beyond absurd at this point.

Failed reconsideration requests are now coming with this email that tells site owners they must remove more links: pic.twitter.com/tiyXtPvY32— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) January 2, 2014

With WMT admission that linkspam MUST be removed we are past tipping point; it’s now a risk to not engage in neg SEO against all comp. #sad— Cygnus SEO (@CygnusSEO) January 2, 2014

Why is diversity so important?

Dissent evolves markets. The status quo doesn’t get changed by agreeing & aligning with existing power structures. Anyone who cares to debate this need only look at Google’s ongoing endless string of lawsuits. Most of those lawsuits are associated with Google (rightly or wrongly) taking power from what they view as legacy entities.

Even on a more personal level, one’s investment returns are likely to be better when things are out of favor:

“Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett

In many markets returns and popularity are inversely proportional

Investing in Internet stocks in 1999 was popular, but for those who stayed too long at the party it was a train wreck. Domain name speculators who bought into the carnage a couple years later did well.

Society is so complex & inter-connected that its very easy to think things run far more smoothly than they do & thus buy into to many fibs that are obviously self-evident until the moment they are not.

Popularity is backward looking, enabling the sheep to be sheared.

Unfortunately depth & diversity are being sacrificed to promote pablum from well known entities in formats that are easy to disintermediate & monetize.

Think about it: an actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! This is beyond popularisation. This is taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. This is not the solution to our most frightening problems – rather this is one of our most frightening problems.
– Benjamin Bratton

Innovative knowledge creation and thought reading tattoos — the singularity is near.

Categories: 

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Covario: Global PPC Click-Through Rates Hit New Highs, Spend Up 17 Percent YoY In Q4

Ginny Marvin

Though the numbers vary, the Q4 reports we’ve covered all point to solid year-over-year increases in paid search spending. Covario’s Q4 analysis of the global paid search advertising landscape is no different. Based on results from their high tech, consumer electronics and retail…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Global paid search spend increased in 2013: stats

Christopher Ratcliff

Here’s the global paid search activity for Q4 2013:

Regional

The USA’s search spend was up 17% quarter-on-quarter and 9% year-on-year.

However Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) showed a small decline in search spend, with quarter-over-quarter spend declining 1% and year-on-year declining 8%. This possibly due to an overall decline CPCs.

Ad effectiveness has improved in EMEA though, with a 60% increase in click-through-rates (CTR) compared to 2012.

The Asia/Pacific region (APAC) showed a 5% rise in search spend over Q3 and by 21% year-on-year. This was driven by a 13% rise in CTRs and a 20% rise in click traffic.

Search engines

Google continues to dominate with 84% of the world’s paid search market share. Advertising spend in Q4 with Google was up 7% from the previous year.

The Yahoo-Bing Network holds 8% of the world’s paid search spend market share. Year-over-year quarterly spending grew 23%. Q4 saw a 6% rise from Q3.

Baidu received 20% of APAC’s Q4 budgets, with 75% going to Google. Baidu has 80% lower CPCs than Google and higher than average CTRs, resulting in 55% of all clicks in APAC.

Here’s a closer look at global search engine market share.

Mobile 

Mobile now represents 20% of total search spending worldwide. 

The ad spend between smartphones and tablets widened in Q4 to 34% for smartphones and 66% for tablets.

For more information on PPC, download our Paid Search Marketing Best Practice Guide or check out this guide to what is paid search and why do you need it?

bing ads trends Channel: SEM Google google adwords trends Google: AdWords Google: AdWords: Product Listing Ads Microsoft Microsoft: Bing Ads paid search trends q4 ppc reports rkg Search Ads Search Ads: General Search Ads: Mobile Search Search Ads: Product Ads Search Engine Land Stats Stats: General Top News Uncategorized

RKG Report: PLAs Fuel AdWords Growth, Bing Ads Spend Rises Sharply In Q4

Ginny Marvin

RKG has released its Q4 2013 Digital Marketing Report, and as other reports have indicated, paid search saw solid year-over-year growth in the holiday quarter. Paid search spend among RKG’s retail-heavy client set rose 23 percent year-over-year. Overall click volume increased 19 percent, and…

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There’s No SEO Without Mobile SEO

Bryson Meunier

It’s 2014, which means we are officially one year away from the year that Kelsey Group predicted mobile search will eclipse desktop search. Are you making your mobile resolutions to ensure you’re ready for when that time comes? I’d like to start the new year with a short…

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SEO Best Practice – Introduction to SEO, Changes and Ranking Factors

Econsultancy

This report is part of Econsultancy’s renowned SEO Best Practice Guide and has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before. 

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity. 

Contents

  1. Introduction to Our Guides
    1. How this guide is structured
      1. Features of this guide
    2. About Econsultancy
  2. Introduction to Search Marketing and SEO
    1. What is search marketing and SEO?
    2. Why is it important?
    3. Market context
    4. Getting to grips with the fundamentals
      1. Have you heard of the tail of search?
      2. Savvier searchers
      3. Anatomy of a SERPs page
      4. The different types of organic search result
    5. Goals, objectives and KPIs
      1. The difference between goals and objectives
      2. Setting SMART objectives
      3. The value of KPIs
    6. Opportunities, challenges and risks
      1. SEO opportunities
      2. SEO challenges
      3. What are the risks?
    7. Integration with other marketing channels
      1. Paid search
      2. Display advertising
      3. Affiliate marketing
      4. Offline marketing
    8. Regulations
  3. Changes in SEO Since the Last Report
    1. Updates from the search engines
      1. Algorithm update: Hummingbird
      2. Algorithm update: Panda
      3. Algorithm update: Penguin
      4. Algorithm update: Venice
      5. Algorithm update: EMD
    2. Interface updates
    3. Transparency and alerts
    4. The drive to disavow
    5. Paid inclusion
    6. Updates from the SEO industry
      1. Content marketing
      2. Outreach and engagement
      3. Data and analytics
      4. Click through optimization
    7. Debate around Google+
  4. Ranking Factors
    1. Focus on the customer to get the rank
    2. The science behind rank
    3. How search engines are evolving algorithms
    4. How this is expected to change
    5. Key dos and don’ts
  5. Appendix 1: Acknowledgements
    1. Lead author
    2. Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download.

SEO Best Practice – Mobile, Local and International SEO

Econsultancy

This report is part of Econsultancy’s renowned SEO Best Practice Guide and has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before. 

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity. 

Contents

  1. Introduction to Our Guides
    1. How this guide is structured
      1. Features of this guide
    2. About Econsultancy
  2. Mobile SEO
    1. Why do mobile SEO?
    2. Development for mobile SEO
      1. Responsive web design
      2. Mobile optimised site
      3. Technical considerations
    3. Mobile indexation
      1. robots.txt:
      2. META robots tag
      3. link rel=”alternate”
      4. Mobile XML Sitemap
      5. Canonicalisation
    4. Mobile content
      1. Viewport meta tag
      2. Display/hide content per viewport
      3. Responsive images
    5. Mobile performance
      1. Page speed
      2. CDN (content delivery networks)
      3. Dynamic (or “lazy”) loading
      4. Structured data
      5. Click-to-call links
      6. Option to view the full site
    6. Mobile SEO marketing
      1. The factors driving mobile marketing growth
      2. What are people doing?
    7. Understanding mobile search behaviour
    8. Mobile keyword research
    9. Understanding the mobile SEO algorithm
    10. Link building for mobile
      1. Reciprocity
    11. Mobile landing pages
    12. Key dos and don’ts for mobile SEO
    13. Useful resources for technical mobile SEO
  3. Local SEO
    1. How local SEO has evolved:
      1. The Google Venice update:
      2. Personalisation
      3. Google Places pages and Google+ Local pages
      4. Zagat reviews
    2. Local SEO ranking factors
      1. Place page factors
      2. On-page factors
      3. NAP listings and citations
      4. Link signals
      5. Review signals
    3. Social and local SEO
    4. The most impactful signals
    5. Key dos and don’ts
  4. International SEO
    1. The global search engine market
    2. Defining an international SEO project
      1. Auditing current international organic search status
      2. Auditing current international search activity
      3. Approach to translation: automated vs. native support
      4. Targeting your international audience
    3. Your international SEO goals and targets
    4. Developing an internationally optimised web presence
      1. Organising your international URL structure
      2. Country targeted website URL structure
      3. URL Structure for language targeted websites
    5. Translating or localising
    6. Language and country targeting for web content
      1. Hreflang annotations
      2. Content language meta tag
      3. Search engine webmaster tools
    7. Growing your international web popularity
      1. Defining an international link building campaign
      2. Executing an international link building campaign
    8. Measuring international SEO success
      1. Following up your international search activity
  5. Appendix 1: Acknowledgements
    1. Lead author
    2. Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download

SEO Best Practice – Measurement and Reporting for SEO

Econsultancy

This report is part of Econsultancy’s renowned SEO Best Practice Guide and has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before. 

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity. 

Contents

  1. Introduction to Our Guides
    1. How this guide is structured
      1. Features of this guide
    2. About Econsultancy
  2. Measurement and Reporting For SEO
    1. SEO measurement
      1. The role of web analytics
      2. Identifying goals, objectives and KPIs
      3. Defining data needs
      4. Ecommerce and non-ecommerce tracking
      5. Ensuring data is validated
      6. Metrics for SEO
      7. Using campaign tracking parameters
    2. SEO reporting
      1. Defining requirements
      2. Essential SEO reports
      3. Using segmentation
      4. Role of dashboards
      5. Custom reports
      6. Importance of goals and event tracking
    3. SEO analysis
      1. Importance of context
      2. Questioning data
      3. Role of Voice-of-Customer data
      4. Multi-channel funnels and attribution analysis
      5. Universal analytics and SEO
    4. Role of testing and optimization
      1. What can you test?
      2. Creating a testing plan
      3. Case study
    5. Known data anomalies for SEO
      1. (not provided)
      2. iOS search
    6. Tools of the trade
      1. Web analytics platforms
      2. Market analysis tools
      3. SEO performance tools
      4. Browser extensions
      5. Technical performance tools
      6. Voice-of-Customer tools.
      7. Page engagement tools
      8. AB and MVT testing tools
    7. Key dos and don’ts for SEO measurement and reporting
  3. Appendix 1: Acknowledgements
    1. Lead author
    2. Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download.

SEO Best Practice – Planning and Strategy for SEO

Econsultancy

This report is part of Econsultancy’s renowned SEO Best Practice Guide and has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before. 

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity. 

Contents

  1. Introduction to Our Guides
    1. How this guide is structured
      1. Features of this guide
    2. About Econsultancy
  2. Planning And Strategy
    1. Understanding the darker side of SEO
      1. Whitehat SEO
      2. Greyhat SEO
      3. Blackhat SEO
    2. Understanding Google penalties
      1. Manual penalties
      2. Algorithmic penalties
    3. SEO strategy – the planning process
      1. Setting a realistic strategy
      2. Balancing SEO and paid search
      3. How PPC can help SEO
    4. Audience analysis, search behaviour and keyphrase selection
      1. Which search terms should you target?
      2. Understanding search behaviour
      3. Time-related variations in keyphrase use
      4. Understanding different types of keyphrases
      5. Grouping and categorising keyphrases
      6. Keyphrase identification and selection process
    5. Auditing current performance
      1. Relative performance
      2. Performance benchmarking
      3. Site inclusion for natural search
      4. Link and domain popularity for natural search
      5. Evaluating alternative SEO approaches
      6. Site speed
      7. Page metrics vs. key term metrics
      8. Benchmarking content performance
      9. Mobile vs. desktop
      10. Page performance
      11. Benchmarking correctly
    6. Site inclusion and reinclusion requests
      1. Filing a reconsideration request
    7. Setting goals, objectives and KPIs for SEO
    8. Key dos and don’ts for SEO strategy
  3. Appendix 1: Acknowledgements
    1. Lead author
    2. Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practice Guide

Econsultancy

About this guide

At more than 400 pages long and almost 140,000 words in length, Econsultancy’s SEO Best Practice Guide contains everything you need to know about search engine optimization, whether you work for an in-house client team, independently or for an agency.

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before. 

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity. 

Make no mistake: this guide contains lots of actionable, real world insight. It will help you immediately start to improve your performance across the search engines.

Topics covered

Inside the guide, you will find: 

  • Best practice success factors 
  • Key recommendations
  • SEO tips for success 

These sit across six main areas: 

  • Introduction to SEO, Changes and Ranking Factors
  • Planning and Strategy for SEO
  • Measurement and Reporting for SEO
  • Technical SEO, On-page Optimization and Landing Page Optimization
  • Link Building, Social and Online PR
  • Mobile, Local and International SEO

Contributing authors

This guide has been put together and updated by James Gurd, an experienced digital marketing consultant and owner of Digital Juggler, with the assistance of leading agencies and practitioners working at the coal face of search engine optimization. They have kindly contributed their time and effort in producing this guide.

Contributors to the report include:  

  • Andrew Girdwood, Media Innovations Director, DigitasLBi
  • Stefan Hull, Insight Director, Propellernet
  • Rishi Lakhani, Independent Online Marketing Consultant
  • Lee Colbran, SEO Director and Founding Partner and Dr David Sewell, Consultant at Fresh Egg
  • Gary Moyle, SEO Manager, NetBooster
  • Lisa Myers, CEO and Owner, Verve Search
  • SEmetrical
  • Joe Friedlein, Founding Director, Browser Media
  • Nichola Stott, Owner and Director, theMediaFlow
  • Kelvin Newman, Strategy Director, Site Visibility
  • Michael Hope, Analytics and Conversion Manager, Search Laboratory
  • Alex Moss, Director, FireCask
  • James Lowery, Digital Strategy Consultant, Latitude Digital Marketing
  • Paul Rogers, SEO Manager, Buyagift.com
  • Aleyda Solis, Head of Digital Strategy, WooRank

Contents

  1. Introduction to Our Guides
    1. How this guide is structured
      1. Features of this guide
      2. Key chapters
    2. About Econsultancy
  2. Introduction to Search Marketing and SEO
    1. What is search marketing and SEO?
    2. Why is it important?
    3. Market context
    4. Getting to grips with the fundamentals
      1. Have you heard of the tail of search?
      2. Savvier searchers
      3. Anatomy of a SERPs page
      4. The different types of organic search result
    5. Goals, objectives and KPIs
      1. The difference between goals and objectives
      2. Setting SMART objectives
      3. The value of KPIs
    6. Opportunities, challenges and risks
      1. SEO opportunities
      2. SEO challenges
      3. What are the risks?
    7. Integration with other marketing channels
      1. Paid search
      2. Display advertising
      3. Affiliate marketing
      4. Offline marketing
    8. Regulations
  3. Changes in SEO Since the Last Report
    1. Updates from the search engines
      1. Algorithm update: Hummingbird
      2. Algorithm update: Panda
      3. Algorithm update: Penguin
      4. Algorithm update: Venice
      5. Algorithm update: EMD
    2. Interface updates
    3. Transparency and alerts
    4. The drive to disavow
    5. Paid inclusion
    6. Updates from the SEO industry
      1. Content marketing
      2. Outreach and engagement
      3. Data and analytics
      4. Click through optimization
    7. Debate around Google+
  4. Ranking Factors
    1. Focus on the customer to get the rank
    2. The science behind rank
    3. How search engines are evolving algorithms
    4. How this is expected to change
    5. Key dos and don’ts
  5. Planning And Strategy
    1. Understanding the darker side of SEO
      1. Whitehat SEO
      2. Greyhat SEO
      3. Blackhat SEO
    2. Understanding Google penalties
      1. Manual penalties
      2. Algorithmic penalties
    3. SEO strategy – the planning process
      1. Setting a realistic strategy
      2. Balancing SEO and paid search
      3. How PPC can help SEO
    4. Audience analysis, search behaviour and keyphrase selection
      1. Which search terms should you target?
      2. Understanding search behaviour
      3. Time-related variations in keyphrase use
      4. Understanding different types of keyphrases
      5. Grouping and categorising keyphrases
      6. Keyphrase identification and selection process
    5. Auditing current performance
      1. Relative performance
      2. Performance benchmarking
      3. Site inclusion for natural search
      4. Link and domain popularity for natural search
      5. Evaluating alternative SEO approaches
      6. Site speed
      7. Page metrics vs. key term metrics
      8. Benchmarking content performance
      9. Mobile vs. desktop
      10. Page performance
      11. Benchmarking correctly
    6. Site inclusion and reinclusion requests
      1. Filing a reconsideration request
    7. Setting goals, objectives and KPIs for SEO
    8. Key dos and don’ts for SEO strategy
  6. Measurement and Reporting For SEO
    1. SEO measurement
      1. The role of web analytics
      2. Identifying goals, objectives and KPIs
      3. Defining data needs
      4. Ecommerce and non-ecommerce tracking
      5. Ensuring data is validated
      6. Metrics for SEO
      7. Using campaign tracking parameters
    2. SEO reporting
      1. Defining requirements
      2. Essential SEO reports
      3. Using segmentation
      4. Role of dashboards
      5. Custom reports
      6. Importance of goals and event tracking
    3. SEO analysis
      1. Importance of context
      2. Questioning data
      3. Role of Voice-of-Customer data
      4. Multi-channel funnels and attribution analysis
      5. Universal analytics and SEO
    4. Role of testing and optimization
      1. What can you test?
      2. Creating a testing plan
      3. Case study
    5. Known data anomalies for SEO
      1. (not provided)
      2. iOS search
    6. Tools of the trade
      1. Web analytics platforms
      2. Market analysis tools
      3. SEO performance tools
      4. Browser extensions
      5. Technical performance tools
      6. Voice-of-Customer tools.
      7. Page engagement tools
      8. AB and MVT testing tools
    7. Key dos and don’ts for SEO measurement and reporting
  7. Technical SEO
    1. Why technical SEO is important
    2. Considerations when building a website
    3. Site architecture
      1. Categorisation
      2. Use of subdomains
      3. URL formats
      4. Using Webmaster Tools
      5. Sitemaps
      6. Telling the search engine about your Sitemap
      7. URL parameter management
      8. The “robots” meta tag
      9. The Robot Exclusion Standard (robots.txt)
      10. Mod-rewrite and URL Rewrite:
      11. URL Rewrite
    4. Canonicalisation
      1. Why does canonicalisation cause problems?
      2. Quick tips for canonicalisation
    5. Pagination
    6. Geo-targeting
    7. Crawling, server behaviour and response codes
      1. Viewing headers
      2. HTTP request headers
      3. User agent
      4. Accept-Encoding (Compression)
      5. Referrer
      6. HTTP response headers
      7. Response status codes
      8. HTTP compression
      9. ETag
      10. X-Robots-Tag
      11. Canonical URLs
    8. Vary HTTP header
    9. Web crawler detection
    10. URL discovery
      1. Links
      2. Sitemaps
      3. Toolbars and analytics
    11. Web crawling optimization
      1. Crawl budgets
      2. XML Sitemaps
      3. Expired/deleted content
      4. Crawl optimization checklist
    12. Redirection
      1. Geographic redirection
      2. Mobile/device redirection
    13. Site availability and speed
      1. Availability
      2. Site speed
    14. Optimising site speed
      1. Server response time
      2. HTML size
      3. Page structure
      4. AJAX / client-side asynchronous technologies
      5. Site speed checklist
    15. Vertical technical SEO
      1. Image search
      2. News
      3. Video search
      4. Shopping search
    16. HTML markup
      1. Open Graph
      2. Title and description tags
      3. Header tags
      4. Structured data
      5. Breadcrumbs
      6. Pagination
      7. Testing
      8. HTML 5 elements
    17. Domain migration and site redevelopment
      1. Domain migrations
      2. Site redevelopment
    18. Technical auditing for SEO
    19. Technical SEO monitoring
      1. Monitoring checklist
      2. Monitoring tools
  8. On-page Optimization
    1. Introduction
    2. The importance of targeting keywords
    3. Selecting keyphrases for optimization
    4. Page markup factors
      1. Page <titles>
      2. Content headings
      3. Body content
      4. Meta description
      5. Image optimization
      6. Authorship
      7. Rich snippets
      8. Social sharing
    5. Document level factors
      1. Keyphrase(s) within domain name
      2. Keywords in URLs
      3. Non-HTML document types
    6. Internal linking
    7. User-generated content
  9. Landing Page Optimization
    1. Setting objectives for your landing pages
    2. Conversion strategy
      1. Macro conversions
      2. Micro conversions
      3. B2B or B2C
    3. Measuring effectiveness
      1. Success factors
      2. A careful consideration for product specific obstacles
    4. Conversion considerations when copywriting for SEO
    5. Different types of SEO landing pages
      1. Landing page as part of the existing structure
      2. Specific campaign landing pages
      3. Microsite (different domain)
    6. Continuous improvement – testing landing pages
      1. Tools
      2. Evaluate results on all levels
    7. Key dos and don’ts
      1. Remember non-responders
      2. Ensure your company image matches perceived impression
      3. Don’t use corporate terms and language
      4. Break content down into readable format
      5. Introduce urgency
      6. Ensure your CTA has an enticing value proposition
      7. Don’t ask for unnecessary information
  10. Link Building
    1. Introduction: Why links are so important
      1. History
      2. Link based algorithms: how Google changed web search
      3. Evolution of link based algorithms and the growth of link spam
      4. Link networks
    2. Link building today: marketing your site to attract links
      1. What makes a good link?
      2. Earning links
      3. Creating unique and valuable content
    3. Active link building
      1. Blogger outreach
      2. Guest blogging
      3. Directories
      4. Business partnerships
    4. Other marketing channels and link treatment
      1. Affiliate marketing
      2. Advertorial
    5. Manipulated links: identifying, cleaning and avoiding
      1. Why are manipulated links problematic?
      2. How to identify unnatural links
      3. Link tools to help with analysis
      4. Cleaning a backlink profile: link removal or disavowal?
      5. Future-proofing your link building strategy
  11. Social and Online PR and their Influence on Search
    1. Changes in algorithms and their impact on the role of social and PR
      1. February 23, 2011 – Google Panda update
      2. April 24, 2012 – Google Penguin update
      3. July 26, 2013 – Link schemes document update (Google’s Webmaster Tool)
    2. Online PR
      1. The role of the influencer
      2. Online PR distribution services
      3. Understanding the motivations of journalists and writers
      4. Key PR skills that support SEO
    3. Social media and SEO
      1. Why is social media relevant to SEO?
      2. What does this mean for SEO?
      3. Social leads to links
      4. Social leading to richer search results listings
      5. Social content ranks in its own right
      6. On-page social signals
  12. Mobile SEO
    1. Why do mobile SEO?
    2. Development for mobile SEO
      1. Responsive web design
      2. Mobile optimised site
      3. Technical considerations
    3. Mobile indexation
      1. robots.txt:
      2. META robots tag
      3. link rel=”alternate”
      4. Mobile XML Sitemap
      5. Canonicalisation
    4. Mobile content
      1. Viewport meta tag
      2. Display/hide content per viewport
      3. Responsive images
    5. Mobile performance
      1. Page speed
      2. CDN (content delivery networks)
      3. Dynamic (or “lazy”) loading
      4. Structured data
      5. Click-to-call links
      6. Option to view the full site
    6. Mobile SEO marketing
      1. The factors driving mobile marketing growth
      2. What are people doing?
    7. Understanding mobile search behaviour
    8. Mobile keyword research
    9. Understanding the mobile SEO algorithm
    10. Link building for mobile
      1. Reciprocity
    11. Mobile landing pages
    12. Key dos and don’ts for mobile SEO
    13. Useful resources for technical mobile SEO
  13. Local SEO
    1. How local SEO has evolved:
      1. The Google Venice update:
      2. Personalisation
      3. Google Places pages and Google+ Local pages
      4. Zagat reviews
    2. Local SEO ranking factors
      1. Place page factors
      2. On-page factors
      3. NAP listings and citations
      4. Link signals
      5. Review signals
    3. Social and local SEO
    4. The most impactful signals
    5. Key dos and don’ts
  14. International SEO
    1. The global search engine market
    2. Defining an international SEO project
      1. Auditing current international organic search status
      2. Auditing current international search activity
      3. Approach to translation: automated vs. native support
      4. Targeting your international audience
    3. Your international SEO goals and targets
    4. Developing an internationally optimised web presence
      1. Organising your international URL structure
      2. Country targeted website URL structure
      3. URL Structure for language targeted websites
    5. Translating or localising
    6. Language and country targeting for web content
      1. Hreflang annotations
      2. Content language meta tag
      3. Search engine webmaster tools
    7. Growing your international web popularity
      1. Defining an international link building campaign
      2. Executing an international link building campaign
    8. Measuring international SEO success
      1. Following up your international search activity
  15. Appendix 1: Acknowledgements
    1. Lead author
    2. Expert contributors
  16. Appendix 2: SEO Performance Audit
    1. Technical Performance
      1. Page load speed
      2. Page size
      3. HTML validation
      4. HTTP status
      5. Site crawl errors
      6. Volume of webpages being indexed
      7. What content is being indexed?
      8. Cross browser rendering
      9. What checks to make
    2. On-page Optimisation
      1. Page titles
      2. What checks to make
      3. Meta descriptions
      4. What checks to make
      5. Internal links
      6. What checks to make
      7. Content
      8. What checks to make
      9. Keyword density
      10. What checks to make
      11. Mark-up and rich snippets
      12. What checks to make
    3. Keyword Coverage
      1. What checks to make
    4. Link Portfolio
      1. What checks to make
    5. Social Media Coverage
      1. What checks to make
    6. Competitor Strengths and Weaknesses
      1. What checks to make
    7. SEO Audit Checklist

A free sample document is also available for download

SEO Best Practice – Technical SEO, On-page Optimization and Landing Page Optimization

Econsultancy

This report is part of Econsultancy’s renowned SEO Best Practice Guide and has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before. 

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity. 

Contents

  1. Introduction to Our Guides
    1. How this guide is structured
      1. Features of this guide
    2. About Econsultancy
  2. Technical SEO
    1. Why technical SEO is important
    2. Considerations when building a website
    3. Site architecture
      1. Categorisation
      2. Use of subdomains
      3. URL formats
      4. Using Webmaster Tools
      5. Sitemaps
      6. Telling the search engine about your Sitemap
      7. URL parameter management
      8. The “robots” meta tag
      9. The Robot Exclusion Standard (robots.txt)
      10. Mod-rewrite and URL Rewrite:
      11. URL Rewrite
    4. Canonicalisation
      1. Why does canonicalisation cause problems?
      2. Quick tips for canonicalisation
    5. Pagination
    6. Geo-targeting
    7. Crawling, server behaviour and response codes
      1. Viewing headers
      2. HTTP request headers
      3. User agent
      4. Accept-Encoding (Compression)
      5. Referrer
      6. HTTP response headers
      7. Response status codes
      8. HTTP compression
      9. ETag
      10. X-Robots-Tag
      11. Canonical URLs
    8. Vary HTTP header
    9. Web crawler detection
    10. URL discovery
      1. Links
      2. Sitemaps
      3. Toolbars and analytics
    11. Web crawling optimization
      1. Crawl budgets
      2. XML Sitemaps
      3. Expired/deleted content
      4. Crawl optimization checklist
    12. Redirection
      1. Geographic redirection
      2. Mobile/device redirection
    13. Site availability and speed
      1. Availability
      2. Site speed
    14. Optimising site speed
      1. Server response time
      2. HTML size
      3. Page structure
      4. AJAX / client-side asynchronous technologies
      5. Site speed checklist
    15. Vertical technical SEO
      1. Image search
      2. News
      3. Video search
      4. Shopping search
    16. HTML markup
      1. Open Graph
      2. Title and description tags
      3. Header tags
      4. Structured data
      5. Breadcrumbs
      6. Pagination
      7. Testing
      8. HTML 5 elements
    17. Domain migration and site redevelopment
      1. Domain migrations
      2. Site redevelopment
    18. Technical auditing for SEO
    19. Technical SEO monitoring
      1. Monitoring checklist
      2. Monitoring tools
  3. On-page Optimization
    1. Introduction
    2. The importance of targeting keywords
    3. Selecting keyphrases for optimization
    4. Page markup factors
      1. Page <titles>
      2. Content headings
      3. Body content
      4. Meta description
      5. Image optimization
      6. Authorship
      7. Rich snippets
      8. Social sharing
    5. Document level factors
      1. Keyphrase(s) within domain name
      2. Keywords in URLs
      3. Non-HTML document types
    6. Internal linking
    7. User-generated content
  4. Landing Page Optimization
    1. Setting objectives for your landing pages
    2. Conversion strategy
      1. Macro conversions
      2. Micro conversions
      3. B2B or B2C
    3. Measuring effectiveness
      1. Success factors
      2. A careful consideration for product specific obstacles
    4. Conversion considerations when copywriting for SEO
    5. Different types of SEO landing pages
      1. Landing page as part of the existing structure
      2. Specific campaign landing pages
      3. Microsite (different domain)
    6. Continuous improvement – testing landing pages
      1. Tools
      2. Evaluate results on all levels
    7. Key dos and don’ts
      1. Remember non-responders
      2. Ensure your company image matches perceived impression
      3. Don’t use corporate terms and language
      4. Break content down into readable format
      5. Introduce urgency
      6. Ensure your CTA has an enticing value proposition
      7. Don’t ask for unnecessary information
  5. Appendix 1: Acknowledgements
    1. Lead author
    2. Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download

SEO Best Practice – Link Building, Social and Online PR

Econsultancy

This report is part of Econsultancy’s renowned SEO Best Practice Guide and has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.

Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before. 

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.

It has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity. 

Contents

  1. Introduction to Our Guides
    1. How this guide is structured
      1. Features of this guide
    2. About Econsultancy
  2. Link Building
    1. Introduction: Why links are so important
      1. History
      2. Link based algorithms: how Google changed web search
      3. Evolution of link based algorithms and the growth of link spam
      4. Link networks
    2. Link building today: marketing your site to attract links
      1. What makes a good link?
      2. Earning links
      3. Creating unique and valuable content
    3. Active link building
      1. Blogger outreach
      2. Guest blogging
      3. Directories
      4. Business partnerships
    4. Other marketing channels and link treatment
      1. Affiliate marketing
      2. Advertorial
    5. Manipulated links: identifying, cleaning and avoiding
      1. Why are manipulated links problematic?
      2. How to identify unnatural links
      3. Link tools to help with analysis
      4. Cleaning a backlink profile: link removal or disavowal?
      5. Future-proofing your link building strategy
  3. Social and Online PR and their Influence on Search
    1. Changes in algorithms and their impact on the role of social and PR
      1. February 23, 2011 – Google Panda update
      2. April 24, 2012 – Google Penguin update
      3. July 26, 2013 – Link schemes document update (Google’s Webmaster Tool)
    2. Online PR
      1. The role of the influencer
      2. Online PR distribution services
      3. Understanding the motivations of journalists and writers
      4. Key PR skills that support SEO
    3. Social media and SEO
      1. Why is social media relevant to SEO?
      2. What does this mean for SEO?
      3. Social leads to links
      4. Social leading to richer search results listings
      5. Social content ranks in its own right
      6. On-page social signals
  4. Appendix 1: Acknowledgements
    1. Lead author
    2. Expert contributors

A free sample document is also available for download