ShareTweet Crowdsourcing interests me for many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s a great way to get multiple people to promote content (yes, I’m always thinking about that.) Some of my favorite evergreen content pieces have been crowdsourced and I’ve noticed that when I search to see what’s recently been said about specific topics, those pieces still appear at the top of the SERPs. With that in mind, I thought I’d ask a few SEOs to fill out a quick survey, with the questions being listed below: 1. What are your thoughts on crowdsourced pieces? Does it make you think that the author is being slack and taking a shortcut by asking everyone else’s opinions, or do [...]
Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Predatory Thinking for SEOs
ShareTweet I was fortunate enough to attend BrightonSEO a couple of weeks ago – big love to Kelvin and the team for organising another fantastic event. For me the stand out presentation of the day came from Dave Trott on Predatory Thinking. Dave Trott is the Executive Creative Director for CSTTG. He trained on Madison Avenue at the end of the Mad Men era, when the three-martini lunch and golf course advertising was for dinosaurs, and the creative revolution was just starting. After 4 years, to avoid getting drafted for Vietnam, Dave came back to London. Some of the advertising he worked on included: Ernie the Milkman for Unigate; Aristonandonandonandon (quoted in a speech by Margaret Thatcher); Red Rock Cider [...]
- September 17th 2012
- 16 Comments »
Surprise! Or Not! Competitive Industries
ShareTweet Nichola just asked me this: Which sectors have you found surprisingly competitive and why? I decided to answer this from my own billion-feet-in-the-air perspective, ask my link builders, and ask a few SEOs who don’t do exactly what I do. The results were pretty cool but not cool enough to put into any form of spreadsheet or nice set of graphs. Just read. The floral industry was insanely difficult and pricey in my opinion. This totally surprised me as I’d worked with that industry before and thought it was quite easy at the time but that was when I did regular SEO, not link building. I knew they would of course do big holiday and seasonal pushes as they’re [...]
What To Do When Good Links Go Bad
ShareTweet In my years of working in SEO, I’ve seen a lot of weirdness. Some of that weirdness is related to links and link building. There was the time we discovered 50,000 links built overnight or the time a carefully plotted strategy was ruined by spammers and scrapers. But what do you do when good link building goes bad? There are a lot of reasons why good links go bad. I’m not talking about link farms harming your rankings (naughty) or anything like buying a link on a specific site known to search engines for selling links. I’m talking about when good links go bad. There are lots of good links from valuable sources that you can get and sometimes [...]
Schema and CTR Increase
ShareTweet There’s a number of reasons a webmaster might want to markup structured content in a way that can render a data-type more clearly to search engines. Whilst this doesn’t have a causal effect on rank improvements, that more of your content can be “understood” more clearly, must be a positive right? Whilst there is some concern that marking-up your page content with Microdata, Microformats or RDFa may in some cases permit search engines to know enough about your page content and comparative data elements to bypass your page entirely; serving comparative results in-SERP, in most cases this seems somewhat alarmist when there are significant benefits to be had. This isn’t a how-to post, as I wanted to focus more [...]
Book Review – SEO ROI: Rules and Tactics of Advanced SEOs
ShareTweet I’ve been feeling a little SEOfatigued of late. Sick of hearing the same old regurgitated advice and seeing the same old presentation. I’ve found myself withdrawing from Twitter and retreating to smaller communities where the discussion is much more specific and emerges from real, in-the-field observations and results. And you know what? I’m learning more, much faster, and in a shorter amount of time. So, this isn’t a Twitter-diss; but more a natural evolution of my own approach to (constantly) learning SEO. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased when this book landed in my inbox reason being the content is very much of the insider-perspective, using situational examples as opposed to any grand SEO theory. About the Author, Editor [...]