Seo book gareth by Vikas V

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Table of Contents: INTRODUCTION:

Why search marketing?

Addressing keyword rankings.

Addressing return on investment.

The black art behind SEO.

About this book.

KEYWORD RESEARCH:

There is no single search term your customers find you through.

I’m only going to target a small range of terms.

How to identify whether a keyword is right for you. Does it fit? Review the competition. Test it.

19 19 20 21

Content creation – what are they looking for?

One keyword vs. thousands of keywords.

It’s called long-tail demand and it should be your primary SEO strategy.

Different types of keywords. Why does all of this matter to me?

27 28

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3|Page The different types of queries. Navigational Queries: Informational Queries: Transactional Queries:

28 29 29 30

An Introduction to Keyword Planner:

Some interesting keyword research strategies. Content creation around brand terms. Hooks: Industry Terms:

35 35 36 38

How do I check my progress?

What is â&#x20AC;&#x153;not providedâ&#x20AC;??

Some alternative tools for Keyword Research: Google Webmaster Tools: The YouTube Keyword Tool: Google Trends: SEM Rush: Bing Keyword Tool:

41 42 42 42 43 44

ON-PAGE OPTIMISATION:

How a positive can very quickly become a negative.

Indirect benefits and the user experience (UX).

The basics of keyword insertion.

Keyword insertion and the introduction of Hummingbird.

Does this mean that keyword insertion is dead?

The basics of page title optimisation.

Meta Description Optimisation:

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4|Page So, what should you be doing with your Meta Descriptions?

Content Development and Long-Tail Optimisation: Advanced Search Operators:

61 63

Long-Tail Optimisation: 65 Content Development for Long-Tail and Generic Terms: 67 How much content should I write? 67 Does my content have to be unique? 68 How many words do I have to write? 68 How often do I have to update my content? 69 Rel=author and AgentRank, incorporating a bit of vanity into search results. 70

ON-SITE OPTIMISATION:

How web crawlers work:

How do I get my site indexed? How do I get pages crawled quickly?76 Content which canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be crawled:

Duplicate Content and Canonicalisation: How much duplicate content can I get away with? How can duplicate content exist without me knowing about it? The Canonical Tag and 301 Redirects: Pagination and Filtering: Filtering or faceted navigation:

79 80 81 82 84 86

XML Sitemap:

Breadcrumb Navigation:

Footer Optimisation:

Reviewing Googleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Webmaster Guidelines:

LINK BUILDING BASICS:

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5|Page A definition of link building.

Why would I want to do this?

Not all links are created equal.

How link building works:

Where we were vs. where we are now. So, what’s happened? So, SEO is dead?

96 96 97

Where we are now.

Authority vs. Relevance vs. Trust vs. PageRank: 98 The balance of risk: 98 The Associated Risks From Conducting Less Ethical Link Building: 100 So, how do I get “caught” by a search engine? 101 So, we don’t build paid links into our website then? 102 Link Building Principles: Diversification: Outbound Links: Bad Neighbourhoods: Link Weight: NoFollow:

104 104 105 105 105 105

Analysing link metrics: Be Relevant: Generating a little PageRank:

106 108 110

Backlinks Analysis – the root of all knowledge! The tools you can utilise. Analysing link profiles.

112 113 113

LINK PROSPECTING AND MANUAL OUTREACH:

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6|Page How difficult is link prospecting? Don’t you have some dark art tactics to teach me?

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Building your prospect list.

119

Third-party tools to build an amazing prospect list. InkyBee: Buzzstream: Followerwonk: Ontolo: Scrapebox: MozToolbar: My Blog Guest:

121 121 122 122 122 122 123 123

How to conduct outreach. What you can achieve. The subject line. Use a signature. On-domain e-mail address. Get creative. Pick up the phone! Start SMALL. Ok, so what do I actually write? TAILOR your e-mails. Scalability vs. relationship building. Scalable: Relationship Building: Deciding who to outreach to. Getting in touch with difficult to reach people.

123 124 125 126 126 127 127 127 128 129 130 132 132 133 134

LINKABLE ASSETS AND CONTENT MARKETING:

136

Is content marketing right for you? Now, why does all of this matter to you?

137 138

Content Marketing: Do’s and Don’ts

139

Writing great content.

140

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7|Page Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re doing the same thing. Again. Is there something on your nose? Headlines. Images. Would I read this?

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Ideation: Yahoo Answers and Quora: Content Aggregators and Bookmarking Sites: Topsy: Backlinks Analysis: Ask your customers: How to: Google Suggest: Google Alerts:

147 148 148 148 149 149 149 150 150

Popular Posting Formats: Newsjacking: Interviews: Content surveys. Repurposing your content. Industry Round-Ups:

150 151 153 154 155 156

Infographic Development: Wow, why so much hard work? Coming up with a concept or idea. Remember your business objectives. Conduct a (small) infographic audit. Repurpose your infographic. Conducting research around your infographic. How to structure your infographic. Commissioning the design of your infographic. Create a draft. Infographic prospecting.

157 157 158 159 160 160 161 162 163 163 164

LINK BUILDING STRATEGIES AND MECHANISMS:

167

I love you.

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8|Page Competitive Backlinks Analysis:

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Broken Link Building:

170

Guest Posting: Finding guest posting opportunities.

173 175

Building relationships on web forums: Donation Pages:

175 176

Delivering Seminars:

176

Help a Report Out or Expert Sources:

177

Press Release Distribution:

178

Article Marketing:

178

DECENT web directories:

179

ALGORITHMIC UPDATES:

182

Why should I worry about being penalised?

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How do I know if Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been penalised?

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How to address a (link-based) penalty.

184

Google Penguin:

185

Google Panda: How does Panda define low-quality or thin content? So, what does this mean for you?

187 187 188

Google Hummingbird: So, what does this mean for me?

188 189

EMD Update:

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TOOLS AND RESOURCES: Google Alerts: Feedly: Wistia: Wistia Learning Centre: Advanced Web Ranking: Google AdPreview: Google Analytics: Google Webmaster Tools: Bing Webmaster Tools: Xenu Link Sleuth: Screaming Frog: SEO for Chrome, SEO Quake and MozBar: Social Crawlytics: Wayback Machine: SEM Rush: Scrapebox: Trusted Proxies: Majestic SEO/AHREFS/Open Site Explorer/SEO Spyglass: TechSmith Camtasia: Ontolo: oDesk, Elance, Mechnical Turk: Disqus: Yoast SEO/All in one SEO pack: Google Trends: Tweet Deck: AWeber: Linkdex: Kiss Metrics and Crazy Egg: Buzzstream: My Blog Guest: InkyBee: Topsy: Followerwonk: Audacity: Visual.ly: Pixlr: Ubersuggest:

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191 192 192 192 193 193 193 194 194 194 195 195 195 195 196 196 196 196 197 197 197 198 198 198 198 198 199 199 199 200 200 200 200 201 201 201 201 201

10 | P a g e Server Header Checker: Authorsure: Keyword Planner, YouTube Keyword Tool and Wordtracker: XML-Sitemaps.com: YSlow: URL Builder: Survey Monkey and Google Consumer Surveys: BrokenLinkBuilding.com: Linkstant: Schema Creator: SEO Tools for Excel: Tools from SEO Gadget:

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202 202 202 202 202 202 203 203 203 203 203 203

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INTRODUCTION: Why search marketing? If you’re about to read through a 40,000 words book on search, I suppose you should probably have a pretty good reason for doing so. I imagine you probably have a few ideas in mind: 

I want to rank in search for a keyword my competitors feature for.



I want to spend £x amount of money and get £y return in a simple, logical manner.



I want you to teach me some black art method or David Blaine-esque mind trick I can perform to do all this stuff.

The three ideas above are pretty common among clients, however they all pose inherent problems. So, let us start by dispelling some myths.

Addressing keyword rankings. Despite popular belief, putting all your eggs in one basket and going after the term you think your customers are searching for, is about the worst strategy around. Those ‘big’ keywords rarely drive that much traffic relative to the investment required to rank for them and what’s more, targeting them increases the level of risk you assume (which we’ll talk about in a lot more depth as we move on, particularly in chapter 5).

Addressing return on investment. If I were to boil modern organic search down to one factor, it would be links. The more links you acquire behind your website Written by Gareth Mailer, GarethMailer.com.

13 | P a g e i.e. from other websites, the higher you rank in search (search engines interpret links like votes in favour of your website – acquiring quality, valuable links will boost your visibility in search). However, the precise balance, the precise number of links, the precise nature of those links is all open to interpretation – more than anything, you have to believe in and trust the process. The more quality links you attract, the more your visibility in search will improve – that’s the mantra you have to live by. To understand the exact extent of work you need to undertake, you should begin by looking at the competition (we will address this as we move on).

The black art behind SEO. This book is about teaching you the secrets behind SEO, so I thought right off the bat I would just get straight to the point and let you in on the secrets, after all who wants to spend hours reading through 40,000 words of content? Ok, so here goes…are you ready? There are no secrets. There’s no secret key, magical formula, or fairy dust. There’s just a third-party search engine (I obviously don’t work for Google, or any other engine) and, most importantly, the experience of the search practitioner. This book is filled to the brim with actionable SEO advice, however I could probably fill about 70% of this book with ‘stuff’ people SHOULDN’T BE DOING. When it comes to what Google is looking for, you need to be aware of the following four points:

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Negative: there is stuff you really SHOULDN’T be doing. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY shouldn’t be doing.



Positive (minimal impact): The stuff that is often way over-hyped (particularly by bods at Google), the stuff that does help, but doesn’t have much of an impact.



Positive (actually works): This is the stuff that Google does and doesn’t tell you about - Google is very cagey when it comes to talking about most things orientated around link building/link acquisition, and rightly so (it’s obviously not in their interest to have millions of webmasters trying to manipulate search results).



Misinformation: The stuff which Google likes to talk about, but ultimately is a half-truth. Google likes to do public relations on certain things, it’s after all a lot easier to distribute a press release to millions of salivating-at-the-mouth webmasters than it is to release yet another algorithmic update (there’s more on what this means below).

Feeling pretty confused? I wouldn’t be surprised if you are – this is why most people buying SEO services end-up completely mystified as to what the hell is going on, who they should listen to, or what they should be doing. Me? I just like to cut through the noise, as much as possible. The online marketing space has changed markedly – tactics of old (tactics people still use today, particularly ‘SEOs’ selling services) either don’t work, are short-term or are downright dangerous for your long-term visibility. This book will show you the difference between competing ‘ideologies’. This book isn’t about my taking a moral stance on one side of the fence or the other – if you want to be a spammer, then

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15 | P a g e more power to you. However, I will say that after eight years working in this industry, spammers rarely prevail (unless you are REALLY, REALLY good at it but even then, your days are usually numbered). Rest assured however, we will cover off all options, all pathways and invariably, let you make your own mind up.

About this book. This book has been a long-time coming – it’s a reflection on my life’s work (to date!), it’s a lot of what I teach in training courses, it’s a lot of what any webmaster could ever need to push their website forward and get marketing results they never knew, in a world full of half-truths and false promises, could exist. This book hasn’t been written in a manner that demands you read from the beginning and straight through to the end, it’s pretty easy to jump in and out if there’s anything in particular you don’t understand or you want to focus on. This said, this book is predominantly aimed at beginners who want to take their knowledge of search from, well, nothing up to an intermediate and even advanced level. The difficulty I’ve had is in addressing just what I should include – in reality, I could spend my life in-front of a word processor and still not convey absolutely everything I want to. Find Me. Love Me. Link Me. is a book written predominantly with small business owners, webmasters and marketers in mind – I’ve covered off just about every conceivable important organic search orientated development and topic for 2014, and all you need to do is READ.

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KEYWORD RESEARCH: Whenever I ask the question ‘have you conducted keyword research?’ I’m usually given a couple of standard responses:  

I already know what my customers are searching for. I’ve got 3-5 terms I want to target in search, I know what I want to rank for.

In gist, keyword research is often seriously neglected. This is all the more frustrating because keyword research is at the root of just about every successful organic search strategy. In this book I’ve put together about 5,000 words of content on keyword research, quite frankly it’s such a big and important topic, it could easily fill a book (particularly if you were to focus on Analytics, too).

There is no single search term your customers find you through. It’s important to note, that roughly 20% of the queries made through Google are queries they (Google) haven’t seen in the last 90 days – we don’t know what they’re going to be, we just have to conduct research to identify what types of terms people have searched for in the past and make educated predictions that as result, they will likely search for these terms again in the future. Much of this research data can be pulled from tool like Analytics, your AdWords account (if you engage in paid search advertising), or a tool called the Keyword Planner (formerly called The Google Keyword Tool). However, the most important thing to keep in mind is that keyword searches are VERY fluid – what YOU may think

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18 | P a g e potential customers or visitors are searching for, VERY rarely translates in what they are actually searching for. Over time, the average length of a query has been getting longer and longer – searchers are becoming a lot more specific. What’s more, Google is increasingly modifying their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to incorporate a lot more elements which encourage users to stay on the page, rather than head to your website (for example, weather information, sports scores, event dates and times, telephone numbers and so on). All of these factors, as well as a lot more, have to be taken into account when conducting keyword research.

I’m only going to target a small range of terms. Search isn’t this simple anymore. This type of strategy, which is more often than not engaged in by SMEs, involves utilising links to secure generic keyword rankings in search – there’s a lot wrong with this type of practice (all of which we’ll cover off when we get to the link building basics section of this book). When you’re conducting keyword research, you have a few objectives: 



You are looking for search terms which tie in with your business objectives. If you want to drive more sales, you need to identify search terms which are more likely to drive conversions. Search volume (the total number of searches a particular keyword accounts for) isn’t be all and end all, 1% of 1,000 searches is far superior to 0% of 10,000. Keyword research informs your content strategy. You may have heard advice in the past that suggests you

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

should simply create very specific landing pages for all of your main target terms. While this holds some weight, a far better strategy is to identify what your potential customers are searching for, then develop meaningful content around those search terms. It’s important to try and discover, as far as possible, what your customers want – keyword research enables you to do this. There are infinite content development opportunities in your niche, you just need to discover firstly who your customers are, and then secondly, what they want from you.

How to identify whether a keyword is right for you. In just a few short steps we’re going to begin discussing the various merits of The Google Keyword Planner, and how it will help you identify the highest value keywords (or categories of keywords) in your niche. However, firstly, let’s take a look at how you determine the value of a keyword.

Does it fit? It’s a crazy question, I know – but is the keyword RELEVANT to what you do? Look at your exiting content and think whether this particular keyword is a suitable match for any of the content on your website. I ask this, because I regularly see online brands targeting some of the most ridiculous (high volume) terms which have little to nothing to do with what they offer. By being very specific and focused, and selecting terms which are very relevant to your brand, you will maximise the likelihood of a user actually converting on your website.

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Review the competition. The first thing you should do is perform a search and review the websites which currently hold position for this term. Needless to say, you should be looking at the organic listings (rather than the paid listings), however it’s also worth looking to the top and right-hand side of the page – are there a lot of advertisers?

If so, then it provides a relatively good indication that the keyword performs – if it didn’t, then advertisers wouldn’t be devoting their budget to acquiring clicks through the term in question. At this stage, it could also be advisable to have a look at the types of content which has been generated around this search term – are the results all commercial orientated landing pages? Or are some brands pushing forward useful information to try and tempt visitors onto their site?

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Remember, the hard sell isn’t always the most effective approach – in some instances, users just want information. There’s nothing wrong with that – at the very least, by getting in-front of them when they are hunting down information, you are bolstering your website’s brand awareness and building trust with the consumer.

Test it. Run an AdWords campaign, a small one. NOTHING BEATS ACTIONABLE DATA. If there’s a particular keyword (or category of keywords) you think will be worth

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22 | P a g e targeting, then launch a tester PPC campaign and start pulling in data. Keyword research using free tools like The Keyword Planner is great, however the best data is always REAL data. With an AdWords campaign, you will get an idea about both the value of your campaign and maybe even how well suited the specific pages on your website are to the term in question. Lastly, it’s worth reading through this report from Slingshot SEO. Search volume estimations (which you will be given through The Keyword Planner) are one thing, however it’s important to remember that search volume DOES NOT equate to traffic. A first page ranking in search is not a guarantee of traffic – particularly if it’s a lower volume query (i.e. under circa. 3,000 searches). As the report above suggests, a number one ranking in search will, on average, generate a click-through rate of 18%.

Content creation – what are they looking for? This is where the fun begins – in fact, it’s so much fun, at this stage I’m not really going to do anything other than introduce it. After you identify a search term, you need to set about developing content around that search term. Now, for example, you may have identified that your customers search for a specific keyword i.e. ‘gladiator sandals’. So, what do you do? You create a page of content, stick the word ‘gladiator sandals’ in there, say, 16 times and then hey – you’re done!

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23 | P a g e Yeah, don’t even think about doing that.

When it comes to content creation, Google is a LOT smarter than it used to be. Keyword insertion isn’t all that necessary – what’s more important is just writing naturally, as if the search engine isn’t even a factor in the equation. That relevance that you yearn for i.e. making the page relevant so the search engine is aware of what it’s ‘all about’, will be more capably generated using other methods which we will discuss in more detail as we move on. When it comes to creating content, the best approach isn’t just creating a page of content, the best approach is CREATING AN AMAZING PAGE OF CONTENT. Something that’s different, interesting, and useful for your visitors. Looking at the above example (‘gladiator sandals’), that page could include:   

A short, unique description of the product. Other related products. User reviews.

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GREAT pictures. And so on.

THIS is the type of information packed page which people will want to link to and as you will discover later in this book, links are rather important (and for a whole host of reasons).

One keyword vs. thousands of keywords. The important thing to note about keyword targeting, as stated above, is that it’s fluid. Let’s take our example from above and let’s presume that it’s an online retailer, specialising in women’s shoes – what search terms are they going to target? Or rather, what are their customers likely typing into search when looking for the types of products they sell? OPTION 1: The term “women’s shoes”. What do you think the problems are with targeting a term such as this? Well, there are lots. Firstly, what is the intent behind the search? It really is impossible to say. We know the searcher is looking for “women’s shoes”, but which type of shoes? What colour? What size? What price range?

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There are so many parameters left undefined. Now sure, there are a LOT of searches for the term “women’s shoes”, but how many of them are actually going to be purposeful for you? In essence, this person could be looking for anything – they could be searching for pictures of women’s shoes, they could be looking to buy women’s shoes in bulk…the list is endless. OPTION 2: ‘size 6 gladiator sandals suede’ For the sake of this example, let’s presume you sell gladiator sandals in suede. Now, what term would you rather make its way to your website, this term or option 1? It’s got to be this term, right?

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26 | P a g e You sell gladiator sandals, you’ve got them in size 6 and you’ve got them ready to sell. By driving traffic through these more specific terms, you will subsequently improve the probability of driving more sales. Want to know something even cooler? These terms are relatively easy to rank for. While option 2 may only drive, say, 1 visit (and the term “women’s shoes” may drive tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands), it’s nonetheless a very targeted visit.

It’s called long-tail demand and it should be your primary SEO strategy. Do you remember that stat above about 20% of the queries made through Google each day being unique (or not having been seen for the last 90 days)? These are the terms you need to tap into. The difficulty is, we don’t know what they’re going to be, however we have a broad idea, based on keyword research, on how users are likely to construct queries in our niche – they may integrate colours, size, material and type of shoe into the query string, which means we need to create relevance around this framework of likely search terms. The crucial parts of all of this is that not only are these queries easier to rank for, but when you have a solid, valuable base of content on your site (content which is relevant to the search terms your users are constructing) you will start to rank for these terms pretty much automatically (providing you follow the concepts outlined throughout the rest of this book). What’s more, when you collect these search terms together (longer, more specific search terms), then you will find that typically they vastly outnumber the traffic generated through

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27 | P a g e any single one, two, three, four or even five generic (short) keywords. This strategy is often referred to as long-tail targeting â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we will review it in a lot more depth as we move through this book, however for the time being try and cement in your head that these are the types of terms you REALLY want to be driving through to your website.

Different types of keywords. People search in different ways. From digging up online reviews, to identifying further information or conducting research around a product before making a buying decision, consumers are becoming savvier. This type of behaviour is often referred to as the buying cycle and ideally, if you hope to be successful online, you should be focusing on strategies to help guide users through the buying cycle. For example, the first step on a buying journey for many users is collecting information, the next step is reviewing who to buy from and then the next step is making a purchase (thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a bit of a watered down buying cycle, however a fuller picture is a bit beyond the scope of this book). Ideally, you should be able to serve up information and content which will guide them through the entire process, from beginning to end. If they are trying to discover which type of shoe is available to them, then give them a page full of content detailing exactly the type of shoes they can wear for, say, different events. If they are trying to discover whether or not your business is reputable, show them online reviews. If they are trying to buy from you, then make it easy for them to do so.

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28 | P a g e An interesting concept – which is again slightly outside the scope of this book – is TOFU (top of funnel), MOFU (middle of funnel), BOFU (bottom of funnel). At the top of the funnel you are really just building up a relationship with them (the prospective customer) and helping them out as much as you possibly can. Once they reach the middle of the funnel you are serving them up a different type of content, content which is designed to qualify them as a prospect. Lastly, you are aiming to convert them. You will likely have differing objectives based on what stage they are at in the funnel i.e. at the first stage, your only objective may be to capture their e-mail address (after all, when visiting your website for the first time, it’s far easier for a user to give out their e-mail address than it is to part with money). Throughout this process, you are feeding your customers with different forms of content. I appreciate that’s a very sparse description, so it may be worth checking out this great post on Moz for more information.

Why does all of this matter to me? It’s quite simple – you need to identify which terms people are typing in as they push through different stages of the funnel. Even if a visitor is using an “informational” query to find your website, there’s nothing to suggest they won’t be interested in purchasing from you in the future. Thus, on this particular page they’ve landed on, it may be worth focusing on lead generation (capturing their e-mail address), rather than direct selling.

The different types of queries. So, in consideration of the above, it’s important to understand the different types of intent behind a user’s query – most search

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29 | P a g e queries can be categorised under three distinct headings: navigational, informational and transactional.

Navigational Queries: These are typically brand orientated queries. Brand queries can often attract significant search volume, for example the term “Wonga” (a payday lender based in the UK) is searched for more than the generic term “payday loans”.

A navigational query doesn’t necessarily have to be just the brand term itself, for example it could be a term like “wonga short term loans”.

Informational Queries: As the name suggests, information queries are queries made by users looking for some form of information. The above query

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30 | P a g e “women’s shoes” could be categorised as an informational or a transaction query – the searcher could simply be looking for the history of “women’s shoes” (less likely, but possible), or they could be looking to make a purchase.

Transactional Queries: Again, as the name suggests, transactional queries are queries made by users who are further down the buying cycle and looking to convert. The word ‘convert’ doesn’t necessarily imply that the user wishes to part with money – a conversion could simply mean subscribing to a newsletter, or filling in a contact form.

An Introduction to Keyword Planner: If I were asked to recommend one specific tool for conducting keyword research, it would be The Keyword Planner. Google’s Keyword Planner is a new version of what was once The Google Keyword Tool – you can utilise the Keyword Planner to perform a range of functions, including:  



Identifying search volume totals for specific search terms. Review search volume totals for specific countries – nowadays, and with the keyword planner, it’s also possible to review search volume data to a city level (i.e. you can identify how much search is confined to, say, Manchester in the UK). Hitherto, you can select different match types using The Google Keyword Tool - with The Keyword Planner, the only match type available is ‘exact’ (which, at least when working on organic search strategies, is the only match type you really need). The Keyword Planner is very closely tied to paid search advertising – The Keyword Planner is actually an

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

amalgamation of traffic estimator and the old Google Keyword Tool. You need to have an AdWords account in order to be able to use The Keyword Planner. When The Keyword Planner provides a monthly search total, that total is actually an average of the previous 12 months search volume (rather than search volume from the previous or current month).

When you first open the Keyword Planner (via your AdWords account, the keyword planner can be found under the ‘tools and analysis’ menu item in the main navigation bar), you will be presented with the following screen:

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32 | P a g e Just click on the ‘search for new keyword and ideas option’ and try typing in a few sample keywords (within the ‘your product or service’ field), then take a look at the various targeting options, underneath:

It’s the settings to the left-hand side that we are most interested in, simply click on the various location buttons to choose a location you want to find search volume totals for – as you will see from the above screenshot, I’ve selected ‘United Kingdom’. Once you’ve input all the required options, just click the ‘get ideas’ button, which will take you to the following page:

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As you will see, The Keyword Planner defaults to the ‘ad group ideas’ tab – while this is quite useful for viewing pre-selected categories of keywords based upon your input, I prefer the keyword ideas view.

As you will see above, The Keyword Planner outputs a search volume total beside our input term(s), and also provides a list of additional terms we may or may not decide to target.

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34 | P a g e It’s worth noting you can bulk input terms, too (in the old Keyword Tool you were limited to a maximum of 100 search terms, however this limit has been lifted with the advent of Keyword Planner). Just go to the top of the page and beside the search bar click ‘modify search’ – this will allow you to input additional terms (you can also do this from the initial page). One further REALLY useful feature is the ability to combine keyword lists. If you head back to the initial start screen, you will see an option at the bottom of the page called ‘multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas’, as displayed in the screenshot below.

This feature enables you to provide modifiers, so the terms we’ve input in the left-hand side field will be appended to the terms we’ve input on the right-hand side. A modifier basically changes the direction of a keyword. When it comes to keyword research, it’s important to understand what types of modifiers your customers are using, or more

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35 | P a g e importantly, which types of modifiers you are happy for your business to be associated to. In the above field I’ve used a few different modifiers, but really the list is endless:      

Cheap Luxury Bespoke Best 5 Star And so on.

By conducting this type of research, you can VERY quickly come up with new content ideas and identify which types of modifiers your customers use more often than not to find your products or services online. With The Google Keyword Tool, we had to utilise a function in Excel called concatenation if we wanted to (quickly) append modifiers to lots of keywords – this feature obviously means we don’t have to do that. That’s pretty much a quick snapshot of what you can achieve with The Keyword Planner – I would recommend experimenting, coming up with lists of different modifiers and perhaps consider searching across different locations.

Some interesting keyword research strategies. Content creation around brand terms. One of the great things about consistently working on SEO strategies across many different industries is that you can pick up, very quickly, lots of different strategies and ideas from one industry to the next.

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36 | P a g e For example, in the UK, there are 4 main supermarket chains – Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys and Morrisons. The two biggest are Tesco and Asda and if you watch T.V. in the UK you will very regularly see adverts commissioned by one or the other proclaiming their prices are far lower than their competitors – in some of the adverts, they would even do price comparisons. A strategy which some brands utilise is targeting brand search volumes – for example, Wonga (the payday lender mentioned earlier in this chapter) has a page on its website, dedicated to ‘Quick Quid’, which is one of its biggest competitors. Essentially, Wonga is trying to target the term ‘Quick Quid’ in search, thus grabbing some of the brand search volume behind that term. Now, in this particular situation, there’s a serious ethical argument to make – personally speaking, and in the context of poaching some else’s brand traffic, it’s not something I would do. However, there are of course situations where it can be both ethical and productive to create brand pages on your website (for example, Auto Trader, a leading online used cars marketplace, frequently ranks in search for a range of brand terms associated to car manufacturers). IF you have a legitimate reason for doing this, it could be worth researching the search volume behind brand terms to identify potential content development opportunities.

Hooks: This is particularly effective when you’re launching a new product or service i.e. something which has little to no awareness around it. Say, for example, you are trying to market a new gadget and it’s golf orientated, like a golf swing analyser – the obvious term

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37 | P a g e you would probably go after is ‘golf gadgets’. However, the problem you are going to face is the fact that there’s little to no search volume behind it. So, you need to get creative. Create a new section on your website themed around ‘perfecting your golf swing’ and start targeting more generically i.e. “improve your golf swing”, “golf swing tips” and HOOK people into your product. Better yet, set up an e-mail capture form on the page (again, hook them in by offering them free golf swing tips by e-mail, or something a lot more valuable) and market to them directly via e-mail (and subtly). I have to say, I love this strategy and, as content producers consistently raise the bar year after year, it’s a very viable way to try and carve out some visibility in a niche you may otherwise not have considered. Lastly, when conducting keyword research it’s important not just to think about what your customers are searching for, but more importantly what they want. For example, if you are running a luxury hotel, it may be worth exploring ‘joined-up’ industries like concierge services (or maybe something like extreme sports, if this is something your customers are interested in). Simply develop content around these niches and then give that content to your customers – appealing to their interests is often a far safer strategy than appealing to their wallets! Interestingly, I watched a video featuring Gary Vaynerchuk recently and he actually mentioned this topic – he suggested creating a completely distinct site i.e. a site about extreme sports, and then feeding advertisements from your brand into posts and content on that site. The above is something we have done, albeit on a very limited basis, in the past – this type of content may obviously be a lot

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38 | P a g e more appealing to your customers than, say, the layout of your hotel, or your services, or whatever else features on your website (it’s after all informational content, designed to appeal at a more personal level).

Industry Terms: This is a GREAT strategy. A few months ago a web developer friend of mine approached me with a conundrum I hear just about every day of the working week: 'my industry is so competitive when it comes to acquiring more visibility in search and I’m starting from ground zero’. I suggested two things to him:  

Pursue a content-led strategy and focus on long-tail acquisition (we will discuss this in more depth later). Target industry keywords.

A lot of brands, naively, target a single generic search term, or target terms which, based on their resources, are out of reach. In most instances and particularly if you’re starting from afresh, it’s a lot more sensible to go granular, and go targeted.    

“web design for restaurants” “web design for hoteliers” “web design for plumbers” “web design for photographers”

Carve out a niche and you will make it work. What’s more, due to the relative lack of competition, you will make it work faster. His average order value (AOV) is also relatively high, so he only needs to pull in a few each month. n.b. the above aren’t specific keyword suggestions, but rather real services people are searching for – simply create content around these problems (or this demand) and drive people –

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39 | P a g e naturally - to your website. The idea here being to target the niches or industries which command the highest search volumes.

How do I check my progress? I wasn’t quite sure where in the book to put this, however it’s quite important information, so I just wanted to make sure I put it SOMEWHERE. One thing I’m always asked is how to check rankings in search. I know that probably seems a bit strange, however I’ve literally lost track of the number of times clients have got in touch with great excitement, proclaiming their rankings have jumped massively overnight, when in reality I know as soon as they mention it, it’s something altogether different. It’s called personalised search. Do you ever notice that pages you have visited, or have been recommended (on Google +) by your friends, often appear higher in search? This is Google trying to create a more relevant search experience for users – as far as they are concerned, there’s a high probability that if your friends or you have visited a site in the past, then you’ll probably be interested in it again. I’m not going to go into too much detail on personalised search, simply because I could be here all day, however I just want to show you a very quick way to mitigate against this problem so you can very quickly check specific rankings on-the-fly – it’s called Google AdPreview. AdPreview will provide you will a completely non-personalised interface and will enable you to search from any location within a designated country of your choice (results often change when you move around a country i.e. results in Manchester will be different to results in London, depending on the query).

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As you will see from the above screenshot, I’ve searched for the term “flowers” as if I were searching from New York – I’ve also done this through Google.co.uk (results will also obviously vary between different location-specific engines i.e. between Google.co.uk and Google.com.au). Alternatively, incognito mode in Google Chrome can also provide non-personalised results (however, more often than not I use AdPreview).

What is “not provided”? If you use Google Analytics and if you check your organic search reports, then you may have spotted “not provided” as the most frequent keyword referrer. In essence, not provided occurs when a user searches from a secured page on Google (all searches through Google are now SSL encrypted), the keyword referring data will not be visible in Analytics (however, you will still obviously be able to identify that the user has visited your website).

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41 | P a g e The best part? Well, this only impacts organic search visitors – it doesn’t impact AdWords advertisers (who can still see keyword referrer data when a user clicks on an Ad). Some, more cynical, marketers contend that this was implemented to drive more businesses to AdWords and away from organic search. Google’s official statement sights ‘privacy’ as the main reason for its implementation. I will leave you to make of this what you will. The main reason that this is an issue, is simply that it makes it a lot more difficult for organic search marketers to establish what’s working and what’s not, or rather which keywords are proving effective, and which are doing very little. Avinash Kaushik – who is as far as I and many other people are concerned is the World’s leading authority on Analytics – created a great post about various steps you can take as work around to this issue (however, it’s important to note that these are just workarounds, there is no way to fully circumvent “not provided”). If you are interested in the subject of “not provided”, it’s worth reading this recent post on Search Engine Land about how both Bing and Yahoo! Are implementing secure search and abiding by the principles of HTTPs protocol (whereas Google isn’t).

Some alternative tools for Keyword Research: I just want to be clear, in no way is Keyword Research confined to the Google Keyword Planner, there’s a vast swathe of tools out there which will further your research and give you more actionable insights – the reason I’ve focused on The Keyword Planner is simply because it’s one of the more popular tools and, well, the data comes from Google.

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Google Webmaster Tools: One option is the data you will find in your Webmaster Tools panel – if you haven’t signed up for a Webmaster Tools account, you can do so here (we will cover off webmaster tools in more depth further on in this book). Google Webmaster Tools will show you impression data at the keyword level – some marketers consider this as a substitute for the problems experienced with “not provided”, however the important point to note here is that it’s just impression data, rather than visits (‘impressions’ signifies how often a listing appears in search, rather than how often it’s clicked). Nonetheless, it can still throw you some interesting insight (particularly if you spot a keyword you otherwise would have missed).

The YouTube Keyword Tool: If you publish video content online, then this may be worth a look – personally, and while some people talk about and promote The YouTube Keyword Tool, I’m not a fan. The results are dubious to say the least – it’s not exactly what you would call feature packed, either. This said, it could be worth a quick look to see what you can get out of it – just be careful to select the correct match type (‘exact’) from the top-right hand corner of the tool.

Google Trends: Search volume can be seasonal, or in other words you can expect that certain search times will peak and dip at certain times throughout the year – for this problem, we have Google Trends as the solution.

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The screenshot above is a trend graph for a certain search term – the term peaked massively throughout November and December, can you guess what the term is? Google Trends is fantastic for being able to very quickly analyse what search terms will peak at which points in the year – it’s a vital tool when developing a content strategy.

SEM Rush: SEM Rush is a premium tool, however it packs a rather mighty punch. The main feature of SEM rush – from an organic search perspective, at least – is the opportunity to identify what your competitor’s main target search terms are. You simply type a competitor’s domain name into the search bar and SEM rush will deliver a full keyword report (keep in mind, the data is roughly 30 days out of date, so rankings may have shifted slightly in that time). It’s a really quick way to bolster your keyword research!

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Bing Keyword Tool: You’ve heard of Bing, right? I really shouldn’t be so flippant, recent reports suggest that Bing’s marketshare in the UK hovers around 6% (Google’s marketshare is close to 90%) and Yahoo is now also, obviously, powered by Bing search. I have to admit, the Bing keyword tool isn’t one I’ve used a great deal – the main limitation for me when I last picked it up was the fact I could only search one keyword at a time. That’s a bit of a deal breaker for me. That said, there are advantages to using the tool over Google’s Keyword Planner, so it’s well worth a look. These are just a few of many available keyword research tools – I’ve stopped here for no other reason than I don’t want this to end up being a book dedicated to keyword research! Next stop, on-page optimisation.

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ON-PAGE OPTIMISATION: On-page optimisation is one of the groupings or facets of search engine optimisation which many webmasters often struggle to get their head around, and there a few reasons for this: 



Historically speaking, on-page optimisation factors like keyword insertion or page title optimisation have been recklessly abused. Misinformation about the relative importance of these factors is rife. Within on-page optimisation, as is the case within other aspects of SEO including off-site optimisation, there are both positive and negative factors, or rather things that you should be doing and things that should be avoiding. When it comes to on-page optimisation (in fact, when it comes to any aspect of SEO), enhancing the user experience should take precedence over any form of optimisation.

On-page optimisation still plays a very large role in search engine optimisation. However, when working on on-page optimisation, you really should be more concerned with how you are improving the quality of a page and be aware of how those improvements can in many instances – indirectly – impact upon your visibility in search.

How a positive can very quickly become a negative. I’ve introduced a few concepts above, so let’s just go into them in a little bit more detail. One example of a positive factor, is ensuring that your copy is relevant to a target search term – one approach for improving your relevance to a term, is to insert that term, naturally and Written by Gareth Mailer, GarethMailer.com.

47 | P a g e only where it’s relevant, in the copy of the page; this would be a positive factor. However, this can also, very quickly, translate into a negative factor (or rather, something which could do more harm than good) – many webmasters like to go overboard by inserting the same keyword into their copy time and time again and as a result, compromise on the user experience (UX). Factors such as these i.e. ethical direct optimisation, aren’t particularly heavily weighted (from a direct, technical perspective) and in order to be fully effective, they need to be backed up by other signals Google relies more heavily upon i.e. link signals (which we will go into in a lot more depth in later chapters).

Indirect benefits and the user experience (UX). Another aspect of on-page optimisation which is too frequently neglected, is the indirect benefit to be had from bolstering the user experience. A large factor in improving your visibility in search is link acquisition. In order to engage people enough to entice them into placing a link to your website, you really need to provide the best possible on-page experience you can. For example, take a look at this recent post from Econsultancy which touches upon how Sports Direct has focused on improving the user experience by creating an effective site hierarchy, plenty of logical subcategories and promotions and focusing on the quality of content at the product level. In regards to indirect benefits, or content improvements, there are lots of things you could focus on however above all else, it’s about adding value and being better than the rest:

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48 | P a g e 



 



Incorporating more multimedia into the page can be useful, I’m particularly fond of embedding video content or utilising services like Amazon S3 (a hosting solution) and Wistia (a video hosting solution with lots of add-on value) to add even more value to a page. Focus on developing a responsive site i.e. mobile friendly. Ensuring that the user-experience is not interrupted across any popular, modern browser, or device (web pages can display differently depending on the user’s browser, if it’s a particular old browser then it may not be compatible with modern web technologies or standards). A consistent navigational structure and one that is easily understood. Page speed is a factor in search engine optimisation – it’s worth looking at tools like YSlow, which provide speed reports. You can also crawl all the images on your site using a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth, this will provide you with a crawl report which includes the location and filesize of each image. Each page should be specific to a category of users, or keyword – the page ideally should match the intent behind user’s queries. Following on from the above, if a website is targeting international user’s then the appropriate steps should be taken in webmaster tools, and various, specifically local, features should be incorporated into the page i.e. translated content, currency options etc. Various social media sharing options should be incorporated i.e. to enable the content to be shared quickly across a multitude of social networks. If Wordpress is your platform of choice, there are a variety of plugins which can help with this.

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49 | P a g e 

More than anything, the page should be valuable and linkable.

We will look at a lot more factors for improving the userexperience as we move through this book. One of the larger issues with focusing purely on direct optimisation principles, rather than more indirect user-focused principles, is that there’s a trade-off – in many instances, over utilising direct optimisation principles will hinder the user experience.

The basics of keyword insertion. ‘keyword insertion’ has inherited some very negative connotations, principally because it’s one of those factors that is both so easy to manipulate and widely abused (the two do usually go hand-in-hand, unfortunately!). Keyword insertion refers to the introduction of relevant keywords into the copy of a web page with the intention of bolstering the visibility of that web page when a user types that keyword, or a similar keyword, into search. In years gone by, keyword insertion has been manipulated, abused and just blatantly undermined: 



Webmasters, reading about bogus concepts like keyword density, would incorporate the keyword into the content of a page a certain number of times based on some perceived correct ratio. As noted, it’s bogus. Some webmasters would blatantly spam the footer section of their web pages with variations of the same keyword, time and time again – a common tactic in this regard is inserting area postcodes in the footer of a web page, in the hope they will form part of a user’s query. Moving even further back, some webmasters would even insert thousands of supposed relevant queries into a web page and disguise them by using a font colour

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50 | P a g e which matches the background colour of the web page. It really is enough to make you laugh and yes, this practice can still be found on some web pages today. Needless to say, I completely discourage you from engaging in practices such as these – they are absolutely pointless, completely unprofessional and potentially risky. Keyword insertion should be done so sparingly – inserting a target search term, NATURALLY, into web copy, once or maybe at the very most twice, will be more than enough. Truth be told, if ‘writing naturally’ demands you insert a keyword into your copy more than twice, then so be it. It’s not that you should forget optimisation principles when creating copy, it’s more that you should lower their priority and factor them in only when it’s relevant to do so. More than anything, keyword research should inform your content, rather than encompass it. Identify what your users are searching for and help them by providing relevant content around their queries.

Keyword insertion and the introduction of Hummingbird. More recently (August, 2013), Google has implemented an infrastructural change which has been dubbed Hummingbird (note, this isn’t an algorithmic update per say but an infrastructural change, a suitable analogy is to think of an infrastructural change as replacing the engine, whereas an algorithmic update merely upgrades some of the moving parts). Hummingbird, in layman’s terms, expands Google’s understanding of the relationships between words. As noted above, 20% of the queries made through Google each and every day are unique (Google has never seen them before in the order

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51 | P a g e they’ve been put together) however, as you would expect, without direct results matching these very specific and very long queries, it could be difficult for Google to assign the best possible results (or rather, find ‘matching documents’ which include the specific query on the web page). So, Hummingbird has improved Google’s contextual understanding. Where a web page fails (understandably) to include the very specific query or portions of that query that the user has entered, Google can now better process or comprehend the intent behind that query and match it to the shorter, more generic language, used on web pages. Hummingbird will produce results which are more orientated around the intent behind the user’s query. This brings forward a range of different implications. Hummingbird is focused on establishing what the real intent is behind a query and as result, webmasters which have, hitherto, relied on a more direct form of optimisation (by trying to insert different modifiers or queries into content), may see a dip in traffic. It’s important to note that even prior to Hummingbird, keyword insertion alone was very rarely enough to rank prominently across a wide range of longer queries – it was and is still a factor, however it needs to be backed up by other signals, too i.e. link signals (we will go into link building a lot more as we move further through this book).

Does this mean that keyword insertion is dead? No. I still recommend creating content which incorporates relevant search terms, as well as conducting research to identify how users are search in your industry. This latest update is about Google grabbing the user’s query, winding it down a little and

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52 | P a g e understanding the contextual relevance, or context, behind the query, and then serving up results, almost as though they had entered a generic, shorter term. At this stage, I would still recommend engaging in practices like long-tail optimisation (which we will discuss in just a moment) but much like every other practice, don’t overdo it. The fundamental idea is to improve the contextual relevance of a page by incorporating relevant search terms (which are relevant to the page of content) into your copy – it may be the case that, over time, and as Hummingbird evolves, this practice may be less and less important (however, some contextual relevance will obviously always be required).

The basics of page title optimisation. This is probably the most important on-page factor, at least in terms of the relative weight Google puts behind on-page factors. You can find your page title in your HTML source (HTML stands for ‘hypertext markup language’, it’s the ‘code’ used to structure web pages) – please see a screenshot below:

The output from the <title> tag is you ‘headline’ in search:

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If you’re using Wordpress, or any other popular CMS or blogging platform, then you should also be able to edit your page title from within your admin panel. One of the easiest ways to do this with Wordpress is to install a plugin i.e. The All In One SEO Pack, or Yoast SEO. So, what do you actually need to do with a page title? 



Ensure that all page titles are completely unique – this doesn’t mean you can’t have some commonality between titles, it simply means that the bulk of the title needs to be unique. ENSURE that the title is relevant to the content contained on the page. Ideally, the page title, which is displayed as the headline of your search engine result, should be utilised to entice the user to click on the result, rather than just for direct optimisation. You can insert a target term (just make it legible!) and potentially consider some longer-tail variations around that term, too. We will go into more depth about long tail optimisation as we move on.

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54 | P a g e 

 

Try and keep all pages titles to a maximum of 65 characters including whitespace in length, otherwise they may be cut off from view in the search engine results pages (SERPs) – see the screenshot below. As above, the page title will be displayed as the headline of your result, you want the user to be able to read the full title. Consider inserting HTML characters into your title but again, don’t dampen you brand image – be subtle. Consider inserting a telephone number into your page titles, or meta description (more on this below) – this is particularly useful for mobile users, it will prevent them from having to navigate through to your website and (if you don’t have a responsive design) having to awkwardly click around and magnify your telephone number. When a phone number is displayed in your page title, they can simply click to call. You can use the | or the – to separate words in your title. Consider appending your brand name to the back of each of your page titles, I personally like this approach from a brand consistency point of view (this said, there’s little to no direct optimisation benefit to be had from doing so).

An example of a page title cut-off from view in the SERPs:

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You CAN target more than one keyword in a page title and to a page. For example, say you wanted to target the terms “hotel in London” and “London hotel” and “London b&b” to one page of content and in one page title, you could simply do the following: 

“Hotel & B&B in London | Mike’s Hotel”

That title will be relevant to all of the keywords listed above, you do NOT need to write out the following: 

“Hotel in London, London Hotel, London B&B | Mike’s Hotel”

Not only does the latter title look ridiculous, it also takes up more space – while the latter title will likely give you a very marginal boost for the target terms included in the title, the trade-off i.e. usability and professionalism, REALLY isn’t worth it. n.b. OBVIOUSLY it’s unlikely that any business will be a B&B AND a hotel, however it’s just an example. Lastly, don’t cram your title with terms – this isn’t an exercise in spam. Keep it natural and try and communicate what the page is about and why it will benefit the visitor. As above, you can

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56 | P a g e target a wide selection of terms from one page title if you do it correctly.

Meta Description Optimisation: Just to be absolutely clear, your meta description is NOT a direct ranking factor i.e. inserting a keyword within your meta description will not impact directly on your visibility in search. That said, the meta description IS a bit of a sales pitch for your page – make sure you communicate how you will help the user and clearly articulate what the page is all about. Please see the image below for where your description appears in your HTML source code – the meta description will also, potentially, be displayed below the heading of your listing in search too, hence why it’s a sale pitch i.e. it encourages the user to click on your listing.

This is the corresponding output of the above meta description in search:

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As above, there are various Wordpress plugins (listed above) which incorporate Meta description editing.

So, what should you be doing with your Meta Descriptions? 



Try to ensure that all Meta Descriptions fall short of 165 characters in length including whitespace, otherwise they may be cut off from view in the SERPs. Consider incorporating calls to action in your meta descriptions to entice users to click on your listing, good examples of calls to action include: o Get o Find o Visit o Read o Look o Compare Insert your telephone number, where relevant, in your meta description (for the reasons stated above i.e. click to call).

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58 | P a g e  

Consider inserting HTML characters in your meta descriptions. Inserting a target keyword into the Meta description will increase the probability that Google, or another search engine, will choose to utilise the Meta Description (as opposed to ignore it).

Now, there are also instances where using a meta description may NOT be an appropriate choice – you can of course just omit the inclusion of a meta description from your HTML source, should you choose to do so. For example, if you do not include a meta description, then Google will simply select a snippet of relevant text from the page and use this as this description for your result. This can sometimes be more effective, because the snippet of text which Google selects will be relevant to the query the user has entered, rather than simply a non-query-dependant custom meta description. I often favour omitting meta descriptions for this exact reason, particularly where I envisage attracting a significant portion of long-tail traffic to a page (more on this later).

ALT Text Optimisation: ALT text is simply text in your HTML source which is read back to visually impaired users i.e. it’s an attribute within the <img> tag (don’t worry if you don’t know what that means, you don’t need to). It helps a visually impaired user understand what an image is, or rather what’s contained in an image. Search engines also use ALT text – search engines struggle (to a degree) with image processing i.e. they don’t know specifically what’s contained within an image, they rely on ALT text to help

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59 | P a g e ‘convert the image to readable text’. ALT text will also help your images appear more prominently in image search. Google is rapidly improving its image processing technologies: 



They can now detect flesh tones and different body parts within images. For example, if you perform a search within image search you will see options down the left-hand side i.e. ‘head’. Optical character recognition (OCR) is also making greater strides i.e. being able to detect text within an image.

In terms of ALT text, all you really need to do is create content which is relevant to the displayed image – in essence, just describe the image. Again, don’t stuff keywords in there, just write naturally. All in all I don’t spend a great deal of time optimising images, mainly due to the fact that I’d imagine the vast majority of people browsing image search are looking to do one thing: pinch images. This being said, adding visual imagery to your blog posts is a great way to increase user-engagement – utilising ALT text is an obvious step towards an improved user experience.

Filename: The filename of your page (URL or address) simply refers to its location on your web Server – a web Server is in essence an interconnected hard drive which stores all of your website’s files. There are a number of important concepts to understand with regards to filenames, however on the whole it’s not really much of an issue. 

Try to avoid using excess parameters in your URLs. Google’s official position suggests that you shouldn’t use more than 2 parameters in your URLs, however

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

having excess parameters in your URLs won’t necessarily prevent them from being indexed. Here’s an example of parameters being utilised in a URL: example.com/seo?=abc&node=123 etc. Just take a look at Amazon, or some other REALLY large e-commerce websites if you want to see ridiculous, non-intuitive URLs. Try and ensure that your URLs are readable – this is great for usability and it also helps from an SEO perspective, too. For example, rather than example.com/s?id=123 this would be more appropriate: example.com/washing-machine-repair. Language extensions i.e. .html or .php don’t really matter. These can be re-written via .htaccess however, should the need arise (don’t worry if you don’t understand this, we will discuss .htaccess in more depth later, or during the next update to the book). Don’t worry too much about using either subdomains i.e. seo.example.com or subdirectories i.e. example.com/seo – it’s much of the same, however some people claim that subdomains are more likely to be treated as independent entities in their own right (‘claim’ is the best word to use – on the whole, I would say stick with subdirectories i.e. example.com/subdirectory/)

All in all, don’t worry too much about filenames, just try wherever possible to make sure they are readable.

Headers: Headers can be found in your HTML source by simply right clicking on the page, selecting ‘view source’, and then searching within the HTML source code for ‘h1’ or ‘h6’ (or any number in-

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61 | P a g e between). Headers are often regarded by many webmasters as being pivotal in direct optimisation when again, the evidence stipulates otherwise. There are millions of pages ranking in search for generic queries which don’t include keywords within header tags. Again, it’s not going to harm, however headers are far better being utilised to break up and theme content on the page i.e. to make content more digestible. In short, optimise your headers or don’t optimise your headers, it’s entirely your choice, however it won’t impact much on your visibility in search any more or any less than standard keyword insertion does.

Content Development and Long-Tail Optimisation: Content development is at the heart of everything that search should be about – ultimately, all users want to find is good quality content. They want to find quality products, they want to read great stories and they want to scan the latest news. However, it’s important to note that the equation (how to acquire more visibility in search) doesn’t begin and end with content development. Content does play a very important role in generating more relevance for your website around the types of queries you will be hoping to appear for and more importantly, it impacts on what the user does on your website – however, other signals, including links, play a very, very big role in the equation. My recommendation is always to focus on adding more value, this could be in the form of: 

User-generated content, or rather comments or reviews.

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

Promotional content designed to direct the user to performing some sort of desirable action (which ideally should be backed up by some form of social proof i.e. testimonials). Informational content designed to help and inform the user and enable them to make sound buying decisions.

The list of content which you could include on a page is endless, however there’s something even more important here that we have even touched upon yet – testing. There are two cast-iron rules I follow when it comes to internet marketing:  

Don’t spam. Test.

Never, ever presume to know or understand what your users want. IF you are struggling to decide on what content should be included on a specific page, then ask your visitors in the form of a qualitative survey (a good option in this regard is survey monkey, this said there are absolutely hundreds of survey tools out there). Once you have their responses, conduct an A/B test – an A/B test will in essence rotate various versions of a page and show data relating to how each version has performed. It gives you really actionable insight and is a far better approach than merely resorting to guess work. It may also be worth using heat map or other conversion tools like Crazy Egg or Kiss Metrics, to identify where users are looking or interacting with a specific page – all of these tools are designed to enable you to do one thing: convert more users.

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63 | P a g e More often than not, your first step will be conducting basic tests to enhance the user experience, rather than focusing on generating more traffic through additional marketing channels. Finally, and a bit of an open question, what might you do if you arrive at a page which doesn’t fulfil the intent behind your search query? In most instances, the answer is head to the internal search function, or in other words the website’s internal site search. Google Analytics allows you to monitor what users are typing into your internal site search and I’d absolutely recommend getting this set-up straight away, it gives you a much fuller insight into what your customers are really looking for (it can also inform your keyword research and targeting). You can find full information on activating internal site search here. It’s also possible to review UX-orientated information in Google webmaster tools – you can find everything from speed reports to reports on page title or meta description duplication within your webmaster panel. I hope you’re detecting the recurring them here: user experience is EVERYTHING.

Advanced Search Operators: One of the best ways to get a feel for the existing indexation (i.e. the number of pages Google has “picked up” from your website) of your website, is to use advanced search operators. Please see some of the more popular options below: 

“site:” command: This is perhaps the most popular advanced search operator. If you type “site:example.com” into Google, it will return a list of pages Google has indexed from the domain example.com. If you look towards the top of the page,

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

you will also see a stat which shows the total number of pages Google has indexed from the specific domain. Just to be clear, this figure should only be used as a guide, it’s not an accurate indication. “cache:” command: this operator will provide you with the version of the page you have entered as it was last picked up (crawled) by the search engine. We will go into more depth about web crawlers as we move on, however for the time being think about this operator as a way of identifying the last time Google ‘stored’ the specific page on your website. For example, enter the following query: “cache:example.com” “inurl:” command: This is a useful command for returning results which include a specific keyword in the URL of the page. For example, perform the query “inurl:wedding”, this will return results which contain the word “wedding” in the URL. “filetype:” This command can be utilised to only return results with a specific file type, for example PDF. Perform the query “filetype:doc” and this will return results with the specific filetype .doc. This is a great query for finding data you, well, probably shouldn’t be finding. For example, try the following query: “web design quotes filetype:xls”. That query will return excel documents which contain quotes from your competitors (if you’re a web designer). Exact search: You can perform an exact search by simply searching for a query between quotes or speech marks e.g. “football tickets for sale” will return results which contain the EXACT term “football tickets for sale”.

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65 | P a g e These are obviously a few of the main advanced search operators I use on a daily basis, however you can find a LOT more (all of which have their own useful applications) on this page. Ok, so why am I telling you all of this? Well, it will come in VERY useful as we move through the book – advanced search operators have lots of applications, some of which are orientated around acquiring links into pages on your website. The first thing I encourage you to do however is to use the site: command to get a rough gauge on how many pages Google has indexed (picked up) from your website; I would also evaluate your cache date (for your home page, to see the last point at which Google stored a cache of your page). Finally, you can also look at the index status of a specific URL by typing that URL after the site command (in other words, the site command isn’t limited to just displaying all of the URLs on your website, you can be a lot more specific).

Long-Tail Optimisation: Long-tail optimisation is simply the process of targeting queries which are longer than 3 or 4 words in length. Now, as noted above in the keyword insertion section, 20% of the queries made through Google each and every day are unique i.e. they have never been made before (and that’s a LOT of queries you can potentially tap into) – I’ve mentioned that statistic about three times now, I hope it’s sticking! What’s more, long tail queries are typically further down the buying cycle too, which means in many instances, they are more likely to convert or perform a desirable action when they land on your website.

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66 | P a g e The first thing you need to do is analyse your Analytics data for patterns – if you don’t have an Analytics account set-up yet, do so now. For example, you may own an online appliance store and within that appliance store, you sell washing machines. You may sell washing machines from a lot of different brands however you’ve decided to branch out and start selling Zanussi washing machines (albeit, at this stage, only one). You think about the types of terms people are likely to type into search when looking for this washing machine and then it hits you, it’s obvious, you want to target the term “zanussi washing machine”. You integrate this term into your copy and maybe even your page title – you sit down and you pat yourself on the back. Job well done, right? Well, no. First of all and ignoring all of the endless user-experience improvements which you could invariably incorporate on this page, you probably want to make your targeting a little bit more granular or rather, a little more specific. 

  

Incorporate the model number on this page – the model number is invariably something a user would utilise as part of a query they type into search. By inputting the model number, you’re likely to attract visits from users who are a lot further down the buying cycle. Does the washing come with varying functionality? Does the washing machine come in different colours? And so on.

This type of information will not only enhance the userexperience, but it’s also beneficial from an optimisation perspective, in the regard it will increase the probability that the

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67 | P a g e page will be matched to a relevant, intent-focused query made through search. In gist, the more content, features and benefits you can incorporate on the page and the more signals which fall behind the page i.e. links, the better the page will perform. Long tail optimisation also NEEDS to be supplemented by link building activity – the more links your content generates, the better the results i.e. the broader range of queries within that 20% you will appear for.

Content Development for Long-Tail and Generic Terms: I hope you like writing, because you’re going to be doing a lot of it. Content creation is pivotal to what SEO is all about – search engines are looking not just for quality content but content that helps users. In this section I just want to address some more general points, a bit of an FAQ section for questions which I know people have, or that I get asked a lot.

How much content should I write? As much as you like and as much as is necessary to enable you to fully inform your visitors and provide the best userexperience possible. Much like with anything SEO, there is no magic number – content creation and user-targeting is a little bit akin to casting a very large net; you put the content together, you throw it out there and you see what you can grab. When you grab a few fish, you learn from you findings – you then apply your learnings so you can grab even more fish. The context behind the analogy is ultimately that once you start driving small trickles of traffic to your website, you will be better able to identify how to attract more (by reviewing Written by Gareth Mailer, GarethMailer.com.

68 | P a g e organic keyword reports in Analytics and identifying which keywords people are using to find your website).

Does my content have to be unique? YES, absolutely yes. Every single page on your website should contain absolutely unique content. We’re going to go on to discuss duplicate content in more depth, however the gist is this: if you create two URLs which share the same content, then those two URLs will potentially both be indexed by the search engine, and both URLs will subsequently compete against each other. DON’T duplicate content off-site. A lot of people copy and paste content from their website to various local directories or social profiles like YouTube or Facebook. Do you really want your Facebook page to rank ahead of, or in place of, your main website? The odds on that happening are relatively remote and it is a more extreme example, however DON’T detract from the value of your website by duplicating the content you have spent time creating. Every page of content should be COMPLETELY unique. We will discuss this in more depth later on and address topics such as canonicalisation, too. n.b. DO NOT SPIN CONTENT EITHER. If you don’t know what that means then good, don’t bother finding out.

How many words do I have to write? You don’t ‘have’ to write anything, however for every page you write and for every link you build, consider it as an investment, as value that will LAST. It’s likely the case – but not always – that the more content you write, the more value you are providing to your users. With more value comes more links, with more links comes more visibility.

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69 | P a g e On average, most landing pages which we create contain at least 300 words of content – when I write a blog post, I hit more around the 1,000 words mark. Some posts I’ve created have spanned around 5,000 words. This book spans about 40,000.

How often do I have to update my content? You don’t, ever. Think of it this way – when you’ve created a page of content, you’re done. It will sit there, on your website, for good. Day after day, week after week, month after month just waiting and then…BANG. Someone types in a relevant query into Google and your page comes up in position no. 3 and they click it. You don’t NEED to update your content, however it’s obviously VERY beneficial to do so if your content becomes outdated or worse, outmoded. A lot internet marketer’s refer to a concept called query deserves freshness (QDF). QDF is Google’s method for adjusting results based upon what’s fresh or trending, it’s particularly applicable when new technology is released. If a query is generating a lot of traffic, Google then may look for the freshest stories or news items around that query, and give them a boost in search. Take a term like “Manchester United” – if the season is over, and there are no games being played, then the likely results will be the official Manchester United website, and maybe pages from a few authoritative websites like BBC.co.uk. However, if a game has just finished, then you will likely see results for match reports.

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Rel=author and AgentRank, incorporating a bit of vanity into search results. Have you ever spotted pictures of bloggers and webmasters in search and wondered what they are? Well, it’s something called authorship markup.

Authorship is a project set-up by Google to try and attribute ownership to content – in essence, it’s another potential signal they may utilise in the future to weed about webspam and identify quality content. The whole process works by linking your content to your personal Google+ profile – you can view full set-up instructions here. There’s been a great deal of talk about authorship throughout 2013, notably how it will tie in to AuthorRank (or rather, AgentRank) which is a concept that suggests Google may, in the future, build up an overall profile (or form of reputation score) of the quality of you as an author, based upon your contributions and the relative value or success of those contributions. Authors with a higher reputation score could be boosted in search – there’s a good post on Moz about how this may or may not all come together (it is, at this stage, mostly conjecture, albeit educated conjecture).

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71 | P a g e More recently, AJ Kohn (a blogger who many consider to be an authority on this matter), discussed the death of authorship in its current form, and how authorship may move forward in the future. At the moment, just focus on using the provided markup (linked to above) for your personal posts, and maybe utilising rel=publisher for your Google+ business page â&#x20AC;&#x201C; you can view more about the distinction between rel=author (personal) and rel=publisher (business) in this useful presentation prepared by Ann Smarty.

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ON-SITE OPTIMISATION: In this section we’re going to be addressing aspects of Search Engine Optimisation which are going to get a little bit more technical – we’re going to be introducing what are probably a lot of new terms to you i.e. canoncialisation, XML Sitemaps, pagination, filtering, accessibility, click depth and so on, however it’s also a section which is quite frankly, VERY important. A lot of these factors have some form of direct SEO benefit, however pretty much all of them have a user-experience benefit – as noted above in the chapter on on-page optimisation, the main focus when creating a site hierarchy (i.e. creating a logical structure where important pages fall at the top of the hierarchy and link internally to deeper pages) is on user-experience, when you focus on the user-experience, much of the SEO aspect takes care of itself. Now, on-site optimisation is a bit too neglected in my opinion, a lot of the stuff we’ve covered above is addressed by most SEOs and typically in a far more watered down fashion; that said, it’s fairly common sense stuff. However, in this section we’re going to be looking at how web crawlers (search engines) interact with your website and how to structure your website in such a way to make it more accessible. The tips below are what you will need to utilise now and pay particular attention to as your website grows – the section which follows is of particular importance to people who have innately large(r) websites i.e. e-commerce stores.

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How web crawlers work: Yet another section which could go into tremendous detail, however for the sake of brevity I will keep it to what you need to know. A web crawler is in essence a lot like a computer program, all it does ALL DAY is scour the web for content. Once it picks up content, it stores it in a server (it caches it) ready to be retrieved when a user performs a query in search (Google owns multiple data centres which are home to lots of web Servers). A web crawler will at some point land on your website (providing your website has been linked to and in some cases even if it hasn’t been linked to – we’ll go into this later) and it will go through the links on your website and ‘pick up’ your content. It stands to reason that the more links you have pointing into your website the more often it will be visited by web crawlers (or rather pages on your website will be visited by web crawlers). The easiest way to visualise how a web crawler works is to think of the London Underground – think of the track as links and the websites as stops.

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If you have a lot of links pointing into your website, then the crawler will visit your website more often (for example, Amazon.com has over 100 million links pointing into its website and is crawled every hour), if you have a small number of links you will be crawled less often (GarethMailer.com has very few links pointing in – it’s only just been launched – and it will be crawled a lot less frequently. Even with a massively popular website, I’m very unlikely to even come close to the size of Amazon’s link profile!). Please note, I’m speaking generally about this to avoid making it, well, mundane – when I refer to GarethMailer.com or Amazon.co.uk, I’m referring more specifically to the homepages of these sites, there may well be pages on Amazon.co.uk which aren’t crawled for days or weeks at a time; everything depends on the relative value of pages, high value pages (pages which have high value links pointing in or are further up the site hierarchy) will receive more attention from web crawlers. It’s important to remember that the primary objective for a search engine is to sort through all of the documents contained within its index and then order those document by relevance

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76 | P a g e and importance (the relevance of a document being determined by the user’s query or input). Search engines utilise many factors when it comes to assigning relevance or importance, these factors include on-page, on-site and off-site factors, many of which will be addressed in this book. For a snapshot of what search engines look for, take a look at Moz’s ranking factors or the list of 200 ranking factors compiled by Brian Dean (a.k.a. Backlinko). For the seminal paper which acted as the basis for Google, please view Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine (please note, this isn’t bedtime reading!).

How do I get my site indexed? How do I get pages crawled quickly? The simplest way is to just create an ethical link on a web forum you currently utilise, or at another location where usergenerated content is permitted, linking back into your website. Now, not all links are created equal in terms of the value they pass on (when someone links to your website it passes on ‘value’ as we discuss in more depth below, the more value you build up the better your visibility in search) however that’s not what we’re looking to do here. All you need to do is get an ethical (purposeful) link on a web forum and the page you have created should be indexed within 72 hours. You can also request Googlebot (Google’s web crawler) visits your site by typing “Google add URL” into Google and clicking on the first result. QUICK NOTE: DON’T EVER PAY SOMEONE TO “GET YOUR SITE INDEXED”.

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Content which can’t be crawled: Not all content can be crawled and not all content is indexable (indexed simply means stored as a cache – you can view the cache of any page on your website by using the cache: command, please see the on-page optimisation section above). It’s a commonly held belief that flash content can’t be indexed, which strictly speaking is not true – do a quick search for “filetype:swf” and you will see a lot of flash content which has been picked up by visiting web crawlers. That said, it’s by no means guaranteed that if you create flash content that it will be indexed, web crawlers can still encounter problems. Images are another issue for search engines – if you create content within an image file i.e. .jpg, .gif etc., then search engines will not be able to pick up the content within the file (they will however be able to pick up the ALT attribute – please see the above section on on-page optimisation). It can in some instances be useful to create non-indexable content to prevent search engines from accessing specific categories or faceted navigation which ultimately does not add to the user experience, or causes search engine crawlers a minor nightmare (you could argue that crawlers will waste a lot of crawl equity or resources crawling URLs which don’t add any additional value, however we’ll discuss that a bit more later in this chapter!). For the time being, if you are at all concerned about whether the content on your site can be crawled, do the following: 

Tell you web developer to structure your web pages only in plain, static HTML (i.e. plain text). Crawlers love plain text, it’s what they go to websites to find. Give it to them.

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Revisit the cache command – once you have performed the cache command just look to the bottom right hand corner of the grey shaded box and click “text only version”; this will show you the content the search engine has been able to pick up on the page. If there’s content on your page which doesn’t appear within the text only version cache, then the search engine hasn’t picked it up.

Accessibility and Site Hierarchy: There are a hundred and one things which could go into this section of the book; that said for the vast majority of webmasters, it would be overkill. However, one of the most important things you can do when you are going through the process of a site build is to ensure that you have created an effective site hierarchy i.e. a common-sense hierarchy which ensures the following:  

All of the useful and value-driven pages on your website can be reached by a visiting web crawler. The pages on your website are structured in such a way to make content easily accessible to users.

One of the main ‘rules’ to follow is simply to try and maintain a reasonable amount of click depth i.e. try and ensure that no page on your website falls more than five clicks away from your homepage. Structuring a website around the homepage is typically the most common sense approach, mainly because your homepage will typically be the most crawled page on your site (or rather the most linked to page) and as a result, it acts like a portal to the rest of the information contained on your site.

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79 | P a g e The more you decrease click depth, the more you increase the probability that visiting web crawlers will access your content more frequently. However, this doesn’t mean that you should simply link to every single page on your website from your homepage, which would be impractical and counter-productive. Just try and keep in mind the basic principle and structure your site in such a way as to make content as accessible as possible. Remember, if the content isn’t linked to, then the search engine will struggle to pick it up, if the search engine can’t pick it up then it can’t rank the content for a relevant query.

Duplicate Content and Canonicalisation: Duplicate content exists where the same page of copy is duplicated between two unique URLs – the main issue with duplicate content is that you’re simply creating additional competition for yourself; if you create two URLs with exactly the same content, either on-site or off-site, then those two pages will, in essence, compete against each other for position in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Duplicate content also wastes crawler resources – if a web crawler has to spend all of its time picking up duplicate content, then that’s time it can’t spend doing more purposeful tasks, like picking up the unique content which you’ve potentially published deeper into your website. There are many, many ways to generate duplicate content without actually knowing about it or wittingly doing so, for example creating pagination, making the same product or service available via multiple different categories, when generating landing pages to target specific countries etc. However, ignoring the specifics for the time being the best way to identify if you have any duplicate content on your website is simply to perform an exact search i.e. simply take a snippet of

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80 | P a g e content from the page (a sentence will do), paste it between speech marks into the search engine and then analyse the results.

How much duplicate content can I get away with? To clarify, having duplicate content on your website will not result in a ‘penalty’ (it would have to be a tremendous amount of duplicate content and it would have to have been done with manipulative intent and even if that were the case, the search engine will still mechanically have to spot it) – a search engine will simply TRY to filter any duplicate content it picks up. However, this is the important part to understand – in some instances, duplicate content isn’t actually duplicate content. Say for example you created a page of content which was 400 words in length, the top part, say 70% of the content, is completely unique, however the bottom part, the remaining 30%, is duplicated. The search engine will likely retain the URL in its index and it will likely rank the page for a user’s query when that query is matched to the top 70% of unique content. If the query entered matches the bottom 30% of content, it’s likely any number of pages could be displayed by the search engine (pages which obviously contain the same content), pages which may not provide the best user experience, or may not be the pages you wish to rank in search i.e. you may have duplicated the content on an external Facebook page, or a directory. In short, the classification of duplicate content is query dependant – pages may be retained by the search engine if they show minimal uniqueness, however it’s also important to remember that by duplicating content you are also seriously minimising the potential gain to be had through long-tail optimisation.

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How can duplicate content exist without me knowing about it? Well, in about a thousand different ways really. One of the main causes of duplicate content is simply URL structures – for example, please visit PHP.net and pay particular attention to the URL in the address bar. The homepage resolves on each of the following URLs:   

http://php.net http://www.php.net http://www.php.net/index.php

Each of these pages produces exactly the same page of content – the search engine could conceivably pick up each of the URLs. Compare and contrast this with dabs.com, where visiting dabs.com results in being (301) redirected to www.dabs.com. The second issue is simply that by allowing the URL to resolve i.e. the non-WWW, you are also allowing people to link to it – in doing so you are diluting the link value between multiple pages (please read the link building section for more information). 301 redirecting (more on this later on) the non-WWW URLs to their WWW counterparts will enable the link value to flow to just one page, as opposed to being split across three. It’s worth noting that search engines are becoming more proficient at picking up these little subtleties – there is also an option in Google Webmaster Tools to change the manner in which your address is displayed in search i.e. WWW or nonWWW. All of this being said, I do still recommend ensuring that all of the canonicalisation problems listed below are resolved.

A few other instances:

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

URLs with a trailing slash can potentially be considered distinct from URLs without a trailing slash – the solution is simply a 301 redirect. HTTPs pages can also pose a problem – if you utilise SSL pages on your website (secure pages through which credit card transactions etc. can be processed – Google search is now also SSL encrypted by default), then there’s a chance that a search engine can pick up both HTTP and HTTPs URLs, the easiest way to check is to perform the following query: “site:example.com inurl:https”. The solution here would be the canonical tag, which we will discuss in just a bit. Default pages are typically a less notable problem, but worth fixing nonetheless – simply check to see if your /index.html, /default.html, /index.asp etc. resolves, if so then simply 301 redirect it to your homepage (providing it produces exactly the same content as is available on the homepage). There are quite a few of these, however the above are the most obvious and typical occurrences.

The Canonical Tag and 301 Redirects: Have you ever used a .htaccess file? If not, don’t worry – the stipulations you may need to make are not overly complex. A .htaccess file is simply a file that lets you configure how your web Server responds when certain URLs are accessed by a useragent. In order to implement the above redirects, you will need to work with the .htaccess file – it’s NOTHING like as intimidating as it sounds, all you need to do is acquire your FTP details from your web developer or hosting Company (this will allow you to “log on” to your Server), download a free FTP client (like Filezilla) and then read the guide listed below.

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83 | P a g e http://www.squidoo.com/301 I would have gone into more depth, but truth be told I doubt I could do a better job than that document achieves, so we may as well leave it there. In terms of what a 301 redirect does, well it’s a permanent redirect – it enables you to redirect one URL to another. If you EVER decide to move a page of content and in doing so decide to change the URL, ALWAYS make sure you 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL. Failing to do so will result in leaving the link value behind, it’s also poor from a usability point of view too, people accessing the page will ultimately be served with a 404 error (just because YOU have deleted the page of content from a specific URL, it doesn’t mean the search engine has). Implementing a 301 redirect is the best way to ensure the maximum possible amount of link value will be transferred across – that said, there’s no guarantee that all link value will be passed across, so where possible, avoid changing URLs or migrating between domains. If you do ever decide to migrate (i.e. switch domains and change URLs), then ensure that each and every page 301 redirects to a corresponding relevant page on the new domain (ideally, utilising the same URL structure, minus the old domain). The canonical tag presents an interesting option for anyone who does feel the need to publish duplicate content, or has a reason for doing so – the canonical tag basically tells the search engine the following: ‘we have duplicate content on-site, we know about, however we only want you to index one of the pages, rather than all of them’. So, say you had 9 pages of duplicate on-site, you would simply insert the canonical tag on eight of the pages and within the canonical tag (which is placed inside your HTML source) would

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84 | P a g e be a link back to the page you want the search engine to index and the remaining pages would be ignored. The main issue with the canonical tag is that it’s a suggestion, not a directive – this means, unlike the 301 redirect, the search engine doesn’t need to honour it (however, in my experience, they typically always do). The canonical tag can also be used cross-domain, so if you have duplicate content across two websites, you can simply insert the canonical tag on the relevant pages. <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedishfish"/>

Pagination and Filtering: Now, this section could be a bit more difficult to get your head around if you’re not particularly familiar with the basic concepts I’m referring to, however I will link to some further resources at the bottom of this page, all of which I HIGHLY recommend you read. Please see an example of pagination below, there are many associated problems with pagination: 



Pagination increases click depth – the further a page is away from the central structure of a website, the less valuable it is (in essence, there’s more to it than that though). Pages which fall further down pagination can obviously be more difficult for the search engine to reach i.e. page 1 of pagination may be crawled daily, whereas page 34 may be crawled every couple of weeks. Forms of pagination vary greatly – in a lot of instances pages are only accessible via the words ‘next’ or

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85 | P a g e



‘previous’ (which strictly speaking isn’t even pagination at all). However, if you have 10 pages of blog posts and the only way to get to the 10th page is to click (or crawl) ‘next’ nine times, then that’s ultimately nine levels a crawler has to go through to get to that page. Pagination also comes in the form of page numbers i.e. the pagination will show pages 1, 2 and 3 and perhaps the last page i.e. page 34. Now, all of these pages are obviously only one click away, however to get to page 33, the search engine (crawler) obviously has to go through a significant volume of pages. Needless to say, this isn’t ideal.

The ideal is simply to avoid utilising pagination, however on websites with thousands upon thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of pages, this isn’t in the least practical; so, we have to live with trying to minimise it as much as possible. Take the above example i.e. 10 pages of blog posts. Now, within your blog you may have 100 posts – these posts are divided between 10 pages. It will take the search engine nine “clicks” to reach the last page of posts. You could simply increase the number of posts displayed to, say, 50 posts per page and dramatically decrease the amount of click depth.

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86 | P a g e There is obviously an argument to be made for usability, that said I think increasing the number of posts (or products) displayed per page is actually good for usability – after all, who wants to continually be clicking ‘next’ again and again? Displaying posts upfront will potentially increase the likelihood that more of your content will get noticed by users and ultimately read. Secondly, and particularly if you own an e-commerce store (see the links below), focus on categorisation – take the example of NewLook.com. They have layers upon layers of pagination in their main dresses section; they could benefit, rather than simply generating additional layers of pagination, from adding further subcategories to the top-level dresses page i.e. ‘maxi dresses’, ‘summer dresses’ and so on. Not only would this benefit the user, the new URLs which are generated would be purposeful for the search engine and would improve the overall relevance – and likely conversion rate – of the page. E-Commerce SEO is a VERY big topic, however dealing with faceted navigation, effective categorisation and the productlevel user-experience (please see the section on on-page optimisation) should be among your primary concerns – all of these factors will have a very big impact on your overall visibility.

Filtering or faceted navigation: Filtering is an SEOs biggest bugbear – it can, when implemented incorrectly, also hinder the user experience. Filtering is simply the options afforded to users to sort, or determine the type of products, they see on screen. For example, your site may contain a sort option which allows users to order products per page, or it may contain a filtering menu in

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87 | P a g e the sidebar of the page which allows users to select multiple different types of dresses based on type, colour etc. One of the main problems with filtering is that it can, when implemented without taking web crawlers into account, generate lots and lots of superfluous URLs without adding any additional value to the page (or worse yet, duplicating what is already available on many other pages). Looking at NewLook, the problem exists where each time a user selects a faceted navigation option on the left-hand side of the page a new order of products is displayed and importantly, the URL is modified. Where there’s a new URL, there’s a new page for the search engine to index (equally importantly, the page doesn’t add any additional value, it simply reorders the content available on the page). Additional resources on managing faceted navigation:  

Building faceted navigation that doesn’t suck. Guide to E-commerce facets, filters and categories.

XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap is basically just a list of all of the URLs on your website – search engines utilise sitemaps to get a fuller picture of your website. You can create an XML sitemap REALLY easily, it only takes a few minutes (well, depending on the size of your website) – just visit XML-Sitemap.com and follow the instructions. Once ready, simply upload your XML sitemap to the root of your server i.e. example.com/sitemap.xml. It’s also worth submitting your sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools – this can be done relatively easily from within the interface. Lastly, I’d also recommend placing a link to your XML sitemap(s) from the footer section of your website.

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88 | P a g e What will all of this do? Well ultimately it will make it that little bit easier for the search engine to pick up all of your content. You don’t acquire any brownie points for having an XML sitemap, but it’s likely it will improve your indexation rate – a better indexation rate ultimately means the search engine will have more pages from your website to match to user’s queries. If you have a sitemap which contains a very high number of URLs, it’s worth segmenting the URLs across multiple sitemaps – please see this guide for more information (scroll to ‘guidelines for sitemaps’).

Breadcrumb Navigation: Please see below for an example of breadcrumb navigation:

It’s basically a trail of links which informs a visiting web crawler of its position in the site hierarchy. Again, this isn’t going to transform your rankings in search, it’s just yet another means to improve the overall accessibility of your website. If you can’t do it then it’s not a massive problem, but it is particularly recommended if you have a larger website i.e. over 1,000 pages.

Footer Optimisation: Your website footer is typically duplicated throughout your website – needless to say, if you link to your most important pages from within the footer section of your website, then it

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89 | P a g e increases the probability the page will receive more crawler attention. It’s always worth linking to your high value pages from within the footer – just don’t overdo it.

Reviewing Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: This is again, another section that I wasn’t overly sure where to place – Google’s Webmaster Guidelines apply to all facets of search and stipulate, albeit ambiguously in places, what Google looks for from web pages. In essence, it articulates what webmasters should and shouldn’t be doing if they prize organic search visibility. In reference to the document itself – most of which I have paraphrased and expanded upon across all sections of this book – you can find the full set of guidelines here. I absolutely recommend reading through the guidelines and yes, staying within the boundaries set by them, too. As well as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, it is also worth reading through Google’s overview on link schemes (the first chapter on link building is up next), again while I have paraphrased and expanded on a lot of the information contained therein, it’s still worth reading through in full.

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90 | P a g e

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91 | P a g e

LINK BUILDING BASICS: A definition of link building. When you’ve been involved in the search engine optimisation industry for as long as I have, and you’re presented with an empty page within a word processor with little more than the title ‘a definition of link building’, and tasked with writing about the process (or concept) that is link acquisition, it’s pretty easy to feel a little, well, overwhelmed. Link building is such a divisive, and HUGE, topic in the SEO industry – it’s almost segmented across party lines, with some regarding it as a method of manipulation, and others defining it as the creation, in some way, shape or form, of value. In gist, if you go to two different SEOs at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum and ask them ‘how to build links’, they will both give you wildly different answers. But then again, that’s why you’re reading this book – hopefully, I can provide you with some semblance of clarification on the issue. Link building, as the title implies, is the process of building links into a website, however over the last few years the commonly accepted title of link building is utilised to refer to a wide range of different concepts, all of which are manufactured with the intent to either attract, or build, links into a website. While there are other terms utilised to refer to the many facets which make up link building i.e. inbound marketing, for the sake of simplicity, and common perception, I will simply categorise all of these disciplines under the umbrella of ‘link building’ (well, within this book at least).

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Why would I want to do this? Link building is a core factor behind the positioning of most web pages in Google’s (and other engines) search engines results pages (SERPs). Links are regarded, by engines, as indicators of quality and value – when a page (or asset) is linked to by other (valuable) pages, the visibility of that linked-to page in search will be bolstered. Search engines will order results based upon the factors outlined above i.e. on-page optimisation and usability factors, and perhaps more so, the perceived importance and relevance, passed through links, to linked-to web pages. It’s a lot like receiving a citation in a piece of academic work – a link implies value, it tells the search engine that the resource at the end of the link is something that’s purposeful or rather, worth displaying more prominently in the SERPs.

Not all links are created equal. Herein lies the problem. There are ‘places where you can go’ (hmm), where you can buy links – tons of them, thousands of them, millions of them. Based on the definition provided above, this may seem like a logical business decision – in reality, it’s not always (or in my opinion very rarely, if ever, the case). When a page links to another page, it transfers value (the definition of what value is, or how the distinct metrics which make up ‘value’ are prioritised, can vary from engine to engine, but most rely on broadly similar metrics), the more value which is built into the page, and thus transfers throughout the site and through the conduit of internal links, the more visible the overall website will become and across a wide range of queries (keywords, or search terms).

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93 | P a g e It’s more often easier to think of links as votes in favour of a website – the more votes you acquire behind your website (from other weighted, valuable or important websites), the higher you will rank in search (across a range of queries). Some links pass a lot of value, other links pass very little, or none. Some links, due to the fact they’ve been artificially created or generated (and providing the process of artificial creation has been detected by the engine, or rather algorithm), can actually be very damaging to your website, to the point where an engine will penalise you (invoke a ranking drop or deindex your website) for engaging in manipulative practice. Please see this document – also linked to from the chapter above – which outlines Google’s definition of link schemes or rather, bad types of links. Search engines actively discourage less ethical link building, as far as they are concerned it’s an attack against their core business objective: providing the best possible results for users. Defining the values passed through links: 



Domain Authority: This is a total value for a specific domain – it’s, in essence, a sum total of all the value built into all of the tens, hundreds, thousands or millions of pages on your website (domain). PageRank: PageRank is a scoring system, created by Google and named after Google’s co-founder Larry Page, which scores individual web pages out of ten – ten is the highest score you can achieve, 0 is the lowest (in fact, N/A is the lowest). Trust: This is a more ambiguous concept, however based on information garnered from patents, the concept refers to how close your website is, in link terms, from a set of trusted seed websites. The more

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94 | P a g e



trusted you are, the more you will be regarded favourably. Relevance: Relevance can mean a few different things, however it’s most often regarded as how relevant the linking page is i.e. is it from a website relevant to your own, and the relevance of anchor text (anchor text is the text found in a link i.e. “click here”, search engines utilise anchor text to determine what a linked-to page is ‘all about’).

Now, there are obviously many other factors which are considered by search engines when it comes to dissecting the value which passes through a link, however it’s fair to say these are the most weighted link signals search engines rely upon. We are of course going to go into all of these in depth.

How link building works: The more you supplement content creation (i.e. giving people something tangible and meaningful to link to) with quality link building, the more long-tail variations you will appear for and gain broader traction around, and the more referral and direct traffic you will drive. Building or attracting links is at the core of what makes SEO possible and without it you don’t have a strategy. However, you have a few very large issues to contend with: 1. Link Building is relative. If you have an existing link profile i.e. a base of valuable links already pointing into your website (perhaps acquired naturally through offline activity), then it’s going to be quite a lot easier to push forward, mainly because you are working from an established base. 2. Link building has changed monumentally through 2012 and 2013 – a series of algorithmic updates (in this

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95 | P a g e context an algorithmic update is an alteration in the manner in which search engines interpret less ethical links) have all but rung the final death knell on mechanisms which were, hitherto, at their peak effectiveness circa. 2006. In my opinion, they’ve drudged on for far too long. 3. Link building isn’t anything like as easy to scale as it used to be. While ‘back in the day’ you could use certain mechanisms on a broad scale to generate more visibility relatively quickly, the viability of such practices is no longer in question – they don’t work. While they may give you a short term kick in the right direction, following the principles laid down by short-term (unethical) link building ultimately means you will be forever chasing the next game in town. It’s no way to market a professional business. Scaling your efforts will be a challenge – in many ways, it’s easier to look at link building as something which shouldn’t be scaled. 4. Link building, at its best, is about relationship building. This obviously takes time however once you have an online reputation (built up through cultivating relationships with influencers and by acquiring or attracting links on high value web properties), one which transcends ‘channels’, you quite conceivably won’t have to worry as much about doing some of the more day-to-day tasks involved with link acquisition. When it comes to link building, everything comes down to your exiting position in search i.e. the existing quality of the total sum of links pointing into your website, the available resources at your disposal and ultimately, the validity of your strategy.

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Where we were vs. where we are now. I remember back in 2010 (and before) when link building was, well, easy. I could revert to some age-old, tried and tested processes, used by digital agencies the World over, and get websites to rank as easily as I fall asleep at night after a hard day’s work. Wow, those days are gone. Back in the day organic search was the Wild West and while I mention that those days are gone, you could argue whether they ever really existed – many of whom profited so significantly during those days are invariably struggling now (albeit with healthier bank balances).

So, what’s happened? Well, in 2012 a Penguin was released and no, I’m not talking about those loveable (in my eyes) black and white rogues native to Antarctica, I’m talking about an algorithmic update, or rather a fundamental shift in the spectrum of stuff Google was willing to put up with. You see, in days gone by SEOs pretty much had free-reign over Google’s search results – if you were savvy, you could use things link anchor text and low-quality mechanisms to dominate industries, or at the very least play above your station. All you needed to do was go out and find some mechanically valuable pages, build links on them with keyword-focused anchor text and then wow – rankings! Further Penguin updates have ensued since the initial update launched in April 2012 (by official reports, Google makes upwards of 300 algorithmic tweaks per year, all of varying degrees) to the point where we have a VASTLY different SEO

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97 | P a g e landscape to the one we inhabited back in 2010 (we will focus on the specifics behind each update later on in this book).

So, SEO is dead? Absolutely not – it’s just a form of ‘SEO’ that’s dead (dying). If you were so inclined and attached to old forms of doing things, there are still dark corners of the internet where you can lurk and find direct link building tactics which will give you the types of stellar, immediate boosts in search you desire (albeit, over a short timeframe and with potentially disastrous end-game results). However, if you’re looking for longer-term success and want to build online visibility that has substance and adds value, you need to be awake to more holistic approaches not just to search, but to internet marketing.

Where we are now. Marketing is now, and always has been, about creating value – SEO can no longer be considered a standalone strategy, but rather it needs to be approached in terms of how it fits into the more holistic picture of ‘online marketing’. From a link building perspective, on-page content creation and aspects of usability or user-experience need to be revisited by many an SEO, particularly in the context of how these factors can indirectly attract links and bolster the brand awareness of a website online. SEO has transcended beyond pure link building to become about brand building, relationship building and, most importantly, creating value (with valuable content, you can attract, rather than build, links). However, invariably, there’s disconnect between what you create and what is seen, and within this disconnect we have a lot of ‘wiggle room’, a lot of

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98 | P a g e magic and a lot of strategy to input. In short, SEOs are still the masters of what you see and read on the internet (joking-ish).

Authority vs. Relevance vs. Trust vs. PageRank: I’m not going to jump straight into mechanisms (i.e. methods for building links into your website from external sources), because first we need to define the values which transfer through the links which point into your website. Knowing which mechanisms to utilise is far less important than actually knowing how to analyse the relative value of a link – when you know whether a link is valuable or not, grasping for knowledge on mechanisms will be irrelevant, you will be able to spot what’s ‘good’, or ‘bad’. In essence, you will be able to capitalise upon opportunities.

The balance of risk: In, em, certain circles, many ‘old-school’ SEOs regard the entire ‘process’ of SEO as an exercise in balancing risk and maximising the probability for success. Now, one of the main things you need to understand is that noone knows specifically how search engines work. No one has an intricate understanding of the make-up of each and every offsite (or even on-site or on-page) signal search engines rely upon, or how they interpret them. Sure, some SEOs are better than others, some have a lot more experience than others, some will get far better results than others, but even the best of the best (to coin a Top Gun expression!) do not possess an intricate and full understanding of how search engines interpret, or will come to adapt their interpretation, of links.

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99 | P a g e This is simply because it’s not possible, it is after all a third-party search engine which is engineered by a lot of VERY smart people. Rather, good, ethical SEOs rely on experience, instinct and creating value to attract links, which in turn generates more exposure in search. I’m not about to tell you how you should do business, or how you should engage in your marketing campaigns – that’s not my place. However, I will say that the process of link building can, in the wrong hands, be very dangerous to the visibility of your website. By employing the wrong tactics, you don’t just risk damaging your momentary visibility in search, you risk a longterm penalty which could have a very lasting impact (it can also mean years of work undone). For clients, and for our own websites, we abide by the ethical route – we stay within Google’s published guidelines (albeit perhaps indulging our rebelliousness ever so slightly on the odd occasion where the temptation is a bit too strong to subdue) and focus on the creation of value. The main reason for this is that a few years ago, I decided I quite like sleep – it sounds crazy but getting a good sleep at night is wildly underrated. When I’m managing 20-odd campaigns, and using less ethical mechanisms and under the pressure of client expectations to deliver superior results and at lightning quick pace, the stress can pile up. Staying one step ahead – constantly – of an ever more stringent and demanding engine, is draining. Even when managing just one website, you really don’t want that level of stress.

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The Associated Risks From Conducting Less Ethical Link Building: I appreciate I’m probably labouring on these points. However, there’s a reason for that – link building is such an important topic and I want to ensure the points which are being made are fully emphasised. So, what are some of the potential pitfalls from trying to game engines? Well, it’s quite simple really.  

Significant drops in visibility. Potential to be penalised and ‘dropped’ from the search engine i.e. to be de-indexed.

Some link building mechanisms are very high risk and ultimately could result in severe and lasting action being taken against your website. These types of mechanisms are conventionally referred to as ‘black hat’, they are the types of mechanisms which are typically easily scalable and where the sole objective is to find the easiest and fastest route to success. Then there are more ‘white hat’ mechanisms, which are far more ‘ethical’ and fall within Google’s webmasters guidelines, however ultimately can be a bit more difficult and time consuming for brands to engage in, particularly if they’ve been honed on the purported ‘black art’ of search engine optimisation. This said, despite being slow burn, they can, when conducted correctly, provide far superior, long-term results for your brand – they can propel a small brand into a stratosphere which would otherwise be impossible to reach when relying on any other marketing medium. In case you can’t tell, I firmly believe in the underlying principles of white-hat mechanisms.

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101 | P a g e The problem is that all of this (i.e. black hat vs. white hat) is open to interpretation and there are about a thousand shades of grey (‘grey hat’) in-between – there are thousands of different types of links and their existence is pre-determined by millions of different types of relationships. A search engine will never be able to formulate an automated, algorithmic-led approach to combating ALL link ‘spam’ (link spam being links created by SEOs and amateur webmasters to fuel search engine rankings). All in all, if you are concerned by the less ethical approach then just stay away from it – my advice to you would be to focus on the resulting traffic generation from link building, rather than trying to game the system and acquire links on less valuable, or spam sites.

So, how do I get “caught” by a search engine? Well, there are two ways really: either a manual review of your website, or an algorithmic penalty. If you do something ‘mechanically suspicious’ (my term), then an algorithm may detect the activity and push your website down the results i.e. one of the most obvious instances where this can happen is with an over utilisation of exact match anchor text (more on this later). The other possibility is a manual review. Now, the odds on being manually reviewed are, in my opinion, very remote – some very large brands have been subject to this type of ‘action’ in recent years, in fact Google actually had to ‘penalise’ itself after it was found that a third party marketing agency had been buying links and pointing them into the main landing page which ‘advertised’ Google Chrome (Google’s browser). Other victims in recent years include BMW, Interflora and more recently, purportedly, Expedia.

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102 | P a g e Google’s Webmaster Tools panel is the primary method Google uses to inform webmasters if they have been subject to a manual action – needless to say, and even away from this purpose, it’s very advisable to verify your site so you can access webmaster tools.

So, we don’t build paid links into our website then? Later on in this book we will address something called manual outreach, which is the process of contacting webmasters for the purposes of acquiring a link from them – this process has many different forms, however I categorically guarantee that if you pursue this mechanism, a webmaster will eventually e-mail you back and ask for payment in exchange for a link. The question is, will Google ever identify that you have in fact paid for that link? It’s very unlikely, they don’t have access to your e-mail account (I’m going to breeze past GMail issues here). However, could it in some way be deemed a paid link? Possibly, particularly if you’ve utilised this strategy time and time again, or you’ve left a footprint across other similar sites, or you’ve created a certain type of link i.e. a widget or footer link. The real question is, do you really want to have to worry about it? In short, I don’t, under ANY circumstances, recommend buying links – I recommend attracting links. However, I will also say that invariably, based on interpretation and no matter what you do, if you have some hand in the activity behind your website, and that activity leads to a boost in organic search visibility, then someone, somewhere, would be able to interpret that activity as in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. It’s also important to understand that I could perform a query for just about any major generic term, look at the top 10 results

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103 | P a g e and I can pretty much guarantee that I will find some form of manipulation – it’s very, very easy to identify, if you know what you’re looking for. Has the engine picked up on it? Perhaps, but maybe the remaining portion of the link profile is ethical enough to prevent the search engine from making a ‘big deal’ about it (in future, engines will potentially become more efficient at identifying link spam using machine learning, please see the above chapter for more information on this). Just because a paid link exists, doesn’t mean Google will detect it as a paid link. Secondly, even if it is detected, it doesn’t mean it will bring down your entire profile (it doesn’t mean it won’t either) or your overall visibility, the probability of that happening is remote, albeit possible. Thirdly, the best way to stand out is to employ consistent manipulation and in a very blatant form; needless to say, ‘old-school’ SEOs don’t really like standing out (which, ironically, is the primary objective of most modern, white-hat SEOs). The main thing you have to remember is that a search engine, despite all of the public relations emanating from Google, is still a mechanical entity. Detecting paid links and determining that a link is in fact paid for is an incredibly complex process which can be difficult even by human review, never mind from the perspective of an algorithm.    

How can a search engine realistically interpret a link is paid for? Should all author bios on blogs indicate paid or manipulative linking? Should all anchor text links in blog posts be deemed as manipulative, or paid? Should all sidebar links be deemed as paid for?

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104 | P a g e 

And so on.

There are thousands of different types of links, there are millions of different types of instances in which a link could be granted – no human being would be capable of analysing that amount of data and making the correct decision each and every time, no less an algorithm. It’s why manipulation will likely always exist – in a utopian world, you would simply create a great page of content and that content would be given the visibility it deserves. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen – you need to be a trusted resource (by attracting links into your website) and only then will Google push visibility your way. Some of the world’s largest brands retain extensively manipulated link profiles and while it’s difficult to say precisely how big and impact these paid links are making, the fact is there are paid links in their profile and they seemingly haven’t been penalised as a result (and potentially, due to the fact there are trillions of pages on the web for Google to analyse and interpret, never will). My advice will always be to stay away from the less ethical approach if you’re concerned at all by the potential damage to your visibility (as you should be).

Link Building Principles: When you start engaging in a link building campaign, you will start to pick up odd bits of information which always serve to help you along your way.

Diversification: Every ethical and valuable link profile should have links pointing in from a range of different sources – in short, avoid being

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105 | P a g e overly-reliant on any specific mechanism (I detail a range of mechanisms later in this book). A good organic search strategy should incorporate relationship building, content marketing and digital PR – it should also be heavily focused on the user-experience.

Outbound Links: Google has a recommendation in place when it comes to posting outbound links on a page, they recommend that no page should contain more than 100 – ideally, you want to be securing links on pages which link-out to other valuable resources. This isn’t to say acquiring a link on a page with 100 outbound links is a bad idea, but simply that it will minimise the value being passed onto your page.

Bad Neighbourhoods: Always try to avoid associating with ‘bad neighbourhoods’ – in essence, this means you site should be as far away as possible in link terms, from less ethical or spammy sites.

Link Weight: Links placed towards the top of a page of content, or higher up within the copy of the page, are more weighted than links placed lower down the page, or in other segments of the page i.e. the footer, or sidebar.

NoFollow: NoFollow is an HTML attribute which most people often associate with blog comments. If the NoFollow attribute is applied to a link, then no link value will transfer through the link to the destination website.

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106 | P a g e According to Googleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s official definition, they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t actually crawl through nofollow links however from practical experience, I would contest this. That said, if you want to stop value from passing through outbound links, just use the NoFollow attribute.

Analysing link metrics: I get on with most people; I can talk to most people. However, when it comes to selling SEO, there is one type of person I struggle to talk to: the armchair enthusiast. The armchair enthusiast is the one who thinks he or she has it all worked out, however still feels the need to contract the help of a professional. He or she is the one who believes that the ranking increase they achieved was a direct result of that page title tweak they made last week, or that bit of keyword inclusion, or that extra link. They neglect to understand that there are people out there who spend every waking hour analysing links and the complexities of link profiles. When it comes to understanding SEO you have to understand the holistic nature of online marketing, you have to be able to see the entire chess board. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more, when it comes to attributing cause, you HAVE to isolate ALL the variables (there are hundreds of potential factors, even just off-site factors, which could cause an anomaly or an unexpected ranking increase). Domain authority is a LARGE part of the picture. Have you ever wondered why sites like Amazon.com and Wikipedia.org rank prominently in search for, well, everything? Well it has a lot to do with domain authority.

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107 | P a g e Perform a search for the term “cutlery sets” in Google UK and look at the top result – it’s amazon.co.uk (at the time of writing). Why are they there? The predominant reason is links. However, it surely must mean they have a lot of links pointing into that top ranked page, right? Well, no, there are actually a grand total of 0 external links pointing into the page on Amazon.co.uk which ranks no. 1 in search for “cutlery sets”. Note the fact the page doesn’t even contain the term “cutlery sets” with the content of the page. Note the fact that the page contains a significant number of parameters in the URL (which according to armchair enthusiasts is just flat-out bad – it’s not the best and it is against best practice, but it’s also not the end of the World, as some would suggest). Amazon.co.uk isn’t there because they’ve managed to obtain a whole host of relevant links into that page, they are there because as far as the search engine is concerned, they are a trusted and authoritative resource which supplies cutlery sets. They may not be the most relevant page in search for cutlery sets (in fact, not even close), but that doesn’t matter – they are an authoritative source. What makes them an authoritative source? The fact they have over 200 million backlinks pointing into their ENTIRE site. Yes, that’s right, 200 million – many of which are very valuable. Amazon.co.uk can leverage that link profile the next time they choose to go to market with a new product or service – the search engine ‘knows’ them, it knows what they’re all about, it assigns position based on that level of vested trust. Amazon.co.uk is so authority heavy, they could start selling pretty much whatever they like, and have a marathon of a head start over much of the competition. THAT is domain authority. THAT is what you are potentially competing against in your industry. There will be certain

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108 | P a g e websites in your industry (albeit perhaps at nothing like the same scale as Amazon) which outweigh the rest in terms of domain authority and you need to play the same ‘game’, you need to build domain authority and unfortunately, you need to do so over time (I’m afraid I missed the class on selling ‘get rich quick schemes’).

Be Relevant: There are many different ways to build relevance, however I’m going to begin by discussing anchor text. This is where I begin to put the brakes on because at this present moment in time I feel the beady eyes of every web developer or SEO professional glaring down on me. Anchor text optimisation is a bit of a ‘bad phrase’ – it’s something which all evidence suggests has been “clamped down” on by search engines. Anchor text is basically the text found in a link e.g. “click here” – please see the screenshot below. Search engines have for a significant period of time relied on anchor text to determine what a linked to page is all about. So, back in the day, if you wanted to rank for the term “washing machine repair”, you would simply build an extensive volume of decent links into your website with the anchor text “washing machine repair” and…RANKINGS!

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However, it’s a little bit more sophisticated than that these days (and in fairness, it’s been a little bit more sophisticated than that for a good few years). Nowadays, simply inserting 100 anchor text links containing “washing machine repair” into a hitherto untouched backlink profile is a sure fire way to stand out. These days, I stay away from anchor text – with the advent of the Penguin update, Google began looking at anchor text a lot more closely as a signal that a profile was being manipulated. Rather, it’s a LOT safer to build relevance through acquiring links on other relevant websites, as well as the natural relevance you acquire when webmasters link to you using your URL as anchor text (‘search engine friendly’ URLs contain keywords as part of the filename of the page i.e. /washingmachine-repair/, while it’s not as specific as exact match anchor text i.e. “washing machine repair”, it will likely still build relevance into the page).

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Generating a little PageRank: Ah, PageRank. In layman’s terms, PageRank is basically a value assigned by Google to each page in its index – each page is assigned a value of between 0-10, with 10 being the highest and 0 being the lowest. The OFFICIAL definition of PageRank however is quite different – it’s actually defined as a probability score i.e. the probability that a user would land on a page if they were to surf the web clicking on links at random. However, for the time being lets ignore the official definition. PageRank is again, probably one of the more misunderstood facets of search engine optimisation – everyone outside of the industry seems to have a perception that PageRank value equates directly to more visibility in search which quite frankly, couldn’t be further from the truth. PageRank is ONE factor which search engines look to when evaluating the relative importance of pages as well as assigning position in search. 

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PageRank passes between pages when one page links to another – the exact value of PageRank which passes on will be determined by a range of factors including the total number of links on the page being linked from. PageRank is assigned at the PAGE level, each page on your website will have its own value i.e. between 0-10. Please check the ‘tools’ section of this guide for tools which will show your PageRank value. The public PageRank value provided by Google is vastly different to Google’s own internal value – Google’s own internal value is set to a number of decimal points i.e. PageRank 4.4543543253, as opposed to PageRank 4. This means there can be a world of difference between two PageRank 4 pages. PageRank values are updated roughly every 3 months.

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111 | P a g e 

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PageRank flows between pages, when you acquire a link on a page with PageRank, SOME of that value will flow to your website, thus likely increasing the PageRank value of the page being linked to. PageRank also flows internally between pages, too. PageRank has an influence on crawl rate – low PageRank pages will likely not be crawled as often (domain authority is a more important indication on how often pages on a website are likely to be crawled, however).

The important thing to understand is that 1. PageRank can be manipulated by webmasters who try to sell it on for profit (the best way to check to see whether PageRank is manipulated is to use the info: command i.e. info:example.com; if you perform that search and a domain other than the entered domain appears, it’s likely that PageRank is being manipulated by some form of redirect) and 2. PageRank isn’t the be all and end all. PageRank chasing is ultimately pointless, rather you should be focused on attracting links from high value, reputable web properties. To give you an example, if you were offered a PageRank 4 link on a backwater web directory or a PageRank 0 link on BBC.co.uk, which one would you choose? It should always be the latter. BBC.co.uk is a far more authoritative domain, with a far wider and more diverse range of backlinks pointing in – it doesn’t really matter which web directory it is, BBC.co.uk wins. It’s also worth noting that there are literally millions of PageRank 0 pages ranking prominently in search – millions of them. Why are they ranking? Well, mainly because of the total authority of the domain name. PageRank is a factor and of course if it’s a choice between a PageRank 4 or a PageRank 0 page on BBC.co.uk then you would of course choose the former,

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112 | P a g e however just remember that it’s not the be all and end all of link acquisition. Finally, it could be argued Google is placing ever-less weight on PageRank as a metric for determining the relative value of pages, simply because it’s been manipulated so readily by overeager webmasters. n.b. More recently, Google didn’t actually update toolbar PageRank (a publicly displayed PageRank value) for over 10 months, until the value was finally updated towards the latter stages of 2013. This perhaps provides an indication of the relative priority of it as a metric (or Google’s growing disdain for it).

Backlinks Analysis – the root of all knowledge! Ok, so we’ve obviously covered off a lot of information above with regards to domain authority, trust, relevance and PageRank, but how do you actually acquire a real idea about how your website ‘scores’ against these metrics? It’s simple, backlinks analysis! There are lots of backlinks analysis tool out there, however whichever option you choose they all invariably do roughly the same thing, which is give you a picture of what your backlink profile looks like, including:   

Which websites, or rather pages, link to your website. The most linked to pages on your website. The presence of certain issues including 302 redirects, nofollow attribute or broken links. We will review these issues in a bit more depth later on.

Perhaps even more significantly, a backlinks analysis tool can be used to identify the links your competitors have acquired – while you don’t want to get to the point of replicating one of

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113 | P a g e your competitor’s profiles, it still gives you a very good idea of what they’ve done to get to the visibility they’ve achieved.

The tools you can utilise. If you ask 100 SEOs what their favoured backlinks analysis tools, they will probably settle on one of three choices:   

Majestic SEO Open Site Explorer AHREFS

In regards to what you are likely to need it for, they are much of a muchness, they all do broadly the same thing. Backlinks analysis tools work much like search engines, they utilise web crawlers to compile link data – of the three tools above, there arguments to be made about which has the biggest index and which is the superior tool, most of which can be found here. You can also easily acquire a PageRank value for any page you land on by using the SEO for Chrome Google Chrome extension (there are other toolbars available i.e. SEOQuake), or PageRank checkers.

Analysing link profiles. We’re going to discuss backlinks analysis a bit more as we move on, however for the time being I want to familiarise you to a few core metrics: 

Site-Wide Links: A sitewide link is a link placed across multiple pages on the same domain – it’s basically the law of diminishing returns i.e. the more site wide links you acquire, the more each new link diminishes in value. In essence, it’s a matter of one link, one vote (having additional links will obviously help with aspects like the crawl rate of the linked-to page, however 10

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  

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links from the same domain isn’t all that markedly different from one). Referring Domains: This metric displays total unique websites linking in. Anchor Text: As above, this metric will show the anchor text distribution for links pointing into the site. Domain Authority: Domain authority is displayed in different ways between backlinks analysis tools – Open Site Explorer uses a specific ‘domain authority’ metric. Total Backlinks: This metric identifies the total quantity of backlinks into a site, including site-wide links.

Here’s a snapshot of some metrics in Open Site Explorer:

As you can see, we are given a domain authority and page authority score for each of the websites above (this is the link profile of a popular networking website in the UK, 4Networking.biz). From within Open Site Explorer, we can also view a domain authority score for the website we have entered into the tool, see below:

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In the image above, we’re given an authority score for the particular page (the homepage), a domain authority value and also an indication of the total number of unique websites linking in to this domain (this is classified by Moz as ‘root domains’) as well as the total number of backlinks created across those domains.

Moz also gives an anchor text tab which displays the anchor text being used within these links – as you will see from the image above, it doesn’t look as though 4Networking has been engaging in any manipulative practices (the anchor text features nothing more than the brand name), which is a good sign. We’ll run through a far more thorough backlinks analysis a bit later in the book (particularly in relation to utilising it as a link building mechanism) but for the time being, I just wanted to introduce some of these tools to you, so you can gain a bit of familiarity with them – they’re a vital tool in your arsenal. Next up, link prospecting.

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LINK PROSPECTING AND MANUAL OUTREACH: In the context of link acquisition, a prospect is simply someone you wish to acquire a link from i.e. a webmaster. Link prospecting is the process of building a list of potential ‘link targets’ and then running a manual outreach campaign, to try and build relationships with your prospects and ultimately, garner valuable links and brand awareness. Building a prospect list is about first, identifying what type of prospect you are looking to target and how you hope to leverage them. I have two favoured options, but there are PLENTY more: 

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Targeting social media users to promote content to, using a variety of tools including Topsy, followerwonk and Linkdex. The aim is to get these users to share your content. Targeting webmasters to try and build a relationship and ultimately, try and publish some form of content, at some point, on their website.

Link prospecting combined with e-mail outreach is about, first and foremost, building relationships. You’re not just trying to get a link, you’re trying to get…wait for it…traffic. Once that traffic hits your site, you’re going to try and get it to fulfil whatever objective you want it to fulfil. Before you begin prospecting or outreach, you have to give your prospect something worthwhile to link to, or something worth linking to. In most instances, webmasters will offer up some form of content to the prospect (which will be published on an external website) in exchange for a link, or exposure.

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118 | P a g e In this sense, the content you are providing is an asset, it could be:      

An infographic. An interview. A guest post. A podcast. A video. Or whatever you choose, really – it just has to appeal to the prospect you are targeting.

Further to the above, a lot of SEOs prefer to go after less timeintensive options, including links pages (links pages can be very valuable – a links page is as the name suggests, a page of links or a resource page of useful websites) or utilise specific strategies, like broken link building which we will go into in more depth later on. NOTE: Broken link building is the process of looking for 404 error pages i.e. pages which do not resolve, then looking at the links pointing into those pages, contacting the webmasters of the websites which are linking into the broken page, and then informing them that they could link to your resource instead i.e. a resource which works.

Now, each of the above forms of content present their own challenges – I’ve gone into more depth on content marketing, guest posting and infographic development in later chapters, however the main thing for you to decide is whether you want to offer your content to the webmaster, or publish the content on your own website.

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How difficult is link prospecting? Don’t you have some dark art tactics to teach me? Link prospecting is hard work (it can also be very dispiriting if you go about it the wrong way), however unless you have a brand worth talking about, or an extensive catalogue of content which is already driving traffic and which you can leverage, it is VERY necessary. The quality of link you will acquire through link prospecting efforts will be high – however, your approach, or rather the types of links you build or attract, is what defines the success or failure of your strategy. This is not about spamming every dodgy webmaster in the world and asking for a link, it’s about identifying suitable, very high value prospects, and then making in-roads with them (and hopefully building a relationship). In the modern climate, and if you’re working with a website which has little to no visibility online, link prospecting combined with manual outreach IS where it’s at.

Building your prospect list. For me, the best way to build a prospect list is to use advanced search operators (as discussed above). You can perform a whole range of queries to unearth opportunities (you can also use a range of third party tools – please see below):    

“write for us” [your topic] “guest post” [your topic] “add guest post” [you topic] Etc. I’m not going to do work that has already been done better somewhere else, so please review the advanced guide to guest blogging on Moz.com for a

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120 | P a g e whole host of additional advanced search operators you can utilise. As you will be able to pick up, the above queries are for unearthing potential guest posting opportunities – now, there’s a difficulty with guest posting, in as much as if your strategy is ‘off’, and you contribute low value content and approach the strategy from a perspective of scale over quality, you increase the likelihood of something untoward happening with your rankings. I will cover guest posting in more depth below, however I just wanted to give you a primer in case you’re feeling a bit over eager! An even better option (not mentioned above) is to utilise engagement metrics. Think, what content appears on a page that signifies a user has engaged with that particular page? COMMENTS! How about this?   

“write for us” [your topic] “15 comments” “write for us” [your topic] “14 comments” And so on.

Remember, you’re not only aiming to build links and drive traffic, you’re also aiming to build up a community behind your website – the aim of the post is to secure referral traffic and encourage people to join your community. You can obviously keep modifying your queries to incorporate the type of link you want to acquire, for example: 

“gardening” inurl:links

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“conservatories” inurl:links

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“gardening” inurl:resources

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“conservatories” inurl:partners

Needless to say, the above is focused on unearthing links or resource pages which are relevant to gardening, or conservatories. It may be worth not being so ‘on the nose’ with this – if you own a gardening website, it may be better to focus on hooks, or rather industries which are broadly related to your own i.e. DIY. It’s also very worth reading the marketing hooks section in chapter two (I’ve also written a bit more about it in the next chapter) – a core tactic used by internet marketers in the modern age isn’t to target audiences directly, but rather to think about what those audiences are most interested in, and do that.

Third-party tools to build an amazing prospect list. Tools are great – to a point. I always find limitations with tools but I have to concede, they do make the job of prospecting so much easier. This is far from being a comprehensive list, I will save that for a future blog post – the tools below are merely the tools I use the most (I go into more depth on some of these in the ‘tools’ section at the end of this book).

InkyBee: InkyBee allows you to search for guest posters who you can engage and build a relationship with. They give you general insight about the relative weight, authority or influence of each blogger.

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Buzzstream: A tool I can’t live without – anytime you land on a website, you simply click a button on your bookmark bar and pull in any contact details Buzzstream automatically locates from the website, into your database. You can categorise and filter all prospects based on a range of metrics. I have created a video overview of Buzzstream on GarethMailer.com, just to give you a bit of insight into what it can do.

Followerwonk: Followerwonk is very much a relationship building tool – it’s offered as part of the Moz suite. In essence, you can order and compare Twitter users by a host of metrics, you can also search based on specific parameters i.e. location. It’s a great tool for unearthing prospects.

Ontolo: Again, a solid piece of software. You can quickly locate tons of prospects against set categories of sites i.e. you can find links pages, guest posting opportunities, suitable directories or whatever you hope to find. Ontolo automates the whole process and does the searching for you, much like Scrapebox.

Scrapebox: A magical piece of software which is, for what it does, ridiculously cheap – in short, it allows you to perform automated advanced search queries, you type in a query (like those outlined above) and scrapebox will pull back the results. You can then segment the data against set metrics i.e. PageRank and “domain rank”. You shouldn’t be functioning as a marketer without this tool.

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MozToolbar: This does the job of scrapebox, but in a far less automated fashion – in essence, you can export the results you see on a search engine results page, and start building out your list from there. The one major advantage to the MozToolbar is that it doesn’t use automated queries – Google doesn’t like automated queries (this said, Scrapebox allows you to use proxy servers, which mitigates the problem). It also does a lot more besides this, too! For more information on how to make the most from Scrapebox, have a review of this video on Quicksprout by Brian Dean – if you want to build up a prospect list, it’s among the best eight minutes you’ll spend all day.

My Blog Guest: Traditionally, My Blog Guest is a guest posting platform – you create a great page of content, upload it onto My Blog Guest then other users will ‘bid’ (money doesn’t exchange hands, just content) on your content; the bid you accept wins the content and at the bottom of the content is a link back to your website. However, My Blog Guest also has a very comprehensive database of bloggers – you can search bloggers against certain metrics and from there, set about building a relationship with them (you can contact them through My Blog Guest).

How to conduct outreach. It’s just sending e-mails, right? Well, no, not really - it depends on how successful you want to be. Outreach is the process of making initial contact with another webmaster or influencer, the idea being that you cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship with that webmaster.

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124 | P a g e If you want to acquire great links behind your website, or bolster your community building efforts, THIS is how to do it. The important thing to remember about outreach is that you NEED to get creative. This ISN’T about sending mass-spam, nor is about approaching everyone and anyone with a view to getting them to ‘do you a favour’. It needs to be more than that.

What you can achieve. I haven’t done any outreach for our Agency website (well, at least not from a link prospecting perspective), nor have I done it for GarethMailer.com (yet). To date, I have been conducting large scale outreach campaigns only on behalf of clients and due to the fact this outreach has been done across many different industries in the last three years, I’ve learned the hard way what works (long-term) and what doesn’t. Firstly, here’s a list of what we have used outreach for (please don’t see this as any way self-promotion, it really isn’t supposed to be): 

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Newsletter Lists: We have outreached to webmasters with a view to acquiring a mention in their newsletter publications which are sent out to their large subscription base – needless to say, a small mention on a newsletter sent out to hundreds of thousands of subscribers can result in a significant amount of traffic to our client’s site. Free Trials: We have in the past offered free trials to select prospects we’ve unearthed using the prospecting techniques listed above – this didn’t work very well, for a host of reasons. Mainly, it was seen as direct selling (which in my opinion, relative to the resources we have available i.e. 4 staff members, is not worth doing).

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Guest Posting: This has worked very, very well – we have managed to secure a range of very valuable links and a lot of referral traffic back to our client’s websites. Links Pages: A links page is, you guessed it, just a collection of links on a page. We typically target University and Governmental links pages – we like to aim big! Infographics: Easily our most viable strategy, the main issue, as always, is time – the prospecting and outreach time needs to be factored, but so too does the infographic development time.

The subject line. When it comes to writing blog posts, headlines are everything. When it comes to writing e-mails, the subject line determines whether your e-mail lives or dies. When we’re conducting outreach in a new industry, one of the first things we do is sit down and decide on what subject lines we’re going to start with – we send all of our e-mails manually (more on this later) as we like to have granular control over what the prospect is reading. Further, once we start sending e-mails we also monitor and track all results and response rates – it helps us determine which subject lines are working best. Now, you don’t need to get to this level of granular detail and it’s pointless my telling you which subject lines have worked best – EVERY industry is different. However, here are some general tips:   

Keep it short and to the point. Avoid capitalisation or, in some industries, words which have negative connotations i.e. ‘FREE’. Try a little bit of ego-bait – for example: ‘are you the person to talk to?’ Some could consider this type of

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subject line manipulative, however while you need to stay within ethical parameters you also need to get them to open the e-mail and consider your proposition – that’s your objective. Mention their brand name or better yet, their name.

Read guides about how to create headlines and it will give you a good idea about how to generate better subject lines, too – most of the free guides on Copyblogger offer excellent information.

Use a signature. Try to make your signature look as professional as possible – even go to the point of including your address, telephone number and other Company information in there, if possible i.e. an e-mail confidentiality clause. Have you ever noticed when an SEO agency creates a press release they very rarely include real details at the bottom of the release? However, when a PR Agency creates a release, they very rarely DON’T create real details at the bottom of the release i.e. their address, the author of the release and a telephone number. Learn from this. Never underestimate the importance of a first impression – you’re not going to be talking to this person, you can’t persuade them with your natural wit and charm, so you need to pull out every stop to get them to, at the very least, have a glimmer of confidence in you.

On-domain e-mail address. I always recommend using an e-mail address created from your main brand domain name, rather than a free e-mail account service. Firstly, deliverability could be an issue when using free

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127 | P a g e accounts and secondly, sending from your own domain looks a LOT more professional.

Get creative. Forget rules. There are none – there are steps you can take to stand a better chance of garnering a response, but ultimately a lot of this is going to rely on you putting a little THOUGHT into the process and being consistent with your approach. Yes, that means WORK and APPLICATION – you didn’t think this whole process relied on magic and witchcraft, did you? The last thing you should do is create a template e-mail and blast it out to all of your prospects – there’s enough spam on the internet (I should know, pre-2009 I created most of it and did very well out of it), don’t add to it.

Pick up the phone! I hesitated on whether to include this, it really does sound too easy to be true. This said, it’s my number one method for securing infographic spots on external websites. I’m fortunate, I’ve been involved in lots of complimentary industries, I’ve got webmasters contacts in lots of different spheres, which means if I need to place an infographic, I’ve got contact details. More often than not, it takes a five minute phone call and the exchange of a favour (wink wink).

Start SMALL. Don’t go after Richard Branson. I probably shouldn’t have to say that (some of my staff still go after outlandish targets which I tell them they will never achieve, it almost impresses me how ambitious they are), but you’re not going to be able to start at the top.

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128 | P a g e Once you build up a reputation and get a little better known in the online space surrounding your industry then sure, by all means, start going after some harder prospects – until then, start from the back and work your way up. If you have next to no reputation online, I would suggest stretching as far as ‘moderately popular’ territory.

Ok, so what do I actually write? Honestly, I have no idea. There are hundreds of people who will tell you what to put in an e-mail and there are hundreds of different types of approaches but, as above, EVERY INDUSTRY IS DIFFERENT. I can give you examples and I can show you guides, but there’s no guarantee (not in this situation, nor in any other) that what works in one industry will work in another. Here are a few basic steps for structuring e-mails which we utilise across ALL industries, hopefully these will help you out: 

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Brevity is EVERYTHING. Keep it short and sweet. Three sentences per paragraph should do it. Don’t give them your life story. Be nice. Yeah, I know, it’s a revolutionary thought, but it amazes me how many people start outreach by sighting my name and getting straight to the point. I would never respond to an e-mail such as this. Mention their brand, maybe post a link in the e-mail (to demonstrate you’ve actually read their website), or better yet, find someone to actually talk to and mention their name. Try and connect with the prospect on LinkedIn – it will give you a direct e-mail address. Be upfront and tell them why you are connecting with them. If they accept

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your connection request, then you’ve already got an opener for your e-mail. Follow them across all social channels and maybe even respond to a few of their postings (this is presuming you can actually find a person at the website you are targeting to speak to, it will be harder than you think in most instances).

TAILOR your e-mails. “Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m just getting in touch…” BORING! “Hi, I found your website today and I have to say I’m impressed…” BORING! There are two things that always attract someone’s attention in life:  

Talking about something they stand to benefit from. Their name.

Now, there are obviously a few other things but for the purpose of writing e-mail, these are the only two things in life! Hi Joanna, Hope all is good. << be friendly. I read your blog post [blog link] and it prompted me to send you an e-mail – why did you take such a stringent stance against corporatism at the end? << refer to something they’ve written about – it’s slight ego bait. The overall quality of the post was excellent (far better than most I’ve read in recent months!), despite the fact I have a bit of Written by Gareth Mailer, GarethMailer.com.

130 | P a g e a different viewpoint on the issue. << compliment them while pleading your case. I’ve written something about [your topic] here; I know I can produce something similar for [insert her blog here] – what do you think? << maybe better not to include an open-ended question that prompts a “no”, it’s up to you. Let me know – I’ve followed you on Twitter anyway, good to see someone in the industry who tweets regularly! All the best, [Your name] The above e-mail isn’t really finished, you probably need to expand it out a little bit but the core of the e-mail is in place:     

Mention their name. Refer to something they’ve done and compliment it. Plead your own case without being obvious. Mention your attempt to interact with them (Twitter). BE BRIEF!

The simplest way to bolster your success rate is to keep repeating the following phrase inside your head as you read through each paragraph of the e-mail: ‘if it were me reading this e-mail, would I have stopped reading by now?’ In fact, apply that strategy to just about EVERYTHING you write – I probably should have mentioned this earlier, seen as I do it every day.

Scalability vs. relationship building. IN OUR OFFICE (i.e. this is internal opinion, rather than widely accepted strategy), there are two schools of thought on how to make the most of our outreach campaigns and I have to say, again, either side can prevail DEPENDING on the industry.

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131 | P a g e In many instances we’ve gone for a more scalable approach, where we rely on direct link acquisition (i.e. ‘we would like to guest post’, or targeting links pages, or broken link building) rather than trying to build a solid relationship with a webmaster. Why? Well, to be honest, there’s not much online social activity in the damp or car bulbs industry, in a utopian World I would espouse the merits of loving thy neighbour and building a relationship but in the real world…sometimes it doesn’t fit. Now, I know if someone high-up the inbound marketing food chain were to read that, they’d immediately hit back at me saying: ‘Pfft. Even in boring industries you can make stuff work, you just have to get creative’. I say…no. I say – try it (most thought leaders rightly spend all their days keeping up with our fast moving industry and opinions are rather easy, the practical is much more difficult). Without meaning to sound disparaging, it’s immensely difficult from a scalable point of view to build up relationships in certain industries while simultaneously balancing the client’s demands for results. *Again, this is part of the reason why these types of campaigns SHOULDN’T be outsourced to external agencies.* Sure, there will be opportunities to go a bit wider and target other relevant, more social industries i.e. if we were promoting a tyre business we could approach car finance or car hire websites, but by casting the net a bit wider, the job gets more difficult. It all depends on your industry, your available resources etc. n.b. keep in mind however that I’m not working on one website, I’m overseeing 20+ campaigns – I need to structure, balance, juggle and hyperventilate. You will be working on one website, which makes this a LOT easier.

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Scalable: My definition of scalable is building out a campaign that follows a more telesales driven process – you acquire the link, and you get out. Your e-mail needs to be HONED to perfection (we can settle for excellence). The problem with this approach is clear, however: 



It’s process driven – ironically, when it comes to internet marketing, I don’t really like ‘processes’. Every campaign is different, every webmaster is different – each needs a tailored approach. If I had a choice, I’d much rather just work on one website – it’s a lot more fulfilling, it’s a LOT easier and invariably, you get a lot more success (if you know what you’re doing). The value of the link acquisition can be lower – bigger targets usually have bigger demands. If you want to, for example, guest post on a hugely popular website, you typically need to put the time in.

Relationship Building: This is my favoured approach – it’s also the approach that doesn’t really make financial sense, but whatever (well it does, it just makes us less profitable than the other option!). Time is the crucial factor here – you will be working from a list of high value prospects (garnered through prospecting activity) and you will seek to build a relationship with them across multiple channels. This is why, when it comes to internet marketing, I prefer holistic control – I want to be able to articulate the client’s message across social, guest posting and on any other platform I choose (yes, when it comes to campaigns, I AM a control freak).

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133 | P a g e While links you acquire will typically be of an indirect nature (unless you request a guest post or other form of link from your new best friend), they will also, typically, be of higher value. The problem here is evident however – while scalable outreach is a slow burn activity relative to SPAM link building, relationship building outreach is a slow burn relative to scalable outreach. It takes time and clients, more often than not, are monitoring ROI from day one (as they, and we, should be). When it comes to relationship building, we usually opt for the social media route – we build up prospect lists using tools like followerwonk and we then start interacting. We will go into social media activity a little bit more below, but in essence the objective should always be to respond and interact, rather than broadcast (don’t sell, talk).

Deciding who to outreach to. Figuring out your strategy is often the hardest part of prospecting. More often than not, for clients, we opt for infographic development, on-site content creation, high value guest posting and prospecting for links pages. If you are just getting started and maybe want to test the waters, links pages will probably be your best option – they are typically the easiest type of link to acquire i.e. you don’t need to produce something to acquire the link. This said, the success of link page prospecting varies based on industry – by far and away the most successful link page prospecting we have done has been for job boards. The simplest approach for deciding on your strategy is to go back to your objectives – what do you want to achieve? Is your target market forward-thinking an amenable to infographics and content creation and are you likely to receive a response from them on such subjects?

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Getting in touch with difficult to reach people. My specialty (unfortunately, it’s not my specialty because I wanted it to be, it’s my specialty because it had to be!). The solution for me has always been pretty simple – LinkedIn. I alternate between premium and free accounts on LinkedIn (I don’t tend to stick with a premium account, simply because in terms of what I get from it or use it for I don’t believe it represents value), however the simplest option for reaching someone is to send them an InMail. The trick to this is to actually give them a reason to respond to you – if that doesn’t work, the BEST method is actually to try and leverage your 1st or 2nd degree connections to try and make contact. In reality, it’s more miss than hit, however the point is, if you have a REALLY great prospect you want to get in touch with, it’s your best option.

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LINKABLE ASSETS AND CONTENT MARKETING: Content marketing has become increasingly popular over the last few years, particularly among SEOs who are tired of consistently trying to stay one step ahead and want to opt for a more value-driven approach to online marketing. Content marketing is about creating high value informational resources which help your customers, or visitors. This resource (or asset) will work to drive traffic, and subsequently links and social shares, for your site. You can expand the definition of content marketing to incorporate just about any form of content â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the value (defined in its ability attract links, social shares, traffic and sales) in any page of content is typically best judged or perceived relative to the standard (or performance) of other similar forms of content in the niche. Brands which push a heavy content-orientated marketing strategy are opting towards a more inbound approach towards selling, where customers (who are increasingly tired of dealing with interruption marketing) interact with brands on their own terms and depending on the value the brand delivers. Now, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not one for stats (lies, damn lies and statistics!), however some of the stats orientated around content marketing do make a pretty convincing case: ď&#x201A;ˇ

61% of consumers say they feel better about a Company that deliver custom content and are more likely to buy from that Company as a result (ref: custom content council).

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137 | P a g e 

45% of B2C brands and 54% of B2B brands plan to increase their content marketing spend in the next 12 months (ref: content marketing institute).

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Social media sites and blogs account for 23% of all time spent by U.S. users online (ref: content marketing institute).

Ultimately, in terms of where online marketing spend is going, a large portion of it is being directed towards content marketing – there are a number of reasons for this: 

Traditional, scalable link building mechanisms of old are proving largely ineffective and in some instances, very dangerous and bad for public relations (particularly for larger brands).



Content is the gift that keeps on giving – week after week, month after month, content keeps working. Many brands seek to reach a tipping point where content, naturally, drives as much traffic as previous efforts towards less ethical link building mechanisms have – the difference between the two being, content doesn’t require constant input or maintenance (nor is it anything like as risky).



There’s a low barrier to entry with content creation (there is no ‘cost’ per say), the main difficulties are simply ideation, time and ability.

Is content marketing right for you? To tell you something ironic, I’ve always had a bit of a problem with content marketing. In fact, I’ve often had some pretty stinging things to say about it. Why? 

MANY agencies can’t scale (it really shouldn’t be ‘scaled’, but they try anyway) it or sell it properly, it’s a

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

LOT more challenging than direct link building (process driven), link prospecting or manual outreach. In short, it isn’t as easy to gift wrap or clearly delineate how or when a return on investment is going to be acquired. It takes time to see results, particularly if you’re starting form afresh, and clients hate waiting i.e. ‘wait, so you’re going to spend four hours producing a page of content which may, or may not, get links to it? Yeah, no thanks’. Many businesses don’t even want to entertain the idea of taking content marketing in-house and under guidance – it sounds too wishy-washy.

Seen as most businesses always want me to do the impossible, do it quickly and do it without burdening them with any risk, more often than not content marketing was sidelined.

Now, why does all of this matter to you? Well, because content marketing is actually brilliant – when we utilise it, and when are given time to roll out a strategy, it works. It’s by far the best long-term approach to modern internet marketing. I’ve always LOVED developing GREAT content, it’s just we could never make it fit into the small business model (work with large businesses is demanding, working with small businesses is stressful and I take them to heart – you build up a close affinity with the owner, you want to do everything you can for them, but typically they feel strained when waiting for results to come in). Small businesses need results in the short-term and more often than not, despite the fact we’re getting paid FAR less than we do for a large-scale, fully-managed campaign, we are also expected to do 10x the job, mainly because the average small business website has no platform to build on and next to no visibility in search (bigger brands typically always have an

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139 | P a g e existing link profile and brand awareness we can leverage, which makes it ten times easier). However, IF you’re working on one website it’s a more than viable option, providing you can fit it into your schedule and remain consistent with it. Lastly, I would also say content marketing belongs firmly inhouse, simply because the very nature of the content creation process demands an understanding of the industry for which content is being created

Content Marketing: Do’s and Don’ts Before we go into more detail on how to engage in content marketing, the most important thing to remember is that content marketing is holistic – success will be far easier to come by if you focus on integrating social promotion and user experience into the content creation process. Stop thinking in terms of isolated channels i.e. ‘let’s do this for search, this for social and this for e-mail marketing’ – join it up! Your community likes to digest content in different ways, but ideally you need to think of ways to bring it all together. For example, my main point of focus for GarethMailer.com is building everything into an e-mail list – by enticing people to download this book, I capture their e-mail address and from there, I can keep providing them with even more valuable information. The more information I provide, they more they like me – the more they like me and read from me, the more they trust me. The more they trust me, the more they talk about me. The more YOU talk about me, the richer I get (HINT!). Content marketing is the process of demonstrating ability and giving back to acquire an audience and latterly build a

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140 | P a g e community – if you do it right, marketing, realistically, won’t be a problem for you anymore.

Writing great content. Ok, so enough of my philosophical ramblings – you want ideas, strategies and a plan of action, right? Well, let’s start off with what “great content” actually is and more importantly, what it’s not.

You’re doing the same thing. Again. You may have done what you term ‘blogging’ in the past – you may have noticed it didn’t work. From there you probably gave up, you may even have spent a little time wondering why it didn’t work. Well, I’ve got the answer for you and it’s usually one of three things: 

It wasn’t good enough.



You did nothing to promote it, or you have no meaningful community behind you to promote it to (TIP: be a lot more consistent!).

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You’re writing about something that everyone else in your industry has covered about a thousand times.

What’s the definition of a successful pull up? It’s getting your chin above the bar, right? Did your content even complete a single successful pull up? Did you maybe get half way there, drop down, try to pull up again and then hit the floor in exhaustion? The bar is high. In any industry, the bar for quality is EXTREMELY high.

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141 | P a g e Here’s the gist. Say you own a life insurance website – you know everything there is to know about your subject, you know exactly what people need to know to decrease their life insurance policy and save cash. You are the King, or Queen, of life insurance. So, you create a post – you spend about 30 minutes jotting everything down then another hour putting the post together. Little do you know, you’ve already failed before you’ve even begun - why? Because every other blog in your industry has already written about the same thing and more than likely, in greater depth – there’s no discernible reason for anyone to read the content, never mind link to it, or share it. It does frustrate me slightly – it doesn’t frustrate me because I’m sat on some sort of pedestal (I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to rushing certain pages of content and not doing everything I should be doing), it irritates me because you are capable of so much more; you are capable of engaging with your audience. I’m sure I’d like what you’re doing – I’m sure I’d like your business. I want to interact with you, I want to say great things about you and share your content. The only problem is, it doesn’t attempt to engage me, relate to me, or really do anything for me that another brand hasn’t tried ten times over. I’m probably being harsh here – in some instances your content could be read and some people may even share your content. However, you have to ask yourself, what’s your objective? Do you want to get your name out there and people sharing your content so you can build a community? Or do you want to maintain a blog for appearances sake and drive a few visits every now and again? If your objective is the latter, you are probably better off not bothering.

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Is there something on your nose? Writing incessantly about your industry, without any storytelling or outside influences, all the time, every time, will likely not garner the attention you’re looking for, it’s very on-the-nose. Have you ever read Buzzfeed? I’m not going to go into the intellectual merit of such a site or whether I like it or not, the point is: it sells. The content on Buzzfeed, and other similar sites, appeals to users for a few reasons, but mainly:     

It makes them laugh. It makes them go awwww. It makes them scared. It makes them outraged. And so on.

It appeals to raw human emotions – that’s what great content should do. Sure, that’s not going to be the theme of every post you write but you need to try and factor it in. Further, some industries demand a more conservative approach and that’s fine too, but there is a middle ground to be established somewhere. Most blog posts are page after page of the same content, talking about the same stuff, written in the same fashion, abiding by the same rules, fitting into the same box and playing the same zero sum game. It’s like someone created a rulebook that everyone is secretly following. I’m not trying to sell the mantra of a tabloid newspaper to you – that’s not the idea. It’s to try and get you to think and appeal to REAL people, who experience REAL information overload and to find ways to try and get their ATTENTION while they process and digest all of the information coming at them from all

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143 | P a g e directions (their inbox, their timelines, their phones and so on). The world is awash with content and you have a VERY weak voice. Let’s take this further and look at a specific example - you decided on the following topic for your life insurance post: 10 ways you can lower your life insurance policy. Let’s go through a few of the extremities.  



Zany: 24 reasons Jack Bauer’s life insurance policy has gone through the roof. Provocative: Why life insurers hate e-cig smokers. << I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s in reference to something I read lately about e-cigs. Corporate: 112 little-known ways to ensure your life insurance policy drops like a stone. << Sure, it has been done but it’s unlikely to have been done to this extent!

Now, I’ve just thought of these off the top of my head – give me an internet connection and three hours and I will be creating topics like there’s no tomorrow. You’ve been in the industry for however many years, you are more than capable of pummelling me into the ground with your topic-generating ability. You just need to go a LOT further.

Utilising marketing hooks. To take some of the above concepts that little bit further, you need to think outside of the realms of ‘life insurance’ – rather, you need to think about what your target audience REALLY loves to read. Who is your target audience? What do they talk about? Where do they go to socialise? Which sports do they prefer to watch?

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144 | P a g e With the greatest of respect to the life insurance industry, I’m not likely to read all too many posts on life insurance – this said, it’s maybe the case that a great deal of people who are interested in taking out a life insurance premium are also interested in, say, art? You could create a website, dedicated to art (or factor posts about art into you regular blog) – on every 4th or 5th post, you could very subtly drop in a reference to your life insurance brand. It’s not rocket science, but to steal a line from Gary Vaynerchuk: ‘everyone is a media company’. It really is true.

Headlines. When it comes to writing great content, headlines aren’t just important, they are EVERYTHING. A headline is the first point at which a prospective visitor or customer interacts with your content – they see your headlines in the SERPs, they see your headlines on Twitter, they see your headlines in the e-mails you send to them. The headline is going to be the deciding factor between content which is read and content which is confined to the scrapheap. To nab some statistics from Copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 people will read the rest. 

One of the steadfast rules most copywriters abide by is ‘make every line you write better than the last’. Live it.



It’s often worth having a think about the type of visitor you’re are trying to attract and modifying your headline accordingly. A LOT of bloggers love the ‘how to’ headline, it clarifies immediately what the visitor is

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145 | P a g e going to get. ‘How to’ headlines typically imply that help is on offer. 

I have a massive Excel spreadsheet on our Company Server, it’s filled to the brim with 1. headlines I’ve seen other people write (and can learn from) and 2. headlines for posts I want to write.

One of the best ways to master the craft of headline writing is to head over to one of my favourite resources – Copyblogger. They’ve published a free e-book specifically devoted to headline writing, you can get it here.

Images. Images REALLY help push your content forward – combined with headlines (which help break content into digestable chunks), images can really make your content come to life (I personally can never have enough images in my content). Now, it’s important to be careful here – if you follow the online space, you will know that Buzzfeed has encountered a great range of problems relating to copyright theft of images that they frequently publish on their website. This said, there are tons of royalty free images out there, you just have to look around – my personal preference is Big Stock Photo, however I’ve also used Getty Images from time to time, too. Tying content to your business objectives. What are your business objectives? What do you want customers to do when they land on your website? How are you going to get them to do that?

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146 | P a g e A lot of businesses take a very simplified approach when it comes to creating a buying process – more often than not, it doesn’t fit with what the customers want. When I first started looking at selling SEO services, I didn’t think about what I wanted to sell, I thought first and foremost about what people wanted and more importantly, what they needed. As far as I saw it, people needed a full resource on SEO they could pick-up and run with – a resource that was orientated around SMEs, marketing managers or independent webmasters. That’s how this book was born. Now, I obviously make absolutely no money from this book, but that has never been the objective – the days, weeks and months I’ve put into this book was never about generating direct sales, it was about bolstering my own brand reputation. With brand awareness, more people will visit my site and when more people visit my site, more people will share my content. When more people share my content, I generate more sales. You need to clarify what your business objectives are and align them with what your clients, prospects, or visitors are looking for – it’s not all about generating sales, it also, largely, about generating visibility, shares, links and cultivating a community around your brand. With a community, you can do anything. Lastly, try and tie your best content into your main assets – if there’s a specific asset you have on-site that acts as a conversion point i.e. for capturing e-mail addresses which for you, could be the first step in your buying cycle, then build peripheral content around it i.e. a lot of the content and video I create, leads into downloading the e-book.

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Would I read this? When I’m writing a page of content, this is often the main thing that goes through my mind – after all, if you wouldn’t read it, why would anyone else? Remember, the idea of content marketing isn’t to promote your brand directly, or drive immediate sales off the back of your content, the idea is simply to help. A lot of content writers end up putting lacklustre work together, mainly due to a lack of motivation, after all you’re not getting an immediate, direct return for this, so why should it take up your time and why should you put your best effort into it? As above, it’s the indirect impact this content will have on your reputation, brand awareness and the overall visibility of your website – long term – which is FAR more valuable than any one or two sales. Content marketing is very much long-term, however at the core of every successful content marketing strategy is quality and consistency – you may not attract much attention in your first few months, but with a consistent and quality-led approach, the results will come.

Ideation: Coming up with a great idea is often half the battle. When it comes to creating content, you’ve got to partition your strategy based upon your objectives. Needless to say, you want to update your blog with fresh content on a fairly regular basis – now, these posts may not be the lengthiest, or the most detailed you’ve ever written, but invariably they help keep your blog current and your readers happy. More often than not, the vast majority of links pointing into your site will go to your star studded content – the type of content that is massively insightful, thoroughly engaging and

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148 | P a g e better than anything else there is out there on the subject. This type of content keeps attracting links, shares and publicity week after week and year after year. The nature of your strategy and the tactics you utilise will obviously depend on the amount of time and resources you devote to creating the content that your visitors want to read – if you want faster results, then create bigger and better assets and focus on building up your brand reputation. Content marketing, particularly in the early stages, really is a building exercise – the over-arching aim is to bolster your brand awareness and create a quality expectation in the mind of your visitors.

Yahoo Answers and Quora: I love browsing both of these sites – there are a haven for content ideas. To get the most from them, simply perform a few creative queries – if you want to find questions people are asking about search engine optimisation, you would simply query: “site:answers.yahoo.com search engine optimisation”. It may also be worth building out a huge list of frequently asked questions (we’ve done this a lot on behalf of clients) which will invariably be referenced as a resource by prospective customers and maybe even industry professionals.

Content Aggregators and Bookmarking Sites: Sites like delicious and reddit have tons of content ideas – the latter allows you to host AMAs which are basically question and answer sessions with industry experts (these again can serve as a prompt for content development).

Topsy: Topsy is a social search engine and analytics tool which allows your to find the most popular content shared across Twitter.

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149 | P a g e You can also do site: commands through this tool which quickly and easily allows you to draw out some of the most shared posts created by your competitors – it’s a great way to find content that attracts interest!

Backlinks Analysis: Backlinks analysis is vital not only for understanding which link building mechanisms your competitors are utilising, but it can also help inform your content strategy, too – simply use the features in your backlinks analysis tool of choice (be it Majestic, AHREFS or Open Site Explorer) to unearth your competitor’s most linked-to content.

Ask your customers: If you ever outsource content marketing to an Agency, this should be one of the very first things they do. Now, in some instances I question the validity of these types of surveys, however as long as you acquire a solid dataset i.e. a lot of people respond, it can give you a very good indication of what your audience wants to read. Surveys enable you to build up content personas and get a feel for what your audience is really interested in reading – you just need to be careful to ask the right questions!

How to: It’s probably one of the most popular types of headline, however it’s also a very powerful method for generating ideas. What “how to” content does your industry need? It may be worth doing an exact search on Google to identify what your competitors have already written and whether you can either do better, or create an original piece of content.

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150 | P a g e Either way, just think “how to” and hopefully that should prompt a few ideas!

Google Suggest: This one is very easy – type a keyword into search but don’t hit enter, just review the suggestions which appear underneath the search field. Alternatively, use a tool like ubersuggest (which is great!). Review trending topics or popular hashtags:

Google Alerts: There’s no better way to monitor the competition, or other similar sites, than by setting an alert around specific keywords – a Google Alert will then notify you, via e-mail, whenever new content is posted around the keywords you have specified.

Popular Posting Formats: We’ve looked at a few options you can pursue if you’re struggling to come up with ideas, however there are also some tried and tested content formats which can often serve to draw a crowd. Of course, this is content marketing – what works in one industry, and for one audience, may not work for another. This is why building multiple content personas, or rather getting to know your readers and what they actually want to read about, is such an important step for the long-term success of your content strategy. Nonetheless, the content formats listed below are all relatively popular options – as with anything internet marketing related, the key to making these formats work is getting stuck in, developing the content and ultimately testing whether or not they work for you or your brand.

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151 | P a g e No content marketing format is ever an out-of-the-box solution, however hopefully the options below will give you a few ideas, or maybe some frameworks to create posts within.

Newsjacking: This is a technique I utilise probably a bit too often but that’s only because it works so well. The concept of newsjacking is relatively simple to understand, you spot trending topics or popular news stories and quickly put a post together which either reports on the story, or integrates your brand into the story. The idea here is obviously to capitalise upon the popularity of the news item. Different brands pursue different approaches when it comes to newsjacking, and it’s worth testing each of them to see which fits best with your brand. Immediacy: The more popular form of newsjacking is spotting a potentially popular story, reporting on it (reporting just on the facts) and then publishing it on your website. A very prominent recent example of this was Matt Cutts and his ‘stick a fork in it’ post on Guest Blogging, in which he proclaimed (albeit only to later ‘clarify’ his stance) guest posting, as a mechanism for building links, was dead. The manner in which the post is framed made it difficult for webmasters to decide on how they should interpret it – personally, I think that’s why he did it, it was a sure fire way to draw a lot of attention to his blog, particularly considering the popularity of guest posting. As soon as this news story was published – and sensing that there was going to be a lot of publicity around it – many an SEO

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152 | P a g e jumped to their blog and started writing up on it (I personally just headed straight for Matt Cutt’s comments section). Integration: A lot of bloggers or webmasters like to capitalise upon popular, relevant news stories, and try and integrate their brand into the news story. One recent examples of this is the hoopla surrounding a UKIP (UK Independence Party – a political Party in The UK) councillor, who proclaimed that all of the bad weather the UK had inflicted upon it lately was due to the country’s decision to legalise gay marriage. Following this news item, the @UKIPWeather Twitter account was created and attracted over 100,000 followers in little more than 72 hours. I’m pretty sure you can guess the theme of the content which was published through this account! Analytical: This is the type of post you put together if you’ve got a bit of time on your hands. Invariably, a lot of blogs report on events, but what is often missing is a bit of in-depth analysis. Search Engine Land and other such sites, usually take this approach – they may post about the breaking news story (in a report format i.e. just reporting on the events), and then the next day they will follow up with a more in-depth analysis. This approach enables you to be the go-to piece for more information – as always with anything content marketing related, you need to add as much value as possible, so if you’re going to go in-depth try and release it no later than 24 hours after the event, and make sure you add a lot of value on-top of what has already been contributed.

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153 | P a g e If there has been a lot of publicity around the news story, it may even been worth doing a roundup of all that publicity (see below for more information).

Interviews: Interviews typically result in good content for your blog and more importantly, ego bait. The idea in many instances isn’t just to do an interview, it’s to do an interview with a prominent person in your industry. With this, invariably, will come exposure for the post – the idea more than anything isn’t just to get your readers to engage with the post, but it’s to get the prominent person to share the content (across what is probably a very enviable social media presence) and perhaps even link to it (from what is probably a very authoritative domain). Another tactic many have used recently is mass interviews – now, I’m not an overly big fan of the approach, mainly because I believe that as it goes on and evolves, it’s becoming synonymous with low-quality. The idea is simply to conduct interviews with a range of industry professionals and get their opinion on a specific subject that’s of interest to your readers – this is a good example of a mass-interview post (this particular post now ranks prominently for more queries than you care to know about!). This could also be termed mass ego bait – you find a host of highly influential people, get them to answer a few quick questions (‘quick’ is often the better approach, particularly if you’ve got a small website with little to no presence online – influencers are generally very busy people!) and the desired outcome for you is all of these people linking back into your post and discussing or sharing via social media channels.

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154 | P a g e The important part here is to ensure that you set a bar for quality – you don’t simply want to interview people who are only going to contribute a few words for the sole purpose of acquiring a link on your website. That doesn’t add value for your readers, nor is it very effective for you. Lastly, the really great thing about this approach is that it enables you to acquire links and build relationships with prominent influencers at the same time – all of this depends heavily on execution and you should also be prepared to put in some VERY significant leg work (that said, more often than not, the results are more than worth it – just check out the post linked to above).

Content surveys. A content survey is prompting your audience to tell you what they want you to write about, or how they feel about a certain subject matter or service provision; you can needless to say, do so much with this data. Survey Tools: While I don’t conduct many surveys (despite its effectiveness it’s not really what I enjoy doing, I much prefer being front and centre and focusing on video, podcasts and blogging about specific subjects), when I have in the past on behalf of clients, I’ve typically always used Survey Monkey. It’s very easy to get to grips with – I’m not overly fanatical with their payment model or subscription plans, however it’s about the best there is in terms of creating surveys. Furthermore, if you’re struggling to get people to complete your survey they have an audience gathering option – it’s usually about $2-4 per completion.

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Repurposing your content. Most bloggers commit a crime of sorts when it comes to creating content – they spend hours creating and carving out a post and then they just, well, leave it there. They’ve maybe compiled a ton of information, sought to create a truly original page of content (asset) and then that’s it, they’ve stopped. This minimises the impact of your time and your content. What’s more, you’ve likely got a back catalogue of content that’s just sitting and waiting to be repurposed. There are absolutely hundreds of ways you can extend the reach of your efforts, some of the more popular options include: 

Podcasting: Create a podcast based around the information or research you gathered to put your post together. If you are to do this, I’d recommend trying to fit it in to a regular schedule (maybe once every two weeks) – there are loads of great tools out there which help with podcast production, including Audacity (for editing), PodBean for publishing and you will want to invest in a moderately good microphone, too!

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White Papers: If it’s your intention to become a thought leader in your industry, then white papers will be a good way to go – I haven’t produced many white papers, but there are brands that drive a significant amount of visibility through conducting research and adopting a thought leadership position in their industry i.e. Econsultancy.

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Shareable Presentations: This is one of my favourite repurposing options – shareable presentations are both very quick to create and very easy for user’s to digest. One of the more popular sites for publishing

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156 | P a g e presentations is slideshare – it’s worth checking some of Gary Vaynerchuk’s latest contributions. 

Infographic: An infographic is a visual representation of data – when done correctly, they can prove to be very valuable assets (in the context of being shareable, easily digested and link worthy). We will talk about infographics more as we go on, however you can produce your own free infographics at Visual.ly (I always recommend custom made wherever possible and particularly because they can be relatively cheap to produce, however for the purposes of repurposing, a free tool would suffice).

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Video: I’m becoming a bit of a video production addict and I have to say, producing a snapshot of video about a blog post you’ve just created is a bit of a no-brainer, particularly if you’ve got the kit available. You can use services such as Wistia to self-host the video and you can use Speech Pad to create an automatic transcription of the content.

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Social: One of the more obvious options, and one which is often neglected, is simply seeding the content out to social media channels, bit-by-bit. This is particularly effective if the blog post is stats orientated. Needless to say you shouldn’t don’t do it all at once but rather space it out over a period of time.

There are absolutely hundreds of repurposing options you can use, you’re only limited by your creativity and you newfound knowledge on why you really shouldn’t duplicate content.

Industry Round-Ups: One of my favoured content formats, I regularly read round-up posts from a range of contributors. As I’ve alluded to above, a

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157 | P a g e round-up post is simply a collection of links to posts or resources (both internal and external posts) about a specific industry. They are usually utilised to keep visitors up to date on all the latest industry news. One of the best things about creating round-up posts is that they can take relatively little time to put together and they can offer tremendous value to users looking for a quick snapshot of the latest news within your industry. They are also useful from the perspective that you will invariably be linking out to some larger industry sites – it’s well worth cc’ing these sites in when you syndicate a tweet with a link to the content on Twitter.

Infographic Development: We’ve talked a little about content marketing and doing something different i.e. figuring out what the competition in your niche is doing, and then setting about trying to do it 10x better – the same principle applies with infographics. An infographic is a visual representation of data – you come up with a concept, you conduct research around that concept, you structure the concept, you commission a design, you build up a list of prospects and then you contact those prospects to offer them the right to publish your work on their website. If, or rather when, they do choose to publish your infographic – you get linked.

Wow, why so much hard work? I know, it sounds crazy, right? It sounds REALLY time intensive. Well, that’s because it is – that’s why it WORKS. However, I’m going to give you an example which will hopefully push you in the direction of considering infographics as part of your online marketing strategy – that example is CarLoan4U.

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If you do a search for “car finance” in Google UK, you will see Car Loan 4U has acquired no. 1 spot – in fact, if you do a search for just about any high volume generic search term, you will see them factoring into the top 10, at least somewhere. Why? They have a very authoritative link profile. They use slightly too much anchor text for my liking however I’m sure some would argue that’s balanced out by the quality of some of the links they’ve acquired i.e. from Yahoo.com and prominent car hire websites. Many of those links have been acquired through the publication of infographics. While I’m not suggesting that all of CarLoan4U’s visibility has been built up through utilising infographics as a marketing strategy, it’s pretty clear that infographics have formed a pivotal role within that strategy (as they have for many brands).

Coming up with a concept or idea. There are two really crucial components to making this work as it should – the QUALITY of the content (research) and the QUALITY of the design. However, before you even get started

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159 | P a g e with any of that, you should probably address the most important part: what are you going to create an infographic about? Well, to begin with (and to most likely state the obvious) it should be relevant and targeted to the industry you are in – you want to acquire relevant links, so if your e-commerce store sells garden furniture, it’s pretty unlikely you’re going to acquire the types of links you need to acquire with an infographic about football.

Remember your business objectives. More importantly, try and consider what your business objectives are. For example, on GarethMailer.com I write a lot of content about SEO, however my main target audience isn’t just internet marketers, it’s business owners – I don’t just want to help internet marketers, I also want to introduce business owners to internet marketing. So, when I’m creating an infographic, the first port of call may actually be “how to make sure your business doesn’t fail in 2014”. It would then be targeted to small business and start-up websites – once the infographic is published, I then leverage the traffic of those brands to drive traffic to GarethMailer.com (through a link). As a side note, it will be far easier to outreach to these types of sites than it would be to internet marketing sites (most internet marketing webmasters are inundated with these types of emails – nay, most internet marketers SEND these types of emails). So, you also need to consider the probability of whether you will get a response from the niche you are targeting.

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Conduct a (small) infographic audit. It’s quite simple really – just search and have a look around at what other brands have done in your industry. For example, if I were trying to find infographics targeted at small business owners, I would perform the following searches:    

“infographic” “small business” “infographic” “start ups” “small business” inurl:infographic And so on – have a review of the advanced search operators section above.

It’s a very simple way to come up with new ideas and do some competitive research, too. It is also worth visiting a few infographic directories, like Cool Infographics or Daily Infographic (you could use a site: command against these sites and additional advanced operators to filter through all the content i.e. site:coolinfographics.com “small business”). When coming up with an initial concept it’s advantageous to have an idea about what your marketplace actually wants to read – now, needless to say, the best way to find that out is to conduct some form of survey, however at the very least I imagine you will have a rough idea about popular developments in your industry, or trending topics.

Repurpose your infographic. It’s absolutely critical, right at the very outset, to think about how you might repurpose your infographic – this is the stage when the time investment that you are making, and probably questioning, becomes less of a concern. Review the repurposing options listed above and create (research) your infographic with these in mind – based on the

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161 | P a g e type of research you conduct, some repurposing options will likely be easier than others.

Conducting research around your infographic. The first and most important piece of information I can pass on with regards to conducting research for infographics is this: MAKE SURE IT’S LEGITIMATE RESEARCH. Verify everything you unearth and try and collect at least two sources, if possible. The obvious points of contact for pulling information together are mainstream news outlets i.e. The Guardian, The Telegraph etc, or Governmental websites including statistics.gov.uk, or other Governmental institutions relevant to the topic of your infographic. Research is likely going to be the most time consuming part of the entire project, however it’s pivotal that you get it right. A few additional points: 

Try and dig for data that’s a little bit harder to find. You really want to make sure that your infographic is something that user’s WANT to read and that its going to attract the interest of your target market, so offering something that isn’t available elsewhere is the primary way to do that.

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As we’ve discussed in the copywriting section above, try and evoke people’s emotions, in one way or another – the more emotion you manage to create, the more likely the infographic is to go viral.

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Always cite your sources towards the end of the infographic (which is what most people do), just create a long list of all the URLs you’ve utilised and include your Company logo at the end of the content.

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How to structure your infographic. This is usually the hardest part of all and you may find that you have to be a little bit, well, brutal. You will likely have collected a lot of research around your topic, you need to split it up and come up with set themes. For example, we recently created an infographic about road crashes (not “road accidents”, there’s an important distinction to be made there!) and how likely the reader was to be involved in a road crash on UK roads. This was how the infographic was structured: 

Brief Introduction: Here, we included 6 stats, many of which were highly emotive and designed to encourage the user to keep reading.

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Map: In this section we created a map of the United Kingdom and then displayed stats for road crashes across each major region – it gave the infographic a far more personal feel to it i.e. someone could read and immediately get the sense that it is something which is close to them and could even happen to them.

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Mode of transport: In this section we broke down stats for each mode of transport i.e. pedal cyclists, public transport, cars, HGVs and so on. We also displayed stats for each range.

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Main causes: In this section, we displayed some of the main causes of road crashes in the UK, from texting while driving to falling asleep at the wheel.

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Most dangerous roads: We then displayed some of the most dangerous roads in the UK, in order of highest number of fatalities in the last five years.

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How to improve: Finally, we showed stats on how a reader can improve his or her driving ability and minimise the risk of being involved in a crash.

As you can see, this is quite a long infographic, however it also has a very clear beginning, middle and end (in this manner, it’s a lot like a screenplay). You have to remember that your infographic isn’t just an image – it’s telling a story to the user. One of the best websites you can visit to reveal more about this concept is The Oatmeal – the webmaster of that site frequently creates comics which generate hundreds of thousands of shares across social media channels. Each comic tells a very distinct, or powerful story.

Commissioning the design of your infographic. You may have a design team in-house, or it may just be you – either way, someone needs to design the infographic and bring it to life. Typically, we use outsourcers – we do have a designer in-house, however we also have a very talented outsourcer we use, too. I’m not going to lie, finding outsourcers can be tough, however a few good places to start are oDesk, Elance and People Per Hour. I pretty much always use Elance (or at least used to), but that’s a personal preference. Finding a graphic designer who can produce to the standard you expect is one thing, finding a graphic designer who you can actually work with is something else – I should know, I’ve been through TONS of designers (and copywriters).

Create a draft. It has to be said, I draw like a five year old – I’ve always wanted to make my way through Drawing on the right side of the brain,

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164 | P a g e however it never quite happened (and finding time nowadays is a bit of a nightmare!). This being the case, I ALWAYS draw something out for my designer – design is such a subjective thing and a brief description will rarely cover it, your designer need to be given an idea about typography, proportion and structure. Even if your drawing looks awful, it doesn’t matter – your designer should be able to work with it. For the amount of time it takes to put together, it’s well worth doing – it will ensure the final product is a lot closer to your specification.

Infographic prospecting. Without prospecting, you infographic simply WON’T do anything (well, unless you’ve got an established base of traffic already making its way to your site). The first thing you need to do is publish the infographic on your website – when you do this, try and include social buttons in the vicinity of it. It’s also VERY worth including an embed code at the bottom of the infographic, to ensure that anyone who does land on the page can share it, freely. While this is often the strategy most internet marketers choose (i.e. publishing the infographic on their own, or their client’s, website), I opt for a slightly modified approach. I prefer to build up a prospect list and start e-mailing. One thing I’m always careful to include in those e-mails is the appearance of scarcity, or, better yet, a means to tap into their ego i.e. ‘we’re only sending this e-mail out to 46 prospects and we decided to include [brand you are targeting] on that list’. It really does help sell it – it gives them the impression that they are getting something that no-one else is, or rather they are one

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165 | P a g e of the ‘bigger brands’ and that’s the main reason I’m contacting them (in reality, it’s true). Other than the above, you just need to follow the structure I’ve set down in the prospecting and outreach sections of this book which will guide you through the whole process of prospecting for, and outreaching, an infographic.

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LINK BUILDING STRATEGIES AND MECHANISMS: The world isn’t short of link building mechanisms, as you will discover. This is going to be a large section of the book, but just before we dip into specific mechanisms you can utilise, I just want to touch upon the one factor which is missing from just about every failed link building campaign I’ve ever witnessed: PERSISTENCE. It’s at the core of everything you will do. I’ve seen many brands, large and small, start strategies over the years, however the main issue most of them come up against isn’t resources, ability or even time, its application, or persistence. The nature of link building is that it can sometimes be a bit on the monotonous side, but the brands who REALLY make it work are the brands who keep going, day after day, week after week, month after month – they are the brands who trump the rest, ultimately because they want it most. Anyway, without further ado, let’s start looking through some mechanisms.

I love you. What a strange heading for a link building mechanism I hear you say, but as we’ll all know – those are mighty powerful words. People love it when you say nice things about them; most people love a bit of social validation – the real question is, how can you use this to your advantage? We all have customers, we all have partners, we all have relationships – leverage them. Get in touch with existing suppliers, contacts and connections and tell them what you really feel, give them a testimonial.

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168 | P a g e Give them ownership over your work and permission to publish it anywhere they like, with special mention for publishing on their website – why? Because, when they publish it on their website, you can acquire a link back to yours. Simple. It’s funny (in a geeky kind of way), but I’ve seen this mechanism used time and time again to acquire valuable link after valuable link; if you have a large brand as a supplier, it’s always worth dropping them over a testimonial, especially considering it only takes you a few minutes to put together some strong copy which can be used by them to sell more of whatever it is they sell. Here’s a good example of a PageRank 5 testimonial page on AWeber.com – look at the links. Granted, this type of page may be a bit of a harder nut to crack, however if you can get through, it’s a powerful link.

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There are a few things to remember here: 

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Put the testimonial in a separate word document, with a link back to your site at the bottom of the testimonial – make it appear as though you are doing them a favour by telling them you’ve attached it in a separate document (which in reality, you are) so they can simply copy and paste the entire testimonial onto their site. Try and abide by the outreach processes I outlined above – there’s an art form behind getting people to say yes to e-mails, more than anything try and keep it short, sweet and as much about them as possible (i.e. the benefits for them).

Competitive Backlinks Analysis: Is there really an easier way to come up with powerful link acquisition ideas or opportunities than simply analysing the backlink profile of a competitor? That’s obviously a rhetorical question, but to skip straight to the point, the answer is no. Backlink profiles are a goldmine of information – they articulate your competitor’s strategy, partnerships, successes, content ideas and a lot more besides. A thorough review of your competitors’ backlink profiles should be first port of call for any link building strategy. So, what are you looking for? 

Links pages is always a good start – invariably, if the particular competitor you are analysing has been around for a while, then they will likely have garnered links from resource pages.

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I always quite like to check where they are advertising, too – you can very quickly spot if they are particular sites they’ve chosen to advertise on.

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It may be worth exporting the pages available on your competitor’s domain and then running them through a header checker to reveal broken pages or 404 errors. This will reveal any ‘deleted’ pages on their website, which you can then do a backlinks analysis on, and perhaps approach the webmaster of the linking site to see if they’d rather linking to a relevant or similar resource on your website (please check the overview of broken link building below).

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You can very quickly review their most linked-to pages and identify what content works best for them – from this, you can also pick up a list of potential link prospects, brands which are linking to your competitor which would in-turn, likely, be amenable to linking to you, too.

There are absolutely hundreds of applications for backlinks analysis, the most important thing is to keep an eye out for the links which are driving significant value. The idea isn’t to replicate your competitor’s backlink profile, far from it, but rather to pick up a few links, here or there, which are driving significant value.

Broken Link Building: If I were to pick out the most popular link building mechanism among SEOs, other than general link prospecting, this would be it. Broken Link Building can be a bit of a challenge to wrap your head around, mainly because there are a few different ways to do it:

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Look for 404 pages (broken pages, or pages which no longer work) with links pointing into them. Create a resource on your site which is superior to the broken resource you have identified, contact the more prominent webmasters who are linking into the broken page and ask them to link to you instead.

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The lazier approach is to find broken links on a webmaster’s site, get in touch with, inform them there’s a broken link on their site and incorporate a link request into your goodwill gesture.

I have to be honest, I very rarely use the latter approach however I do know of webmasters who utilise it and vouch for its effectiveness – personally, I didn’t feel as though it was right for me. With regards to the former approach, the main benefit you are obviously providing is offering up a resource of similar or superior quality to the resource which is already being linked to, and informing them that they have a broken link on their site. More often than not, I achieve a good response rate from this approach, as well as good, valuable links. How to find broken link opportunities: The process is relatively simple: 

Figure out which keywords you want to use to find resource pages – these resource pages will list links to other resources online (resources which are similar to your own); you want to find the links on that resource page which link to 404 pages. Needless to say, you will want to include advanced search operators i.e. “[keyword] inurl:links” – with regards to specific keywords, you should focus on terms which are broadly relevant to your industry.

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172 | P a g e 

Then, you want to extract all of the results from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – you can do this using an automated scraping tool like Scrapebox, or alternatively you can use MozBar to manually extract.

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Once you have done this, you will want to extract all of the outbound links from the resource pages you’ve just extracted – I usually use this Scrapebox add on for this.

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Next, you will want to check the server response for each of those pages (outbound links) – to do this, simply run all of the URLs through a header checker, you can use Check My Links or here is another good option.

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Now that you hopefully have a collection of 404 error pages, you can start to pinpoint targets by reviewing the backlink profiles for some of these pages. The BEST way to do this – and this is why I opt for a Majestic SEO subscription – is to use a bulk backlinks analysis tool.

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It may also be worth using the Wayback Machine to review what the pages looked like, or the content they contained, before they were deleted.

It’s quite a process, eh? Why on earth would you bother going through all this? Well, it works – I can’t really put it in better terms than that. If you want to skip the whole process above, there is a tool which does it all for you at BrokenLinkBuilding.com. Once all of this is in place, the next step is obviously outreaching to webmasters to make them aware of your content and why it is a viable alternative to the page they are currently linking to.

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Guest Posting: Ah, the favoured strategy of many an SEO. I wrote a huge section on this in the last version of this book, however this time round…well, you should know some of the latest developments. Guest posting is as it sounds – you create a page of (exceptional) content, you outreach to a specific webmaster and that webmaster posts your post on his or her blog in exchange for a link back to your site (the link in many ways isn’t what you’re doing it for, it’s really about the traffic that you can potentially drive back into your website). Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with it – you’re creating value. Unfortunately however, Google does have a few issues. While guest posting in the more legitimate sense is very, very unlikely to get you into trouble, Google’s Matt Cutt’s gives this stance on the issue: “Guest blogging seems like it’s the fad of the month…it is best done in moderation. It shouldn’t be your full-time job.” More recently (January, 2014) in a post on his own blog (I commented on this and received a direct response from Matt, just hit CTRL + F and search for my name if you want to read it), he started a bit of a riot among the SEO industry by stating: “Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.“ After much uproar, he went onto revise his position: “I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future.”

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174 | P a g e Hmmm, as always, it’s suitably vague (Google likes being vague, it’s a lot easier to leave things open to interpretation). A lot of webmasters get all up in arms about anything Google (or Matt Cutts) publishes, personally I’ve been in this industry long enough to know a few things: 

Google is masterful at delivering misinformation. What they say isn’t per say untrue, however they tend to focus on less-weighted mechanisms – webmaster help typically comes in the form of ‘create unique page titles’ or ‘create great content’.

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Google’s best weapon against web spam isn’t algorithmic updates, its public relations. Through public relations they can stop webmasters engaging in practices which are challenging for them to solve.

Truth be told, I like Matt Cutts and appreciate the fact he’s the face of Google and offers a forum for webmasters – however, this latest post does nothing but serve to cause confusion amongst onlookers when in reality, most industry professionals are already more than aware of the current situation. Ultimately, guest posting is fine – in fact, you can secure some great visibility through it (particularly if you can leverage the traffic headed to a large brand). Guest posting can yield terrific results however, like with anything SEO related, it shouldn’t be the only thing you do. Nor should you ever engage in guest posting tactics which are manipulative, or scalable – just aim for very high value, very reputable websites.

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Finding guest posting opportunities. To be honest, it has never been easier to do this – most of the prospecting tips listed above will help you with this. Word of note however, there are MILLIONS of sites which accept guest posts – many of them fall some way short of ‘crap’. Be very selective with your choices and focus more on potential traffic generation rather than link value. Secondly, and if it were me, you would be better focusing on seamlessly integrating a link into the content of the post, rather than creating an author bio at the end of the post – it looks a LOT more natural (this is me bordering on the edge of paranoia here, however it’s my responsibility to make sure you have the full picture). Lastly, when looking for guest posting opportunities it may be worth checking out websites like MyBlogGuest (I would use their blogger directory ahead of their library feature, however); I’ve managed to secure a few good guest posting spots on the websites of large UK brands through MyBlogGuest in recent years (this said, and in my opinion and like with most things, there’s a lot more chaff than wheat in the MyBlogGuest directory).

Building relationships on web forums: No, I’m not talking about simply posting links on your forum profile – first of all that would be more than a little bit spammy, secondly, it would be largely pointless, the link would likely carry next to no weight/value. I’m talking about building a viable presence on an online web forum – one really good option, if you’re based in the UK, is 4Networking.biz. I have built up a relatively strong presence on

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176 | P a g e that forum over the last few years and every now and again, I like to create an offer – recent offers include the following:  

I will provide you with a free keyword research document if you link back to our website. I will provide you with some free technical optimisation if you link back to our website.

Free promotions are great, however you have to make sure that the quality is there. The first promotion landed us 29 brand new links into our website; while they were all small businesses, it still represented a good haul considering the relative amount of work we would have to put in otherwise to acquire the links.

Donation Pages: There are literally thousands of donations pages online and quite a few of them like to thank their contributors in the form of a link – if you donate to a worthwhile cause which does happen to have a links page, then you’re in luck. Try the following searches:  

“[your industry keyword]” inurl:donations “[your industry keyword]” inurl:contributors

*Before engaging in this tactic, please read the chapter above on link building basics and in particular, the section on ‘paid links’.

Delivering Seminars: This isn’t something I have done much of personally, but mainly due to a lack of time – free seminars with local colleges or Universities, discussing topics which are of use to your audience, is a great way to get a FANTASTIC link back to your website from a highly prized source i.e. a University or College

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177 | P a g e (needless to say, links from these domains are typically innately valuable, owing mainly to the fact that the vast majority of education websites retain substantial link profiles).

Help a Report Out or Expert Sources: Do you know any journalists or reporters? Yes? Then what on earth are you sitting here for? If you answered no to that question then the two sources below should help to bridge the gap – journalists are always looking to find useful, reliable quotes, expert sources pairs you up with journalists looking to do just that. Now, this isn’t easiest type of link building however it’s important to remember that the links you can acquire from being part of a news item published online are hugely valuable, in fact pretty much as valuable as you can get (speaking generally). One of the biggest issues you will face when using these services is simply standing out – however, make sure you prepare, respond quickly and submit the best possible work you can submit. Better yet, utilise social media channels, like Twitter, to try and connect to journalists directly – the hashtag #journorequest is a great means for achieving this (alternatively, use the site: command to search Twitter for key terms including “telegraph”, “The Guardian” etc. – you can also search Twitter bios using Followerwonk).  

http://www.helpareporter.com/ http://www.expertsources.co.uk/

If the above don’t suit you, it may also be worth checking out journalisted.

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Press Release Distribution: This particular mechanism holds connotations with a more spam-like SEO strategy, that said if you utilise press release distribution services to their fullest potential, then you can acquire some very strong links. Two of the more prominent services include PR Web and Market Wired – you are typically permitted to create a certain number of links back to your website from within the press release (such statements, even when made from my own hand, make me feel uneasy!). One of the important things to remember about press release distribution is that you have to create something genuinely newsworthy to get mass-market appeal – the content obviously needs to be unique and not purely self-promotional. Lastly, it’s also worth remembering that the content will be distributed across numerous websites and due to the fact the same page of content is used again and again, some of the pages will likely end up filtered from the SERPs. My advice would be to avoid this strategy in favour of the strategy listed above i.e. using Expert Sources or Twitter hashtags to make inroads with actual journalists.

Article Marketing: Just to be clear, I’m not here to pass judgement – I’m here to inform. If I were here for the former, I probably wouldn’t be passing this off as a mechanism. Article marketing is a bit of a down market version of guest posting – you create a page of content, publish that content on an article directory like EZineArticles.com or GoArticles.com, and you post a link back to your website from the resource box.

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179 | P a g e Now, the description of the process itself should be enough to set off alarm bells, however all in all, it’s a pretty easy way to get links. The advantage is the simplicity of it and to be fair, you could probably get a website to rank for a low competitive query by using articles as part of the link building process. However, be under no illusion – articles marketing carries an element of risk, and the links are obviously of a lower value.

DECENT web directories: Here we’re again, one of those link building mechanisms that I was deliberating over whether to include but ultimately remembered I’m here to inform! Web directories were originally designed to categorise websites and make it easier to find information – then came the search engine and web directories were made a little bit redundant. Now, the vast majority of directories you come across will be built around a business model and while many of them are mechanically sound and quite likely to pass ‘link value’ onto your website, the truth is you are increasing your risk when submitting to such directories. Here’s a broad overview of what I would classify as a good web directory (this said, next to a natural link the word ‘good’ takes on a lot less weight) 

They shouldn’t market ‘SEO value’ – a web directory is supposed to be a place where good quality websites are categorised. A web directory, as far as Google is concerned, is not supposed to be a haven for spam.



There should be an approval process – there should be a possibility that your website will be rejected. A lot of directories simply accept anyone and everyone. Google

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

has in the past literally wiped thousands of web directories from their index overnight. Directories which are overly-general in nature i.e. not themed around a specific topic, are typically not the types of directory you should be looking to request inclusion in. They shouldn’t contain a list of homepage links – webmasters ultimately believe that a homepage link is the most valuable link which you can acquire and 99% of the time they would be right. The homepage is typically the most linked to page on a website and as such, it’s the page on a website which retains the most value. If there are paid links all over the homepage, then it’s best avoided. Really, you shouldn’t be allowed to select your own anchor text – it should be a brand link back into your website. You may want to avoid submitting to directories which contain extensive amounts of pagination – search engines can, in certain instances, struggle to crawl through layer upon layer of pagination, as a result your link may never be picked up.

Am I saying that web directories won’t contribute link value back into your website? No, all I’m saying is that for every link you submit to a less ethical directory, you are subsequently increasing the risk of something a little undesirable happening to your visibility. How many links could you get away with? It would be irresponsible of me to make a suggestion, because that would make it appear as though I was somehow encouraging this practice.

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181 | P a g e To give you a better idea, here are a few general web directories I have submitted to in the past:    

Best of the Web Business.com DMOZ Yahoo Directory

It’s also worth noting Matt Cutt’s position on buying advertorials (or correspondingly, these types of links): “The first is on the search engine side of things. Search engine wise you should make sure that if links are paid, that is, if money changed hands in order for a link to be placed on a website, that it should not flow PageRank; in essence, it shouldn’t affect search engine rankings. That’s no different than the guidance we’ve had for many years and years and years.” In gist, he’s stating that any and all links which have come about as a result of ‘money changing hands’ should be nofollowed (or rather, prevented from passing PageRank or influencing search results). Welcome to the ambiguous World of SEO! Truth be told, I think you’d struggle to find a link profile anywhere in the world which hasn’t relied on some sort of exchange, monetary or not, for a resulting link which ‘flows PageRank’. This isn’t to say I’m suggesting engaging in any of the above, I’m merely pointing out a fact.

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Algorithmic Updates: I think in 2014 we may start to see a new type of marketing job come to the surface entitled ‘Director of keeping an eye on what Google is going to do next’. Ok, while I’m being a little bit tongue-in-cheek with that statement, it’s fair to say there have been a LOT of updates, far more than any SEO-hobbyist would EVER care to read, nevermind most client-focused professionals. Truth be told, you don’t need to know much about algorithmic updates (me on the other hand…over the last year it’s pretty much all I’ve read!) – it’s always orientated around panic, or how webmasters have gone wrong, or how they’ve lost 60% of their traffic overnight (yes, that kind of thing does happen and it happens to big brands, too). What’s more, with the amount of analysis and debate that goes on behind it, it really does get more than a little bit tedious. Me? I prefer to just get on with it. IF you are doing things correctly, if for the most part you abide by Google’s Guidelines, then really there’s nothing to worry about. This said, for the purposes of transparency and for understanding the full picture of search, I wanted to include a rough overview of the TONS of material I’ve digested about this subject over the last two years – I’m going to keep it as short and sweet as possible. n.b. If you are looking for a LOT more information on this subject, it may be worth checking out Moz’s Algorithm Change History, it’s more than link worthy!

Why should I worry about being penalised? When many people think ‘penalty’, they think of something that is relatively easy to recover from. However, when it comes to

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184 | P a g e algorithmic penalties, it really couldn’t be further from the truth. If you engage in widespread manipulation, you are significantly increasing the possibility that your website will be penalised – if your website is penalised, you are going to have to go through a rather long and drawn out process (which isn’t clearly defined) to recover, or you can start again. Those are your options. There’s no other way out of it. To make things worse, Google isn’t what you would call ‘customer friendly’ – sure, if you’re paying them money to advertise you will have no problem getting through to them on the phone, but as far as organic listings go, responses are limited to what you receive via Webmaster Tools and the process is VERY slow.

How do I know if I’ve been penalised? There’s no categorical way, in some instances, to determine if you have or have not been penalised. One clear indication is if you receive an unnatural link warning from Google via Webmaster Tools, another indication is obviously if you see a significant dip in traffic (however, this could be the result of any number of problems or issues, it could even be a seasonal dip, so it’s important not to jump to the worst possible conclusion!).

How to address a (link-based) penalty. I’m not going to go into this in great depth (mainly because so many others have done exactly the same thing, I have linked to a few examples below), however I will cover off some of the basics of what you can do. The first thing you NEED to do is verify that you have actually received a penalty – as above, a dip in traffic could be explained by any number of issues i.e. problematic instructions placed Written by Gareth Mailer, GarethMailer.com.

185 | P a g e within your robots.txt file, seasonality, Server downtime etc. Make sure you conduct a thorough review and identify if there’s any other reason why traffic may have dipped over the period you’ve identified. If a sales prospect comes to us under the suspicion that they may have been penalised, the first thing we invariably do is check through their Analytics account. When I do this, I’m looking for LOTS of different things, most notably: 

Looking through organic traffic reports to spot specific keyword-level dips.



Looking through page-level reports to identify, again, anything particularly unusual.

Next, head on over to webmaster tools and check to see if any manual actions have been posted – if so, seek to rectify them. This may involve using the disavow tool to eliminate any less ethical links from your profile (I am obviously referring to Penguin or link-based penalties here). If this is a problem which affects you, then it’s worth reading up on a few authoritative posts on the subject: 

Does the disavow tool work and will it aid recovery from link based penalties?



The Google Reconsideration Request: Recovering a Link Penalty

Google Penguin: Originally unveiled by Google in April 2012, Penguin has since gone through a range of iterations and updates however the core principle remains the same – targeting webspam.

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186 | P a g e Penguin was revolutionary for a few reasons, most notably that it was Google’s most aggressive stance to date on manipulative link practices and ‘over optimisation’. As with all matters Google, there wasn’t full and specific reference to the types of techniques which were targeted, however an analysis of the resulting backlash that ensued made it very clear what was going on. According to most estimates, Penguin targeted circa 3% of all English-based web queries. Various link schemes and networks were tanked just prior to the official unveiling of Penguin, with perhaps one of the more publicised casualties being the popular blog network, Build My Rank (Build My Rank owned upwards of thousands of domains – they gave webmasters access to these domains, to post links, for a monthly fee). This was also the stage at which Google began sending out unnatural link warnings to webmasters – to give you an idea of scale, Google sent out roughly 700,000 unnatural link warning messages to webmasters in the first two months of 2012. So, in essence, what does this mean for you? 

Tactics such as anchor text optimisation and low-quality link building have become a lot more risky. In years gone by, webmasters would dispute the validity of these types of mechanisms – Penguin actively sought to not only undermine these mechanisms, but make them potentially dangerous.



If you are at all concerned about some of the potential ramifications of the above, then stick to Google’s Quality Guidelines.

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Google Panda: Originally and colloquially entitled the ‘Farmer Update’, Google Panda sought to eliminate poor, or thinly-veiled content from the web. It was rolled out in February 2011 and numerous iterations and updates have been released since. The main objective of Panda was to target sites with low quality content, or rather what are often termed as ‘content farms’. These types of sites just churn content – the content may be spun, shifted around, copied or whatever else, whichever approach they take their objective is to flood search with content, rank for as much as possible and feed all that traffic that arrives into some form of business model i.e. advertising. Two of the bigger initial case studies were Mahalo and Suite 101 – however invariably, a lot of sites which relied upon poor quality content creation as a business model, were hit. A lot of the content which was being fed into Google’s index was also orientated around trying to create something that was bare minimum ‘quality’, or basic pass marks, rather than value orientated. Prior to Panda, many brands would develop content into a scalable business model and it had become a particular problem for Google, due to the fact they were indexing more content than ever (primarily as a result of various infrastructure updates).

How does Panda define low-quality or thin content? That’s a bit of a difficult question to answer, however in reality, common sense will more than likely apply. To create a standard, Google sent out questions to outside testers – the questions ranged from anything including ‘would you give this website your credit card details?’ to ‘would you

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188 | P a g e consider this to be an authoritative website?’; from these answers, Google put together its definition.

So, what does this mean for you? As we’ve covered consistently through this book, the emphasis should always be on quality – spinning large volumes of content for nothing more than the sake of creating content for search engine rankings, is not a valid strategy.

Google Hummingbird: I’ve already mentioned some of what Hummingbird seeks to improve in the above chapters, however more than anything it is what is often termed an infrastructure update – it’s something of a new ‘engine’. People are used to the standardised approach to understanding how search engines work i.e. they match a user’s search query to the content available in Google’s index. Hummingbird however aims to better understand the meaning behind queries – it takes these long conversation type queries i.e. ‘what is the closest place to eat relative to where I stay?’ and attempts to ‘shorten’ them down and better understand the meaning or intent behind the query. In the above example, Google may already be aware of your location, it may understand that ‘place’ means a physical store and so on – in essence, it’s attempting to better understand the intent behind the search. Another good example – taken from this post on Search Engine Land – is the interpretation of a part of a query like “pay your bills”. For example, the query you type may be “pay your British Gas bill” and previously, this query may have drawn you to, say, the homepage of British Gas – now, with the advent of

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189 | P a g e Hummingbird, it would be more likely to draw you to the payment page on the main British Gas website (Google understands you want to pay your bill – while the homepage may better match the specific query you have typed, the payment page, as Google understands it, is what you’re looking for).

So, what does this mean for me? This update may, in future, render aspects like long-tail optimisation less important – if Hummingbird is better able to understand the intent behind queries, then it becomes less reliant on matching specific keywords to a page.

EMD Update: I was deliberating over whether to include this, however I opted to simply because I know a LOT of webmasters still like to rely on exact match domains (EMDs). An exact match domain is one which includes a specific keyword in the domain – for example, the exact match domain for the term “washing machine repair” could be washingmachinerepair.co.uk, or washingmachinerepair.com etc. It’s been clear for a long time that Google often boosts the position of a website in search if the full and specific keyword which is being searched for is included, in full (without any additions i.e. numbers or hyphens), within the domain name. In some instances, very thin, very poor quality websites we ranking prominently for relatively competitive search terms – the EMD update sought to challenge this. The Jury is still out on the impact I’m afraid, I for one am not overly convinced it has had much of an impact. While seemingly some domains lost visibility as a result of the update, there are

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190 | P a g e still a significant number of exact match domains ranking in search with little to no link profile or any discernable signals behind them (and they are often surrounded by far more authoritative domains). On the whole, and if you are choosing an EMD for the purposes of acquiring a boost around a specific keyword, then I would probably say its best avoided: 

We’re unsure to what extent Google will take action on this again in the future.



For what you gain in a single keyword ranking (it is just, after all, a single keyword), you perhaps lose in brandability – EMDs aren’t exactly notorious for being easy to brand. This said, some do believe that having an EMD will increase the click-through rate from queries which match that EMD.

One positive you could argue is that ultimately a webmaster has more leeway to creating anchor text, simply because the anchor text which will be created resembles brand anchor text, rather than keyword anchor text – this is however merely an opinion on my part and what I believe could be the case, rather than iron clad evidence (in essence, don’t rely on it as gospel!).

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TOOLS AND RESOURCES: Google Alerts: A Google Alert is simply a notification sent by Google whenever new content or information that matches the keywords or queries you have specified appears. Google Alerts can be used for many purposes, however my favoured application is for brand mentions. They can also be used to monitor your competitors or influencers, and identify potential link opportunities as a result of these mentions being made (i.e. if your competitor is being mention on a page, there’s a good chance that if you contact the webmaster of that website, you could acquire a mention, too).

Feedly: Feedly is my RSS reader of choice, I would highly recommend utilising an RSS reader of some form so you stay up to date on what your competitors are creating and all the latest industry news.

Wistia: I can’t quite express how much I love Wistia. Wistia offers video hosting – in essence, they give you the opportunity to host your video with them, as opposed to placing it on a popular video sharing website i.e. YouTube. However, Wistia’s real value falls beyond simply hosting your video content – they offer a range of features which you can integrate into your video, including e-mail sign up forms and such, and they also offer a solid analytics package, too. If you produce a lot of video content, you’d be hard pressed to find a better hosting solution than Wistia – my only slight gripe

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193 | P a g e is with the bandwidth charges (which relative to Amazon S3, are quite high).

Wistia Learning Centre: If you are at all interested in video production, this is the place to go – Wistia’s learning centre offers a tremendous amount of great content on how to produce your own videos for the web. They cover topics such as kit, editing, lighting and a lot more besides – best of all, it’s completely free.

Advanced Web Ranking: Advanced Web Ranking is the Agency tool of choice for monitoring search engine rankings. The obvious benefit to the tool is being able to monitor as many search terms as you choose as well as being able to view MoM or YoY improvements in organic search. Some find the Advanced Web Ranking interface a bit antiquated, so it may be worth having a look around at other options like SERPs – if you do choose to opt for AWR, then it may be worth opting for some proxy servers, too (to speed up the process). Just a quick note, Advanced Web Ranking performs keyword searches automatically on your behalf (although attempts to do so in a natural fashion and you can set the speed at which the queries occur), needless to say Google isn’t particularly fond of automated queries.

Google AdPreview: Google AdPreview is my tool of choice for checking search rankings on-the-fly – the main reason I choose AdPreview is that it eliminates any problems relating to personalisation and more

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194 | P a g e importantly, you can specify which city or country you retrieve results from. Another option for achieving non-personalised results is to utilise incognito mode in Chrome.

Google Analytics: The industry standard Analytics tool of choice, if you don’t have a Google Anlaytics account set-up then it’s your first action. Within Google Analytics you can acquire a full picture of what is happening on your site – unfortunately, a full overview of Analytics is slightly beyond the scope of this book (at this stage), however if you are interested in more information, then I wholly recommend reading Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik (Avinash maintains a blog which is also required reading!).

Google Webmaster Tools: A Google webmaster tools account provides you with valuable insight into how your website performs in organic search – from page speed and page title reports, to domain preference settings and location targeting, it’s well worth taking a look around!

Bing Webmaster Tools: I have to say, I love Bing Webmaster Tools – while Bing’s marketshare is rather on the low side, they do like to take care of webmasters. It’s worth registering solely to use their link explorer tool (a backlinks analysis tool – while it’s not anything like as comprehensive as paid for solutions, it does take me back to Yahoo! Site Explorer days).

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Xenu Link Sleuth: Probably one of my favourite SEO tools, Xenu is your own web crawler. Simply crawl your website, or the website of your competitor, and Xenu will draw a whole host of useful, actionable information, including each and every page title and meta description on the website, the click depth of each and every page, image file size, broken links and a lot more besides. Best of all, it’s completely free!

Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog is a bit of a step-up from Xenu, but with that step-up also comes financial cost. This said, it’s well worth purchasing – the main improvement over Xenu is simply the user interface and the range of on-page elements which are analysed.

SEO for Chrome, SEO Quake and MozBar: Some form of browser extension to monitor core metrics is absolutely pivotal, and the three listed above are invariably the ones I use most often. Of the three, I’d have to say MozBar is my favourite – it gives you access to a lot of metrics but also goes a step further, in allowing you to export the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), which is a very useful feature, particularly when engaging in link prospecting or competitive analysis.

Social Crawlytics: Social Crawlytics is a very useful and free social media tool which displays how often your content, or the content of your competitors, is shared across social platforms.

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Wayback Machine: The Wayback Machine provides a picture of how a website looked at a given date – it’s great for a range of applications, but most notably finding content or URLs which may have been deleted as well as looking at past-history of a domain name you may want to purchase.

SEM Rush: Another tool I use frequently, SEM Rush gives you a picture of which keywords your competitor ranks for in search – it’s a really good place to start keyword research!

Scrapebox: With regards to Scapebox, I think it’s probably an apt time to use Google’s mantra: “don’t be evil”. There are some really dodgy things you can do with Scrapebox, for example mass comment spam however, the real, ethical uses for this tool are also apparent – you just need to get a handle on how best to use it. In essence, Scrapebox is a scraping tool which allows you to pick up lots and lots of URLs in one fell swoop. You can specify the parameters of your search within scrapebox, then retrieve a list of URLs and filter them by metrics including PageRank. I use Scrapebox a lot and it’s a very worthwhile investment providing you learn how to use it. There’s a really good video posted by Brian Dean which is available on Quicksprout – it covers off the methods for getting the best out of the tool.

Trusted Proxies: If you’re looking to buy a reliable set of proxy servers (maybe for use with Scrapebox or Advanced Web Ranking), then Trusted Proxies is probably your best option (it’s worth noting

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197 | P a g e that you can harvest free proxies from within Scrapebox). Trusted Proxies works on a monthly subscription model, the more proxies you need the higher the price.

Majestic SEO/AHREFS/Open Site Explorer/SEO Spyglass: These are the four best backlinks analysis tools you can buy and as far as I’m concerned, for the rank of best backlinks analysis tool, it’s a straight tie between Majestic SEO, AHREFS and Open Site Explorer. I would spend some time trialling each option to see which best fits with what you want to do – each tool poses some different metrics. It’s also worth looking through this comparison blog post, which details the ins and outs of each tool (and gives a slightly controversial opinion on which is the best option!).

TechSmith Camtasia: Camtasia is the screen recording tool of choice – it records whatever you are looking at on-screen, and it’s great for creating tutorial videos which you may want to post on your website, or on a video sharing platform. I bought into what is now a relatively old version of Camtasia back in 2011 and I still use it every week – there’s a bit of an outlay for the tool, however if you plan on creating a lot of tutorial videos, then it’s a no brainer.

Ontolo: If you want to adopt a more automated approach to link prospect, then Ontolo may be worth a look. It allows you to specify the type of link you wish to acquire,

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oDesk, Elance, Mechnical Turk: Outsourcing is typically a crucial component in any SEO strategy and the above three sources are pretty much where I’ve found most of my freelancers – be prepared to go through some trial and error

Disqus: I have a few issues with Disqus, notably loads times and it’s rather volatile nature, this said it is pretty much the comment tool of choice and enables you to stomp down on any prevailing Wordpress-orientated comment spam problems!

Yoast SEO/All in one SEO pack: Both of the above plugins are suitable options for Wordpress webmaster looking to integrate more SEO functionality into the blogging platform. If I were forced to choose the best option, I’d opt for Yoast SEO (despite the fact it’s become a little bit attention-seeking as of late).

Google Trends: Google Trends has a host of applications, but I mainly use it to identify at what points in the years keyword search volume dips or fluctuates. Another obvious application is for content ideation and newsjacking (see the above section on content marketing).

Tweet Deck: Great for so many reasons including being able to export custom timelines to your website, monitor multiple timelines from within the interface and scheduling tweets (just don’t abuse it!). Tweet deck is great.

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AWeber: I’m a firm believer that great communities can be developed through large, opt-in e-mail lists – simply put a great, valuable resource together, and request people provide an e-mail address to download it. Now, it’s not quite that simple, but it’s certainly one of the best methods for building a community around your website. AWeber is my tool of choice – I’ve used a few e-mail marketing software providers in the past including MailChimp.com, Constant Contact and Get Response, however I’ve found that AWeber has the best features and more importantly, the best deliverability rates.

Linkdex: Linkdex is more geared towards the professional user however there is literally no better all-in-one SEO tool out there – from analysing social metrics, building prospect lists, monitoring search rankings, Linkdex goes a lot further than most and delivers a superior standard. It’s a shame the cost is prohibitive – I’m a firm believer that value comes before cost, however I think most SMEs would struggle with an entry-level £600 per month. This said, for Agencies and marketing managers, this tool is definitely worth a look.

Kiss Metrics and Crazy Egg: Created by Neil Patel, the main draw of Crazy Egg and Kiss Metrics is simply the conversion insights it brings through utilising features like heat mapping – both of these tools are well worth a look, particularly if you wish to bolster your conversion rate and get a better feel for what your users are looking at on your website.

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Buzzstream: I pretty much live in Buzzstream – it’s my favourite SEO tool (at the moment). Buzzstream allows you to very quickly assemble a sizeable prospect list – it automatically finds e-mail addresses and social contact information for the prospects you identify, it also allows you to conduct custom outreach from within its interface. For these two features alone, it’s well worth the relatively small investment.

My Blog Guest: If the latest posts by Matt Cutts were anything to go by, you may consider yourself justified in believing that My Blog Guest may no longer be a suitable option for you. I would disagree. I think one of the core benefits from using MyBlogGuest is having access to their database of bloggers – questions have to be posed about the quality of the blogs (there are quite a few blogs within the system I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole), however you can also unearth a few hidden gems here or there.

InkyBee: InkyBee is fantastic for finding influential bloggers in your industry – you can sort by a range of metrics and view blogs customers in your industry are already reading.

Topsy: Free to use (up to a point), Topsy is great for identifying what your competitors are doing online and weeding out their most shared content.

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Followerwonk: Part of the Moz suite of tools, Followerwonk is my favourite tool for identifying influencers, or rather people I really should be working to build up a relationship with. You can search Twitter bios for keywords, compare accounts and sort users based on core metrics – if you’re looking to build up your profile on Twitter, then Followerwonk should be your first port of call.

Audacity: A free tool for editing, recording and converting audio – if you create podcasts, then Audacity should be first on your download list.

Visual.ly: Visual.ly is a solid, free tool for creating infographics – going the custom made route is always the better option, however if it’s content repurposing you are after, then visual.ly is a good option.

Pixlr: It’s nothing like as good as Photoshop, however why would we expect it to be? Pixlr is the best free, online image editor around – very easy to use when you’re on the go.

Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest, as the name implies, provides lots of suggestions around the keywords you type into the tool – it’s great for coming up with new content ideas.

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Server Header Checker: A sever header checker is a vital tool in any SEO’s arsenal; with a server header checker you can check the server response code for any given page on a website (more often than not I use this to verify 301 redirects or check for 302 redirects). I usually use the SEOChat option, however the SEOBook checker is just as good.

Authorsure: If you’re looking to quickly and easily implement rel=author on your Wordpress blog, then AuthorSure is your best option – this said, rel=author is a lot easier to implement nowadays, so it may just be worth following the instructions Google lay out.

Keyword Planner, YouTube Keyword Tool and Wordtracker: Needless to say, Keyword Planner should be your first port of call for keyword research – I’ve covered off how to use Keyword Planner in the keyword research section of this book.

XML-Sitemaps.com: XML-Sitemaps.com makes it very easy to create your own XML Sitemap – it’s free, too. Once you’ve done this, simply follow the instructions listed in the XML Sitemap section of this book.

YSlow: YSlow is great for addressing website performance issues – it’s a Yahoo! Tool, and it’s free!

URL Builder: If you don’t have the knowledge to build custom URLs for tracking purposes, then Google’s URL builder is a great option.

Written by Gareth Mailer, GarethMailer.com.

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Survey Monkey and Google Consumer Surveys: I don’t use any survey tools other than Survey Monkey or Google Consumer Surveys above – the great thing about both is that if you’re struggling to get people to fill in your survey (or if you want to complete it relatively quickly), you can pay for the privilege.

BrokenLinkBuilding.com: I went into more detail above about what Broken Link Building is, however this tool from BrokenLinkBuilding.com can make the job about 10x easier – if you are engaged in broken link building campaigns then it can save you a lot of time.

Linkstant: Linkstant is a great little tool which tells you when new links to your website emerge.

Schema Creator: The Schema Creator is a great option for anyone wishing to incorporate structured data into the results displayed in the Search Engine Results Pages – there are lots of different schemas to choose from, well worth a look if you want to make your listings stand out!

SEO Tools for Excel: A fantastic free tool which integrates a host of excellent SEO options into your standard excel document – take a look at some of the features.

Tools from SEO Gadget: SEO Gadget is one of the most reputable digital agencies in the UK and their toolset is well worth a look.

Written by Gareth Mailer, GarethMailer.com.