Matthew Barby heads Search Marketing and Social Media at Wow Internet. Matt blogs around all areas of online marketing, from technical SEO and link-building through to conversion strategy and social media marketing.
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Our website recently fell foul to a malware attack and it was a real nightmare. Google blocked access to the site meaning that anyone trying to access the website was faced with this garish and quite alarming page…
If you’re suddenly presented with this message when you try to access your website, don’t panic, simply follow these steps.
It’s been just over a year since the first Penguin update and many websites are still shaking at the sound of the word. The Penguin update affected a huge number of websites, including some high-profile brands that were engaging in all sorts of spammy link building techniques. Matt Cutts has now confirmed on Twitter that Penguin 2.0 will hit the search engines within the next two weeks:
@mrjamiedodd we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 10, 2013
Creating anything from scratch requires a lot of foresight and planning, whether it be a new mobile application, a new blog website or even just one of those dodgy flat-packed desks from IKEA. I’m not going to give you a step-by-step on how to put a desk together but what I can do is give you a few tips, based on my personal experience, on how to drive traffic through to your brand new website.
When you’re first developing a strategy for your new blog it’s really important to set yourself some targets that have time-scales placed upon them. More importantly, these targets have to be achievable. There’s no point in setting yourself the task of achieving 10,000 unique visitors to the blog within your first couple of weeks unless you are prepared to dedicate some serious financial resources toward it. A lesson that I have learnt very quickly during my time within online marketing is to be prudent in your predictions.
This statement is true in the sense that once someone is presented with your content in front of them and they get a chance to actually see it and enjoy it then yes, people will certainly pay attention to it. The only issue lies in the visibility of the content itself. Having good quality content that is genuinely interesting to your target audience is crucial to the sustainability of visits to your blog, however quality content isn’t always enough.
Outreach seems to be the buzzword of 2013 so far and we have seen countless articles about how to source outreach opportunities. With this in mind I have been trying to find slightly different approaches toward carrying out effective outreach and ways to identify individuals to build relationships with. I have talked a lot through the latter stages of 2012 about the importance of building niche-specific relationships with influencers in order to create a sustainable link-building campaign. What I am now going to show you is how to actually identify who your current influencers are and how you can benefit from building a relationship with them.
Let’s start with what I mean by an ‘influencer‘ of your website: An influencer is someone who actively reads, shares and/or engages with your site’s content. This could be through sharing your blog articles on social media, linking back to your content or generally talking about your website/brand in one way or another. For the purposes of this article I will be concentrating more on content influencers as opposed to general brand evangelists, mainly because if I start getting into complete brand influencers then I could be writing for some time!
Rich snippets within the search results can help to increase click-through rates and also make users aware of other content from your website. We have heard loads over the past year or so about Google+ authorship within your search engine snippet, but one extra feature that I rarely hear mentioned is the use of breadcrumb navigation links.
In the image above you can see an article that I recently wrote appear in the SERPs. I have highlighted the breadcrumb link that goes to the Technical SEO category section of the Wow Internet blog. This can be really handy toward getting more of your content in front of users and also makes for a better user experience in general. To actually implement this into your SERP snippet couldn’t be easier!
As an SEO, it is a critical part of my job to show clients how their SEO campaigns are performing. More times than not, the performance of these campaigns is judged pretty much solely on the positions of keywords in the SERPs that I am targeting for the client’s website. Many SEOs will argue that search engine rankings are not the be-all-and-end-all of an SEO campaign and that they are actually becoming less relevant altogether. I hold this very opinion and this is mainly down to the increased appearance of blended search results (i.e. search results containing news snippets, images, videos, shopping snippets, etc). Even though this is the case, the fact of the matter is that clients want tangible results; results that they can see business from.
I’ve put together, with the assistance of my SEO sidekick, Liam McCarthy (he’s going to hate me calling him that!), a list of some of the different tools, both paid and free, that we have used in the past to check keyword positions in the SERPs. I will also be explaining some good ways in which you can gain a more accurate representation of the performance of your search engine campaign. On top of this, I have called in the help of Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO, Simon Penson of Zazzle Media and Magnus Simonarson of ConsultWebs.com to share their thoughts on the topic. Thanks guys!
2013 is here and it is time to take a look through the very best online marketing articles from the past year. I have compiled and categorised a list of my personal favourites from a range of different authors and collated it into this one article for you to look through. There is some amazing content here so make sure you give it a read and share the authors work if you feel fit. Anyway, enough of me rambling, here are the articles:
Link Building
Link Building Through Blogger Outreach - Paddy Moogan
Link Building Strategies – The Complete List - Jon Cooper
The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever - Jon Cooper
9 More Evil Ways to Build Links - Peter Attia
33 Links & How To Get Them - Justin Briggs
The Noob Guide to Link Building - Michael King
Crazy Link Building Ideas That Work - Jason Acidre
Link Building for the Little Guys - Matthew Barby (excuse the shameless plug of my own content!)
Semantic Web and Link Building without Links > The Future for SEO? - Simon Penson
How Link Building Really Works These Days - Tadeusz Szewczyk
A List of Link Building Lists - Peter Attia
A solid website architecture is one of the most important factors toward enabling the search engine bots to crawl your content correctly. Site architecture comprises of how the different pages on a site are structured, linked together and the content that the pages comprise of. At the most basic level, your website should have a structure that allows the search engines to effectively access the different webpages on the site in order to consume the content within them.
I have talked a lot about the necessity of effective on-page optimisation recently and ineffective website architecture is a problem that I come across all too often. With this in mind I have decided to share some of my favourite tools that help identify site architectural problems. Some of the tools are free and some are paid for, so you can decide which ones are relevant to you and make the most of them.
This free crawler tool is one of my personal favourites. Xenu Link Sleuth allows you crawl your website and find a whole host of issues. The software is ran off your desktop, so you need to install it on your computer and is really quick at carrying out its’ tasks. Here’s what you can do with Xenu Link Sleuth: