SEO and Link Building Tips, Articles and Resources
Search Engine Optimization and Link Development are both continuously evolving marketing practices, and as a practitioner, keeping yourself updated is imperative to be able to compete in an ever-evolving world of business marketing.
Below are the posts that I’ve published over the years that share different approaches and methodologies – based on my personal experience and core principles – when it comes to optimizing a website for both users and search.
How do you make general and SEO website changes without compromising your site’s user experience and ultimately the number of conversions made through the website? When you start to tinker with content and navigation elements to optimise pages, this can have a profound impact on visitor perception – for better or worse.
So how can you make these website changes without spoiling the website experience you worked so hard to create? This post looks at a number of the most common and important considerations when making any new website changes.
Link building is an outcome, as Ian Lurie shared on his MozCon presentation this year. That’s true, and I couldn’t agree more. You can even automate your link development efforts with that perception alone.
To win in the link building game in the post-penguin era, you must know how to become a link magnet and should start mastering link baiting (no need for super viral content, just content that can potentially attract links). Since that’s where most natural links on the web come from.
Content marketing is a marketing practice that has been recently embraced by a lot of online marketers, especially people in the SEO industry.
Although the principle has existed for decades, continual changes in the online marketing landscape have substantiated the immense weight that Content Marketing can contribute to today’s businesses. Given that it allows small to large brands to be more competitive in their respective industries and this channel enables them to empower both sales and marketing efforts.
There are so many areas of a website that are needed to be optimized when it’s aiming to rank better on search engines, seeing that search engines use hundreds of ranking factors to assess a site if it’s really worth displaying to searchers. Though a big portion of that usually comes down to how the site is well-structured for ease of use and accessibility for search crawlers.
I’ve always believed that on-site optimization is 80% about relevance, since it’s a huge factor that makes a site or its content usable to searchers (if they are finding your content useful or relevant to what they are really looking for). If you’ll ask me if that belief has changed over my 2 years practicing SEO, I’d definitely say no.
Quality vs. Quantity is one of the perennial questions that have been frequently asked in the link building game. Most of us already know that focusing all our efforts on quality will always win, though some of us are still hesitant, puzzled and anxious of some sort. Why?
Because, providing value, as a marketing objective has been very difficult to scale, particularly on agency and enterprise level. Given that value/quality can’t easily be replicated, won’t ever be generic, and most of all – it can’t be done in speed.
A solid strategy is always a brainchild of a strong, persistent and flexible mindset, which can both strictly implement needed actions and agile enough to adapt to sudden changes. Though more often than not, many of us, particularly thinkers, are in search of a single solution or a formula that can withstand different kinds of situations.
Is that possible in this industry? The truth is I’m not really that sure, people will really try to tear me apart when I say that a one-size-fits-all strategy does exist. But, there is one formula that I believe has been working for so long, for so many websites, that I think many aren’t aware of or maybe know it but wouldn’t just bank on that idea.
First, let’s talk about content. The foundation of a successful online marketing campaign is strongly based on its content marketing strategy. Thus, if you want to attract customers, clients and buyers, make sure that you have quality content that they would not only read, but share and spread around as well.
Awesome and relevant content also encourages other sites and web bloggers to link to you, which is a good thing, knowing that links to your pages are one of the major traffic drivers over the web.
Content optimization is getting trickier these days, as users’ behavior toward how they use the web tend to grow over time, plus the fact that a lot of web content providers on different niches are pushing out tons of “great content” in a steadily growing rate.
This progression on web usage has allowed search engines to identify more data that they can use to assess webpages that should be ranking well on their search results (based on usability, social, authority and so many other factors).