“Content is King!” Ah, the wonderfully overused statement that makes me want to throw my monitor at the wall and then hang my head in shame because it’s actually true. I feel like I can safely assume that we can all agree on the increasing importance of awesome content. Recently, it seems like everyone is championing for companies to evolve the way in which they a...
When I began to practice SEO 8 years ago, I never would have guessed that I'd be writing a post about data visualization. Perhaps I might have foreseen myself writing about web analytics or information architecture, but data visualization seemed like something for the statistics fans. But today in web marketing, the emphasis on content has never been stronger, and it just so happens that ...
It's easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we've grown this blog to hundreds of thousands of visitors each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post. There's an art to increasing a blog's traffic, and given that we ...
A good search engine does not attempt to return the pages that best match the input query. A good search engine tries to answer the underlying question. If you become aware of this you'll understand why Google (and other search engines), use a complex algorithm to determine what results they should return.
Great content just magically creates traffic, wealth, and fame, right? Not always, sadly. Here are a few ways to put great content into motion and market your marketing.
Blogger or webmaster outreach is the art of finding the right sites to target to get links on, tracking down who owns or edits them, and building a relationship with them in order to get links.
Content marketing is hard, and we're not all designers. I'm not a designer, but I sometimes play one on the web. Here's a few tricks for how I pull it off.
Before SEOmoz was a business, it was a blog. In fact, blogging is at the heart of everything this company stands for. A blog is so much more than pageview generator. It speaks in your voice, provides a gateway to your community, acts as your moral center and facilitates communication with the rest of the world.
Several weekends ago, for the first time, I accompanied my wife, Geraldine (aka Everywhereist, whose blog was just placed on Time.com's Top 25 Blogs of 2011 and then on Forbes' Top 10 Lifestyle Sites; woo hoo!), to Vancouver, BC for a professional conference focused on her career rather than mine (TBEX - the Travel Bloggers Exchange). Given that she's attended countless sessions on SEO, analytics, tech startups and scalable SaaS models, I figured it was the least I could do.
Question and answer content has been around on the internet a lot longer than the web. From the early days of usenet (and before that, on prehistoric technologies that came before my time) people have been asking experts for answers. You can't fail to have noticed, however, that it has resulted in some of the lowest quality content on the web. For far too many questions, the ranking answer is Yahoo! Answers (or similar) that looks as though it was written by someone who found writing YouTube comments too intellectually challenging.
Producing great content is a high ROI activity. Too often however I see people focused on producing individual pieces of content aiming to get links and attention. Putting together a content strategy requires much more than a single piece of content - it requires a vision and strategy for how you're going to publish your content, why type of content you will be publishing, how your audience wil...
Today I want to share an incredibly simple yet massively powerful process for building search-optimized, "great content." There's no fancy tricks and nothing propetiary about the approach, but it is rare indeed to find an organization that follows these steps and hence, it's a way to potentially differentiate and build a competitive advantage. Step 1: Build a Survey...
What is it we SEOs do? Most of our answers probably boil down to this; we help webpages rank higher at search engines by improving each of the three cornerstones of SEO. The first aspect; technical problems - like indexable content, meta robots tags and URL structures - has been cracked by SEOmoz’s awesome web app. Suddenly we can get a complete dashboard of errors to go and sort - easy.
Yesterday, Perfect Market, a company that "helps publishers create value from their online content with little effort and no risk1" released a study that's been getting quite a bit of attention. The study analy...
