Monthly Archives: February 2013

SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of February 2013

February may be the shortest month of the year, but that doesn’t mean there’s any less of the awesome content marketing, social media, and SEO content that we love to share. So, for your delight and edification, here’s some of the most informative and actionable content that we’ve come across this month.

SEO

18 Meta Tags Every Webpage Should Have in 2013

18 Meta Tags Every Webpage Should Have in 2013

 Let’s get back to basics. If I’m to be honest, flashbacks of arguments with copywriters in ad agencies turn me off to the discussion of metadata. However the reality of the situation is that as Search and Social continue to rapidly converge, it is us SEOs that are left to pick up the technical end of the stick and metadata continues to land on our plate. The most …

SEOs – Your Typography Sucks

SEOs – Your Typography Sucks

When people are on your website they are either skimming through content to find what they are looking for or they have found what they are looking for and want to read it as easily as possible. Either ways, having readable text will help them achieve their goal. A small change in typography can hugely impact the interpretation of your contentWhat do you …

Top 10 SEO Mistakes Made By Small Businesses

Now-a-days, if you have a small business, you probably need a website and ideally some sort of online presence, and unfortunately for most business owners that means finding your way through a myriad of new technical challenges, including SEO and internet marketing. Internet marketing is something that you can do yourself, but it’s not an easy thing to do and there is a lot of misinformation floating around, so it’s all too easy to make mistakes. Have a look at …

Interflora – Where have all the flowers gone? – SEO Blog by Dave Naylor – SEO Tools, Tips & News

If you work in the search marketing sector it’s been hard to miss the penalty that has been dumped on Interflora this week. Is was first noticed on Tuesday but it wasn’t until SearchMetrics was updated today that the true picture of the penalty starts to take shape when you see such a dramatic fall from grace. This is plain to see that …

The New SEO: Search Marketing Integration

The New SEO: Search Marketing Integration

Every year, somebody proclaims that SEO is dead simply because Google has made some changes to its algorithm. But don’t worry, this post won’t be declaring that SEO is dead, dying, or even coughing up blood. However, the days of SEO as a distinct, independent discipline are certainly numbered. SEO is fast evolving into a more creative, diverse, and challenging profession. Over the …

Baidu SEO: Optimising for a Chinese Target Audience

Baidu SEO: Optimising for a Chinese Target Audience

As is common knowledge, the vast population of over 1 billion in China paves the way for fantastic consumerism which we Westerners should become involved with. All company’s need is to be recognised in order to succeed, and the best way to do this is through Search Engine Optimisation. However, when looking to heighten your company’s SEO in China, there are a few things you need to be weary of. Although Google is a large percentage of the world’s …

On-Page SEO Best Practices in 2013: 7 Rules of the Game

On-Page SEO Best Practices in 2013: 7 Rules of the Game

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard enough about on-page optimization to last a lifetime. I don’t want to repeat the same mantras you’ve been hearing since last year. Yes, on-page SEO has become more important (I can hardly remember a time when it wasn’t), and yes, on-page SEO can make or break your chances at ranking high on Google SERPs. But what has changed is the way we …

Don’t Sacrifice Design for SEO or SEO for Design

Don’t Sacrifice Design for SEO or SEO for Design

When looking at a new site build or re-design, it’s important to build search optimisation into its development from the ground up. We are all very aware of the on page SEO optimisations such as Title tags, H Tags, Image alt tags, content and links. However, there is little value in building a website without building SEO into its design and site structure. At Gravytrain we work hard at integrating search …

Inorganic versus Organic Backlinking Strategies: Getting Back to the Basics

Inorganic versus Organic Backlinking Strategies: Getting Back to the Basics

 The backlink within the practice of SEO is an ongoing topic of conversation for marketing, sales, delivery and reporting of SEO services. Even in a post Penguin world, SEO professionals are still asking questions such as: What’s the best way to …

The practice of SEO is a fairly results-oriented business. Increasingly, metrics dominate the focus of the SEO professional, whether rank, traffic, or conversions. While a move to more measurement is overall a good thing, it means that SEOs are increasingly head down, focused on the things—like link building, on-page optimization, and content creation—that they believe will move the metrics needle. A byproduct of a focus on tactics that can be closely tied to metrics is that activities that are …

 

Content Marketing

Integrating content marketing strategies and mobile design

Integrating content marketing strategies and mobile design

Anyone who’s up on technology has heard of mobile web design and content marketing—two terms used with increasing frequency in the online world. Can mobile design and a great content marketing strategy be combined without sacrificing either content or design elements? Or does the content of a website suffer because of the restrictions imposed by design for small screens? The truth is that great content does not have to be sacrificed for mobile design and can even be enhanced by …

4 Ways Brands Can Plan for Content Success

Brands are often (rightly) told they need to move fast in order to play in the content game. But that doesn’t mean planning goes out the window. Quite the contrary. Some brand managers — and the agencies trying to win business from them — seem to think that spending a few weeks or even (gasp) a month in audit, goal-setting and research is a colossal waste of time and …

Is Thought Leadership The Future of Marketing?

In our last interview, Steve McKee asked if Big Data was the future of marketing. In previous interviews, Doug Kessler talked about creating a content culture, Todd Wheatland predicted that content and technology would combine to drive the future of marketing. Mark Schaefer discussed culture and the future of search. Marcus Starke predicted the rise of the science of marketing. Ann Handley called for …

Four Concepts to Grasp in Copyright and Content Marketing

Four Concepts to Grasp in Copyright and Content Marketing

If content marketing is part of your strategy, be it through newsletters, social media, advertorial and the like, the challenge is in creating meaningful, effective, and relevant content. The natural inclination is to simply pass along content found in a web search, but the legal implications of …

Content Marketing: The Fallacy that More Content is Better

Content Marketing: The Fallacy that More Content is Better

Everywhere I go, I find marketers who are challenged with creating more content. More blog posts, more eBooks, more videos, more podcasts… more, more, more. Even our latest content marketing research found that the number one challenge for business marketers is producing enough content. I’m done with more. Here’s a little state of the industry that I’ve noticed: There are hundreds of marketing gurus out there who will tell you that …

Social Media

Focus on Affinity with Facebook Posts

Focus on Affinity with Facebook Posts

From a marketing and advertising perspective, Facebook is a game. It may not be very fun for businesses, but just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that you don’t have to play along to be successful. On the other hand, some businesses have plenty of fun on Facebook. Whether you do or not makes absolutely no difference, though some will say that if you’re having fun with it that you’ll be more successful. I contend that fun or …

Cognitive Dissonance: Why Social Sharing Creates Employee Advocates

Cognitive Dissonance: Why Social Sharing Creates Employee Advocates

 “It is contrary to etiquette to yawn in the presence of a king,” the monarch told him. “I forbid you to do so.”“I can’t help it,” replied the little prince, thoroughly embarrassed. “I have come on a long journey, and I haven’t slept…” “Ah, then,” the king said, “I order you to yawn.” Le Petit Prince, …

3 Tools to Better Manage Your Social Media Presence

Do you want to make more efficient use of your time on social media? Are you looking for tools that will help you manage your social media efforts? In this article you’ll discover 3 tools to enable you to become more efficient and effective with social media. #1: Glyder – Social Media Marketing from Your iPhone Glyder is an iPhone app that allows you to share well-designed marketing messages as social media updates using predefined templates. You …

We’ll round-off this month’s round-up with a video from Matt Cutts addressing something a lot of webmasters are worried about:

 

SEO Basics: The Hilltop Algorithm

Hilltop

attrib(flickr/Storm Crypt)

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the Google search engine, their core insight was implemented as the PageRank algorithm. Put simply, PageRank determines where a page should rank in the SERPs based on the PageRank of incoming links from other sites — it’s a recursive algorithm. The higher the PageRank, the greater the assumed authority of a particular site. That authority can then be combined with a keyword analysis of a page and that combination is then to devise a ranking of pages in response to a search query.

Thus, PageRank is a proxy measure of authority. Google algorithms weren’t, and still aren’t, for the most part, capable of determining whether a page is authoritative for a particular search query by looking at the page content. PageRank, as anyone who used early search engines knows, was an enormous improvement on previous efforts, but it is far from perfect, and it opened up opportunities for gaming the system with various link-building tactics. Continue reading

Does Keyword Density Matter? The Data Says No.

Counting Keywords

(image:flickr/kennymatic)

Keywords are at the heart of any SEO strategy. They are the thread that links sites to customers via their search terms. Over the years there has been a huge amount of focus and speculation about how precisely keywords should be used in on-page content to signal relevance to search engines and to rank to well.

Historically, much of the talk about keywords has been of the “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” variety: where should they be placed in the content, how many words should there be between the start of a page or heading and the keyword, what is the optimum ratio of keywords to other text, and so on. Some (not very good) SEOs strive to produce content that contains an exact percentage of keywords, often with the result of producing content that isn’t very readable to humans. And some stick to the old tactic of writing as many pages as possible stuffed with keyword variants and synonyms to cover all possible long-tail searches. Continue reading