SEO and Internet Marketing
Welcome to the second in the series of the SEO’s toolbox!
Today I’m honoured to be in the company of Yousaf Sekander of Rocket Mill the brains behind the awesome social share monitoring tool “Social Crawlytics”. Social Crawl (that’s what us cool kids call it) made quite a splash in 2012 and I was fortunate to get in on it very early. It’s an excellent social tool to monitor your own sites but for me it REALLY comes into it’s own when analysing competitors social activity.
Over to you Yousaf…
Welcome to the first post in what I hope will be a long running series of interviews I’ve been wanting to put together for some time now. I will be speaking to some of the amazing people behind SEO tools we all know and love over the coming months, hopefully bringing some insight into the great tools available to SEOs, and maybe bringing you a few hidden gems along the way?
First up is a rank tracking tool which I’ve been using for a little while now to follow a couple of clients sites and have been really impressed so far. Rank tracking is a hot topic at the moment with the announcement from Raven tools that they are to drop rank tracking and other scraped data in 2013 with others sure to follow. The irony of Google punishing others for scraping data won’t be lost on those of us who’ve been in the industry for more than 10 minutes.
Anyway, over to my first guest, Nick Cuttonaro of Microsite Masters….
Wow! What a year it’s been in SEO 2012, we’ve had the crackdown on link networks, EMD’s, Panda, Penguin, and Piranha.
Ok, I made the last one up, but there should have been Piranha update right?
It got me thinking, what on earth is Google going to throw at us in 2013? How can they top that? I had no idea, so I thought I’d ask some of my favourite SEO’s instead. I’d just like to thank everybody who contributed to this (especially Shelli who also did all the awesome graphics), almost everybody contacted was more than happy to be involved, some of these replies could be post on their own and I’m humbled the amount of time people have put into this. So thank you guys (and gals!)
The question I posed was simply what they believe is going to happen to the industry in 2013. How do they think Google will be changing, which factors will take a hit and which will be moving up the food chain in terms of importance.
Enjoy…
I’ve been working recently with a few small local businesses, trying to give them some quick and simple tips on getting the websites they have created onto the first page for a few major keywords in their niche. These aren’t my usual gigs and are more me just dropping the odd email here and there saying “Do this”, “Change that” and “No, you did it wrong, try again”. I’m doing these in the main to help out a few buddies with very little in the way of “cash” changing hands so the amount of time I can put in is at a premium. 
Photo: Mark Holloway/Flickr
One of the key factors of local SEO of course is citations and we’ve just got to the point in one of the projects where I’m saying, look, you need to go get you some citations. I explain this to my “clients”. Blank faces stare back at me. What I want to go through in this post isn’t your real high end, flashy local SEO, it’s more of the stuff that needs to be done to a new site just to get the ball rolling. If you’re looking for something more upmarket then I suggest you check out these posts on Skyrocket and Anthony’s piece on Cucumber Nebula. If you don’t mind slumming it and getting your hands dirty then stick around, I’m about to light the bum fire. [Read more...]
Many of you will have caught this post from Jayson over at SEO Teky where he introduced us to his pretty sweet guest post finding tool.
The “Guest Post Query Generator” fetched keyword derivatives from UberSuggest and then generated the Google search query for each of these in real time. I was really impressed with how brilliantly simple this tool was, you simply put in your search term, wait a couple of seconds and you’re ready to rock.
Not only was I impressed but it made me think, could you use this spreadsheet to generate other queries for link building?
Guest posting is one of the hot tactics on the link building scene, possibly too hot as discussed by Chairman Cutts in the video below (Kudos to AJ Kohn for asking the question!) but it’s not the only tactic in the SEO’s toolbox.
I know lots of bloggers like to keep their post top secret until the very moment they hit publish, I guess they’re worried that if they say too much somebody else might write something similar, or they like to be enigmatic and their subjects secret. Or maybe they just don’t care what anybody else thinks? That’s cool, and in some ways I’m the same. The difference however is that I almost always share my drafts with a number of SEO’s day’s before hitting publish (except this one, oh the irony).
I never really intended this to specifically be a tactic for my posts, it just sort of happened a few times and I was getting some real benefits for both myself and my blog. The reason it came about in the first instance was essentially because this blog is still pretty new (started in Jan 2012) and I wanted to get a bit of guidance from the bloggers I looked up to, hoping they would throw a bit of their magic my way.
Below is a guest post from the one and only Joel Klettke or, as you lady’s may know him the best looking man in the world. Joel is (in my opinion) one of the best writers in the industry right now, always funny, direct and above all honest….enjoy..
From ridiculous job titles to insane experience requirements, almost no other industry has job postings more entertaining to read or patently absurd than online marketing.
We as an industry can’t seem to decide whether we want to call employees “inbound marketers”, “SEO’s”, “earned media acquisition specialists”, “Fancy, prancy magic men” or any other string of bizarre descriptors. Then there are the pandering job descriptions, designed to make every company sound “fun” & “edgy” as though including the fact that you have beer on Fridays sings the siren song of “incredible company culture!” – and let us not forget the “DO EVERYTHING!” positions we all covet so badly.
Below is a guest post from Peter Attia (follow him on Twitter guys!) Thanks to Peter for putting this together…enjoy!
By now, everyone is familiar with the dos and don’ts of guest blogging best practices. However, this doesn’t help you with your response rate of getting a guest post. Once you get a response from a blogger, your acceptance rate sky rockets; making it an important part of your outreach.
Today I have the great honor of interviewing 6 members of one of the most well known digital marketing agencies in the UK – Koozai. I recently dropped a guest post over on the Koozai blog, and managed to get them to agree to do this in return. Yeah, I know. They rock!
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