Please give a warm welcome to Chris Dyson of Triple SEO! Many thanks go to him for donating this post on UGC and sharing his experiences and learning.

As I have started to build up some of my own niche websites this year I have been studying a lot more about the ways in which I can scale my content production as part of my niche site content strategy.

Time and again I keep coming back to looking in to a way in which I can build a community that can develop quality content for me at an ultra low cost, and no I’m not talking about automation or spinning in this instance.

[Read more...]

For those of you who’ve not been following my blogging journey over the last few months (Welcome, I’ve been waiting for you) I recently wrote a piece reviewing the first 12 months of StokedSEO.co.uk.

Amongst other things I listed a couple of goals for 2013, one of which was to move from the wordpress.com platform to my own hosted wordpress.org site (and this is it!). I think that the wordpress.com offering is exception at no cost but there were a few limitations I couldn’t live with any longer.

Thankfully, with some gentile guidance from Chris at hitreach the transition was pretty smooth so massive thanks to him  for being so supportive and understanding..

[Read more...]

Hey folks!

Welcome to my very first video post kindly brought to you in association with Dan Shure of Evolving SEO.

I’ve been a keen follower of Dan’s excellent “NoBoard SEO” series for a few months now and have always wanted to feature a video post on Stoked but just don’t have the setup required here at the moment. Thankfully Dan took a break from clearing the snow outside his house to give us some quick thoughts on keeping track of our branded keywords.

Many thanks to Dan for allowing me to hold this video hostage for a few weeks. I challenged him to give me something actionable and he definitely did that. Enjoy…

[Read more...]

Wow, they say time flies when you’re having fun but has it really been 12 whole content laden months since I set up this little ol’ blog?

Why, yes it has.

A little over 12 months ago I decided to get on this blogging thing for a number of reasons, the main reason, to just get better. I knocked out my first post to get the ball rolling (don’t read it, it’s horrible) and have had a great time getting from there to here. Blogging, or writing in general has never been my greatest skill, it’s not something I hugely enjoy, or I didn’t think it was and I didn’t even leave high school with a reasonable level of competence  (I had to retake English to get on my College IT course)

[Read more...]

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…

[Read more...]

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.

[Read more...]

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.

[Read more...]

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.

[Read more...]

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!

[Read more...]

Before we get into this I’d just like to say a big thanks to Mike for agreeing to let me publish an extract from his book for this blog post, I’d also like to wish him a happy birthday! (or ‘appy both’dee as we say here in Stoke) …enjoy..

Below is an exclusive extract from “Free Stuff Everyday”, the book by Mike Essex which explains how to build a brand by giving away freebies. If you enjoy this post be sure to check out Mike’s experiment that is happening today (!) which you can help with by visiting the Koozai website

[Read more...]