Ahrefs’s Insights
Kicking Off a Campaign with Ahrefs Domain Comparison
Examining your competition can be quite a difficult task, especially when starting a new campaign, a new website, or engaging with a new client. But if you use Ahrefs Domain Comparison tool, it is fairly easy to keep a high level view of your site and your competition while gaining valuable knowledge of the entire landscape. The author of this post walks you through several steps that should help you discover the full advantage of this tool.
AhrefsRank (AR) Update. Excellent Correlation with Google SERPs
In this post, we provide you clarifications to the recent changes we’ve made to the algorithm of our AhrefsRank (AR) calculation and aim to answer your most prominent questions regarding the correlation value of new AhrefsRank in comparison to Google Rankings and its value to users. Check out our updated AR and make sure that current market cannot offer you a better metric in terms of correlation with Google Rankings.
Link Building
Google’s Matt Cutts: NoFollow Attributes On Internal Links Don’t Hurt But Generally Don’t Do It
In the latest Webmaster Help video, Google’s Matt Cutts addresses an interesting question regarding the use of rel=”nofollow” on internal links. His general recommendation for internal linking is: try to leave the nofollow off, make sure the PageRank does flow from one page on your site to another, and let Googlebot crawl and explore your site. Anyway, it won’t hurt if you put a nofollow pointing to a login page or to a page that you think is kind of “useless”. Besides, if you don’t want Google to crawl the page within your site, you’d better use noindex, saving nofollow for the cases when it comes to linking to outside sites.
How to Build Links Using Expired Domains
Considering using expired domains for link building purposes? In general, that might be a good idea. In that case, I hope you’ll find this post useful. Julie Joyce shares here some great tips on how to find dropped/expired/expiring domains, vet, and use them for the most benefit of your link building campaign, as well as provides some risk factors and warning signs you should keep in mind when taking this approach.
Link Building Through Outreach and Content Refreshing
In this article Bill Sebald makes a good point saying that just creating and publishing great content is not enough to boost your link building efforts. What is lacking? Performing outreach and marketing your content! Learn how you can implement broken link building and content refreshing tactics for earning high-quality links and content inspiration.
Google Penguin & Panda Updates
Penguin 5, With The Penguin 2.1 Spam-Filtering Algorithm, Is Now Live
It is official: Google’s “Penguin 2.1” spam fighting algorithm is now live! In this post Danny Sullivan reports that the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, shared this news on Twitter today, informing that the latest Penguin release would impact about 1 percent of all searches to a noticeable degree.
Analytics
Google ‘(Not Provided)’ Keywords: 10 Ways to Get Organic Search Data
Apparently, there is no use in complaining and raging against Google for taking the valuable analytics data on keywords away. Instead, try to adjust and focus on searching for ways to replace organic search data that Google is no longer providing. In this article Jennifer Slegg has come up with a pretty impressive list of sources you can use to compensate for the missing data.
International Issues
Google Gives Advice on How to Expand Your Website to More Languages
Thinking about expanding your site to reach more languages? Lucky you are! This week Google has released a new video, featuring Google’s Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye, providing some great advice and best practices for expanding your site to more languages and country-based language variations, and covering details about rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” and potential implementation on your multilingual and/or multinational site. Check it out and happy expansion!
Search Conferences
Ready for another portion of fresh SEO news from SMX East that is currently taking place in New York City? Barry Schwartz composed a great list suggesting some of the live blog coverage of days one and two sessions from the industry.
SMX East 2013 Day One Live Blog Recap
SMX East 2013 Day Two Live Blog Recap
SMX East 2013 Day Three Live Blog Recap
Content Marketing
How to Build Your First Content Marketing Strategy
Do you know the basics of creating a good content marketing strategy? Good for you, if you do. For those unaware of them, Jayson DeMers describes in this post the process of developing an effective content strategy in just five simple steps: have clear goals in mind, review your data to develop great content, if you need to know – just ask, look inside for opportunities before you go outside, create a timeline. How to make sure you’re finally producing effective content in your own business niche? Asking the right questions! They are also covered in the post, so check it out!
Reeling In Your Content Marketing Ideas
Being stuck on your content marketing ideas is bad, but having too many ideas is hardly better! How to find a happy medium? In this post Nick Stamoulis shares 3 ways you can make sure that all your contents are working towards the same goal: organize your ideas by topic and see what patterns emerge, create an editorial calendar, assign ownership.
The 5 Ws of Compelling Content
According to the author of this article, it is quite possible to create compelling content that ranks well in search, prompts sharing on social media and promotes conversion on your website just answering 5 simple questions: “who?, what?, when?, where?, and why?”. Just know your customers, find out what your audience is searching for, have your article or blog post published on someone else’s site, determine a formal editorial calendar for your blog, have business goals in mind before you craft any content .
8 Content Marketing KPI’s You Can’t Afford To Neglect
How do you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing initiatives? The author of this post shares a comprehensive guide to those unavoidable Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for content marketing you can’t afford to neglect, comprising: unique visitors, geo-targets, mobile readership, bounce rate/time spent, click patterns & Heat Maps, page views, comments, and social sharing.
Social Media Marketing
Online Reputation Management (ORM): A Quick Guide
How important is online reputation management in your SEO strategy? This is exactly the case when prevention is much better than cure. You can avoid many reputation problems by following the principles of the Golden Rule when dealing with the public. Chuck Price shares a quick guide on how to manage online reputation problems, by claiming your profiles on trusted websites, creating and optimizing content, creating and following a social media policy, and making customer service a top priority in your organization.
Social Media for Business – You’re Doing It All Wrong
Are you effectively marketing your business through social media? To answer the question in the affirmative, ensure you are not making some of these common mistakes when using social media for business: having “build it and they will come” mindset, not being social, focusing on quantity, not quality, failing to look professional. Avoid those mistakes and utilize social media platforms to their full advantage.
SEO and Security
How Website Security Impacts Search Engine Optimization
In this article Michael Martinez rightly notes that “the only server that is completely protected from hacking is one that doesn’t exist.” Anyway, you shouldn’t give up! There is still something you can do to protect your hard work and investment in organic search marketing. Discover the skills you should master as soon as possible to future proof your website’s security.
SEO Fun
Do You Google Yourself? If So, You’re in the Majority
They say, curiosity killed the cat. Anyway, the results of a new research from PEW Research Center show that the majority (56%) of American adults have used Google or another search engine to search on their own name. Moreover, the study found that men are more likely than women inclined to look themselves up online, as well as Internet users with higher levels of education and household incomes. When was the last time you Googled yourself? Were you satisfied with what you found?
5 Ways the Internet Celebrated ‘(Not Provided)’
It’s so good to know that even in times of greatest frustration, caused by Google’s decision to take keywords data away, some people in the industry managed to preserve their sense of humor and are ready to share it with all the rest (who right now might be well in need of a good laugh!) The author of this post collected some of the most humorous takes on “(not provided)”. Enjoy!
Industry’s News & Insights
Bing Slams “Freakonomics” Bing It On Challenge Critique
Healthy competition is good: both, for companies, trying to improve the quality of their services, and for customers, using these services and enjoying interesting discussions competing companies are having. This week a new study appearing on the ”Freakonomics” blog aggressively disputing Bing’s claim that people prefer Bing to Google and doubting the results of the “Bing It On” challenge caused heated debates between representatives of Bing and their opponents. It’s definitely worth the read if you have time.
The Ultimate Guide to Bing SEO
In times when diversifying your SEO efforts is a trend in the industry, it would be very handy to get a full detailed coverage of the most important things for optimizing a site for Bing. Here you have it! The author of this post did a great job creating a complete Bing SEO guide for beginners, covering everything you need to know from getting indexed in Bing to improving your organic Bing rankings.
7 Simple Things You Can Do To Fix Your Marketing
Feeling like something is wrong with your marketing campaign, but having no idea what you can do to fix things? This is your lucky day! In this post Neil Patel shares the whole 7 simple fixes that should help you improve your marketing efforts: explain your story, give people time to buy, don’t forget your calls to action, optimize for lifetime value, not in session ROI, optimize for conversions, stop looking for a silver bullet, let your product market itself.
Did I miss highlighting any story? Please share in the comments!
