It is my first post of this series, but I find that sharing my favourite posts related to SEO, hosting, SEM and internet marketing to be quite exciting. In addition, readers of temi.co.uk can find something of interest even if it was not published here.
It is not very easy to sort all posts I read during September, so if you think that I missed something interesting, feel free to offer a post to my attention.
In my opinion here are the best posts of September 2014:
Viral Marketing by Brian Dean: I’m not sure that the idea of the post belongs to Brian because it is a story of one successful technique that brought Chris Gimmel more than 17,000 visitors in just one day. But the SEO method belongs to Brian. However, it is still a very interesting read.
To make a long story short, The Skyscraper Technique means that you should find a post in a competitive niche that looks good. Then, you should improve the post by adding new content. Offer that as a new post to website owners who have already linked to the original content.
Have a look at the 2014 Rank Correlation Analysis and SEO Ranking Factors for Google U.S. released by Searchmetrics. Finally, we know that content is a king. Marcus Tober mentioned that content is “no longer an addition to, but is the main focus of, SEO.” It means that now you can focus more on quality content building, but don’t forget about On Page SEO and backlinks. At the same time, keyword rich anchor text loses its importance. However top SEO specialists still using rich keywords for link building.
John Mueller from Google said that even after algorithm update, your rankings may not be visible immediately. It is normal for changes not immediately visible for everyone. If you remember when Google was updating Page Rank toolbar; it took few days to update it for each website.
Google has more than 200 ranking factors and you must consider more than only 1 algorithm. On the other hand, if you were affected strongly by a single algorithm, then you may see major improvements once the algorithm refreshed. John pointed out that, very often, when your site is affected by Penguin; it is also likely impacted by other algorithms.
“We are waiting for Penguin 3.0 in 2014 year,” said John Mueller. In a video hangout, he told that Penguin 3.0 will probably be launched in 2014. To quote him:
“My guess is yes. But, as always, there are always things that can happen in between. I’m pretty confident we’ll have something in the reasonable future, but not today, so we’ll definitely let you know when things are happening.”
Robbie Richards did a fantastic roundup called “60 Experts Reveal Top 3 Tools To Grow Your Email List”. As you noticed, my quote was added in the roundup too, but it does not mean that I included it here only because of this : ). So, according to his poll, the results are the following:
- Lead Pages – 15 points
- Mailchimp – 14 points
- SumoMe and Optinmonster– 13 points
- Aweber – 12 points
- WordPress – 9 points
- Facebook Ads – 7 points
- Bounce exchange and Twitter ads tied – 6 points
- Ninja Popups, Optinskin and Many Contacts – 5 points
- Hello Bar – 4 points
- Optimizely and Infusionsoft– 4 points
Rohit Palit published at Ahrefs blog a very simple tutorial on how to turn unlinked brand mentions into links. He did not share anything new, but this link building method works very well. You just need to find sites that mentioned your brand name and ask them to make the link live. In most cases website owners will do that happily and you will receive a brand name link.
A 1,000 Word Post vs. a 2,000 Word Post: Which Has Better ROI? Published at Searchenginejournal by Ian Harris. It is not a big surprise that higher sites in search results have longer content on the landing page. But what about ROI? According to this research, 1,000 words is not enough and you should make it at least 2,000 to make worthwhile.
More content generates more traffic to your site. More traffic generate more links. More links generate ROI. It is all quite simple.
Paul Shapiro did a nice post at OkDork blog called “We Analyzed the 3,000 Most Successful LinkedIn Publishing Posts”. I don’t use LinkedIn very often, but these great tips have changed my mind about this social network. The main conclusions are the following:
- Make your titles between 40 and 49 characters long.
- Make your posts on LinkedIn visual! Add 8 images.
- Don’t add videos or other multimedia assets to your posts.
- Use “How-to” and List-Style Headlines.
- Don’t write Question Posts—LinkedIn posts where the headline poses a question perform poorly.
- Divide your post into 5 headings in order to attract the greatest number of post views.
- People like to read long-form content on LinkedIn—1,900 to 2,000 words long.
- Don’t get your audience all fired up.
- Make your content readable for an 11-year-old.
- Promote your LinkedIn publisher post on other social networks!
- LinkedIn likes get you views, shares, and comments.
Ben Acheson published 6 Ways to Use Internal Links (The Next Key SEO Tactic?). Internal linking is very important part of successful website and you should do it properly to give more weight to the pages you want. Ben reviewed few important ways:
- Links in navigation menu.
- If you are selling a product, be sure to link to the product category.
- The same from product to product.
- Categories to products.
- If you are publishing news or articles regularly, link them to your products and categories, too.
- In internal linking, you should definitely use anchor text because it won’t hurt your site:
11 Things You Need to Know About Yandex SEO by Harrison Jones: As a person who lives in Ukraine and knows the Russian search market very well, I can say that Harrison’s tips are very obvious and he does not share any dirty secrets. On the other hand, there is not an abundance of information about Yandex in US and UK. Therefore, it could be a good source of information for those who are looking to promote their business in Russia.
The most important things that Harrison probably missed or did not clearly identify are:
- Yandex, at the beginning of 2014, launched new algorithm that do not count inbound links in ranking. I’m not sure that link factors were dropped completely, but it was significantly decreased.
- Geo Targeting is probably one of the most important things. Yandex shows different search results in different regions, even for the same country. For example, people in Moscow do not see the same as people in St. Petersburg. Still, the results are not completely different.
If you think that I missed something important, please contact me here or via Twitter: MrGarkaviy. It is highly probable that there were many good posts published in the month of September that I did not catch. Even if you are not a top blogger but wrote an outstanding post during September, I would love to hear from you so that I can include you in this SEO roundup.