All too many blogs die out before they become successful. They are not failures, not in the traditional sense of “this does not work”. They simply do not become productive enough to sustain the bloggers’ interest in maintaining them. Writing is an emotional exercise. The less emotion you put into it the less you gain from it, and therein lies the problem for a majority of work-for-hire blog posts, the freelance stuff you buy for a few dollars that fails to bring in thousands of daily visitors. Click to continue […]
Year: 2014
So You Cannot Recover from Panda 4.1?
I have come across a few Websites that were downgraded by Panda 4.1 last month. More than a few, actually. And some people have sought me out asking for free advice. Well, I don’t have much time for free one-on-one advice but here are some tips for Panda 4.1 victims. Do with them as you will. Ignore All Claimed Recoveries Dated Before December 1, 2014 Some people may have figured out how to recover from Panda 4.1 but their ingenuity won’t be revealed until 1-2 iterations down the road. So anyone Click to continue […]
What Is a Blog?
Sometimes I wonder if we publish enough content aimed at beginners to Web marketing. So I thought I’d write a post aimed at the novice answering the question “what is a blog?” I remember asking the same question myself a few years ago when blogging first became popular. I’ve tried to include enough interesting information about blogging that even people confident in their ability to define the word “blog” will want to read this post. A Brief History of Weblogs Rebecca Blood wrote The Weblog Click to continue […]
And Now .@sempoglobal Turns the Discussion to Ethics
I don’t want to repeat everything I wrote at SEO Theory in “SEMPO Calls for SEO Code of Ethics – So What Is Ethical?” but I do want to talk about the problem of defining ethics for a worldwide industry. Ethics are supposed to guide the moral behavior of a group. But just who exactly decides what is moral? Search engine optimization as a label has been plastered across many different types of practices, such link building, content marketing, and article spinning. Conceptually all of these identifications Click to continue […]
Every Product Must Tell a Thousand Stories
When you want other people to talk about your company and your products on the Internet instead of making sales pitches you should turn to story-telling. That is how true content marketing works. It is also how true word-of-mouth marketing works. And if you look at the most popular advertising campaigns in history, that is how they worked. One of the longest-running gags in technology advertising was the “Mac-versus-PC” campaign that Apple used to successfully promote its products. Every commercial Click to continue […]
How to Write a Reflective Blog
There are two types of reflective writing. Traditional composition theory teaches us that reflective writing is the style used when recalling real or imaginary events and sharing insights or lessons learned from those events. You use an imaginary event when writing metaphorically or allegorically, or to protect innocent people from derision or investigation. This kind of reflective writing is very common on journalistic Websites, especially those which feature a lot of op-ed articles. In Web Click to continue […]
Why Making Articles Scannable is Less Than Optimal
Someone once left a comment on an SEO Theory article — one of my longer ones — complaining that it wasn’t scannable. He criticized my writing style, suggesting that people would miss out on most of my points because the articles were not easy to scan. I have seldom tried to make an article easy to scan for time-sensitive readers, especially a theoretical article. While it is true that I can be very wordy, I find that when I take the time to edit my copy and condense it I pack even more information Click to continue […]
How to Establish Yourself as a Trusted Expert and Authority
Michael Martinez just sent me a link to Jennifer Slegg’s analysis of the new Google quality raters’ guidelines. These new guidelines emphasize E-A-T–“expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness”. For a lot of people on the Web, establishing yourself and your website as a trustworthy expert and an authority is a mystery. Here are some concrete action steps you can take to establish yourself as an expert and a trusted authority. Use a Byline The first thing you should do, if you’re Click to continue […]
What Panda Strategy Should You Use if You Don’t Want to Delete Content?
One of the most common pieces of advice the SEO industry gives anyone hit by Panda is to delete as much low-quality content on the site as possible. But what Panda strategy should you use if you don’t want to delete content? Every digital marketing consultant should have a plan B, because not all clients are willing to go with plan A. The Low Quality Content Blog Suppose your client has published a blog for the last five years. And suppose they’ve had a pretty aggressive publishing schedule–3 Click to continue […]
Things SEO Bloggers Still Get Wrong about PageRank
It has been about 16 years since Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, the famous Backrub paper. After all these years I still find SEO bloggers writing complete nonsense about the paper. And there is really no excuse for that. Anyone can read the paper. You shouldn’t be relying on what other people have written about it over the years. So why is it so hard for people to get their facts straight? Well, here is yet another blog post about Click to continue […]
101 Inspirational Business Quotes, Quotations, and Sayings
I’ve seen posts about “motivational” business quotes in the past, but I’ve always preferred “inspirational” quotations. The difference between motivation and inspiration is huge. I can only motivate myself for short periods of time; I can find myself inspired for weeks and/or months at a time. Maybe even years. So, in the interest of inspiring you to new heights of business success, here are 101 sayings about business that I find inspirational. Warren Buffett Quotes I know I’m not alone Click to continue […]
Everything You Have Learned About SEO Was Wrong
There are so many people complaining about the death of SEO these days I have begun to think believe very few people ever tried to practice it in the first place. The complainers keep blaming Google for “changing the rules” (that rarely happens) and argue over and over again that “link building is dead” (nothing could be farther from the truth). And the Professional Complainers keep banging their drums about the failure of (their attempts at) “Build it and They Will Come” (still works like magic Click to continue […]