It looks like faux content marketing has won the game of buzzwords with online marketers. This is not an “SEO thing” — just about everyone from ad agencies to freelance writers now call themselves content marketers. Language naturally evolves and words and expressions take on new meanings, so this is a normal progression in usage. I wouldn’t usually take an interest in this kind of misapplication of an expression except that all the content marketers are really confused about what they Click to continue […]
Category: General
All posts that do not fall into other categories.
How to Recover from Negative SEO
Too many people are falling for the propaganda. A general feeling of impending doom is sweeping across the Internet Marketing community as people talk up the possibility of “negative SEO” in Web forums, blogs, podcasts, and conferences. I have dealt with negative SEO several times across the years. It’s never a pleasant experience but it’s much different from what most people are experiencing. If you’re losing traffic and you see links in your backlink profiles that you don’t recognize, Click to continue […]
Why I Never Reply to Guest Blogging Requests
We do our best to discourage people from asking us if they can write guest articles for our blogs. Once in a while someone still insists on sending us a completely useless email. Normally we just discard the email and move on. After all, everyone and their brother who blogs about Internet marketing has shared at least one dumb guest blogging email. Why bother sharing another? Because so many of you continue to ignore the pattern of failure and reach out to complete and total strangers who have Click to continue […]
Why Link Building Is More Important Now Than Ever
Link building is more important now than ever. Links from sites with low quality, “thin” content” are, by definition, “low quality links”. For a discussion of high quality content and high quality links, see this post, which details how to judge the quality of links and content. In the wake of Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, Michael Martinez and I have worked with clients who made mistakes in their linking strategy in the past. Some of them just gave up Click to continue […]
Small Business, Big Search Challenge
How do you compete on a shoestring budget with all those big, well-funded companies out there who hire professional search marketers and agencies to manage their organic listings in Bing, Google, and other search services? One answer that Randy and I share with our clients is a reflective strategy: to optimize for search outside of the search space. There is less competition in the reflective marketing spaces because most people follow the crowd. Reflective marketing for search is easy and Click to continue […]
Link Building Will Never Die but Bad SEO May Kill Your Website
Now that Matt Cutts has lowered the boom on using guest bloggery for linkery all the SEO bloggers are pouncing on LINK BUILDING and proclaiming its imminent death and departure from “white hat”, “good” search engine optimization. These people never learn from their mistakes. Link building is not going away and it doesn’t need to adopt another new name (like “content marketing”). People need to stop being ashamed of link building. It’s not that link building is bad for your Website, it is that Click to continue […]
Do You Really Need All These SEO Strategies for 2014?
Since November we have been treated to an abundance of predictive blogging from the SEO industry trying to get ahead of 2014’s “best practices”. Almost every new “SEO for 2014” article has abandoned the usual litany of obtaining links in favor of promoting relatively new priorities. But I find much of this generic advice hard to justify. Let me explain why, based on queries I see people are actually using. Why Do I Need Google Authorship? I honestly cannot tell you why you need Google Authorship, Click to continue […]
How Google Fails to Help You Find Good SEO Advice in 2013
Search Google for a query like “seo myths” or “how to do seo” and you’ll see the top results are often dominated by old articles that either gave bad advice in the first place, mixed advice, or advice that is now outdated. Some old SEO advice is still good but some of it was nonsense. For example, in many articles I find that SEO pundits were telling readers that “PageRank no longer matters”. PageRank has always mattered — it just never mattered as much as most people in the SEO community thought Click to continue […]
Oh Google Hummingbird, You REALLY Suck at Search
It is getting to the point where I can no longer use Google to search the Web. Every day I have to clear my browser cache/cookies so that Hummingbird doesn’t get its evil, nasty, filthy little claws into my queries. Whoever at Google thought this “We’ll remember everything you search for” idea would be good for the Web was obviously shot up with more heroin than a Taliban can sell on the open market. For many weeks I have found myself designing more complex, more intricate queries. I kept Click to continue […]
How to Promote Your Website for Free
Free Website promotion remains a cornerstone of Internet marketing but there is so much mixed and outdated advice available on the topic these days that people can be forgiven if they come away from the SERPs in a state of total confusion. In 2012 I wrote “Promote Your Website – How to Do it For Free” on SEO Theory (and did you notice that the URL spells out “lessons in humility on the query space”?). I provided some practical advice there but let me address the issue from a different angle. Step Click to continue […]
On the Perils of Using SEO Tools to Help With SEO
I love SEO tools. They are tasty, crunchy little morsels that make for delightful morning snacks. I had a case of the munchies this morning and so I’ll share my masticating thoughts on a recently announced SEO tool. Actually, I’m just going to make fun of it. You see, a while back I was dancing and singing down the Yellow Brick Road — well, actually, I was browsing SEO Blog, which is a pretty cool SEO blog aggregator site (disclaimer: SEO Theory is one of the blogs included in their feeds). I Click to continue […]
Social Media Mistakes that Are Easy to Avoid
A friend of mine on Facebook today (and yesterday) shared a photo of a huge blister on his toe. It was about the size of a grape, in fact. Of course, he got lots of sympathy and plenty of requests from his friends to visit a doctor. He also had one person unfriend him. This might not be a big deal for some folks, but for someone who has hung out a billboard as a web marketing professional, it’s the kind of dumb mistake that can lose you a lot of credibility. It was also the inspiration for Click to continue […]