Search Engine Optimization covers a huge range of tactics – all of which can bring direct benefit to a website. In this post, I’ve shared examples of different tactics used at different websites, and the effects that have been seen. If you’re considering an SEO campaign for your site, or are trying to persuade someone else to invest in internet marketing, I hope this post will help demonstrate the potential of internet marketing…

This is a graph of organic traffic for a theoretical site – they might be in an industry such as print advertising, construction equipment or VHS rental. The decline in traffic is pronounced and serious.

A critical distinction when looking at a graph like this is whether the site’s performance is increasingly worse than the competitors, or whether the whole industry is in decline. In this post I want to recommend some metrics that can be tracked to benchmark your site against competitors (independent of market behaviour) and to check the health of the industry…

There are very few tactics which can guarantee success in linkbuilding. Executed correctly, giving something away is one that gets close to fulfilling that promise.

This post covers competitions and giveaways; I’ll share techniques and tactics you can use, and will include links to some interesting competitions seen online recently, and some that we’ve run for clients.

Running giveaways online typically offers a few different opportunities; of most immediate use to SEOs is that competitions can attract links from authoritative sites and a variety of domains…

Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I’d like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new SEO, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag’s attributes.

Here’s a couple of example links; the first is a link to the White House’s website, the other is to Distilled’s new US website…

This week, I’d like to make suggestions for a ‘reading list’ to help SEOs, and others who work online, particularly with website strategies.

But this list isn’t going to be blogs, post and online articles, oh no. These suggestions are entirely offline. We’re going into dead tree mode with eleven books and two magazines. Some of these suggestions you may want to flick through, some you may want to read cover to cover…

To make a valuable impact, SEO has to be understood by more than just an organisation’s search marketers. This post suggests how to explain the concepts, and get buy-in, from different people within an organisation.

I’ve chosen some of the standard roles that you may find in a company or organisation with a web-presence and for each one have listed:

• Their role: a description of their position within the company and their responsibilities…

Amongst the add-ons I add to any new install of Firefox is the Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick. (Find the install links at the bottom of this post.)

Obviously, this add-on is chock-full of features that are useful for web developers, but it really does make diagnosing various SEO issues much easier. This list gives the top seven tasks that I find easier when the toolbar is installed.

Click on any of the small images in this post to see them in full size…

Introduction

We’ll often rattle off various metrics quite casually in conversation, but it’s easy to forget that others (such as your clients!) might not know whether these are big numbers or small ones. For example: “We’ve just published a guest post on a site with Domain mozTrust 5.67. Mr_Gadget mentioned it to his 64 thousand followers, and it managed to get over 1,000 Diggs.”

This post should be useful to anyone who needs to orientate themselves around such numbers…

A useful indicator of SEO success is the number of unique keyphrases that send traffic to a website. An increase in this number is a reflection of increased trust in the site by search-engines.

Google Analytics can show you the total number of unique organic keyphrases at a glance, on the Traffic Sources ⇒ Keywords page. (Make sure you select ‘non-paid’ to exclude any CPC campaigns…

Improving on-site search functionality can benefit a site by contributing to a better user experience, and by reducing the barriers for users to reach their destination pages.

There are a variety of tools that you can use if your site does not already have a search functionality; I won’t second guess which search application will best suit your site.

There have already been posts on various blogs about best practices for implementing site search (such as: label the button ‘Search’ and not ‘Go’, search case-insensitively by default, always recommend refinements to searches which generate no results, etc…

Hi there – I’m a blogger. Could help me? I read that massive post about ‘lessons learned from three years of blogging’ and I’ve been brimming with ideas ever since. However, I’d like to attract more views to each of my posts.

OK, I can help you with that, by using one equation and five quick techniques to get you thinking. Here’s the equation:

Number of Posts Read = Number of Visits * Number of Posts Read on Each Visit

Rather than just trying to get more people to your site, we should spend some time talking about the final part of that equation – the number of posts read by each visitor…

A few friends have asked me recently about how they can get their personal or business websites ranking higher in Google. I’ve tended to explain SEO – and link building in particular – quite differently to how I’d talk about it to Internet Marketing pros such as yourself.

In particular, there’s one piece of advice that I’ve given so much recently, that I thought it’s worth mentioning here. I hope that even experienced link builders will see value in considering this (and to be honest, they may get even more out of it…

Link building for small ecommerce sites can be amongst the toughest SEO challenges – but also the most common. I’d like to share a few bits of advice for anyone rising to the challenge – whether you’re working in-house or as an agency.

These are targetted at small companies, probably with limited internal resource or a small SEO agency contract, and who don’t have a PR firm able to get them into newspapers or an advertising budget that will put them in magazines, on radio, etc…

We all like links from big sites right?

Whether it’s in an editorial article, a guest post, etc, it’s great for sending some strength and trust to your site. However, the drawback of links from big sites, is that you might find it’s on a small page. The newly published page will take some time to get indexed, much of it’s strength (certainly initially) is likely to come from internal links, and it’s unlikely to have a great crawl rate…

As diligent Search Marketers know, it’s quite a good idea to get links from strong/trusted sites pointing to yours, and combine this with building a single link or two from a large number of smaller websites.

For some people, this second part can seem the most daunting – whilst there is a person you can talk to if you want a link on every page of timesonline.co.uk, there’s nobody you can call or email to get a link from every small website or blog…

At this week’s SMX, Rand made a comment about two big brands that ranked at #2 and #3 for their industry’s generic keyword, behind an exact match domain. Referring to SERPs Click-Through-Rate data, he suggested that you could calculate how much more traffic the larger brand could receive from the keyword by moving from position 2 to position 1.

At the risk of getting a stern talking to, I’m going to have to ask: really? I’m confident that where you see a well-known brand’s site sat next to an anonymous brand, the recognised name will get a disproportionate number of clicks…

I hope you read this post and enjoy it. I also hope you never need it.

In the ‘current economic climate’ there is a chance that any company may have to ‘restructure’ or even cease trading altogether. These events are no fun for any employees involved, but I’d like to share some advice that will help you prepare for and cope with the worst situation if it arises.

Negotiating Your Redundancy
If you are being made redundant, do ask your employer if they would be interested in reducing your working hours instead…