Creating great assests should be the cornerstone of your SEO strategy. Here's how to make them without going mad.

Is it getting difficult to come up with a new topics for your blog posts? Do you struggle to write even 500 words a day? Or maybe writing too much has taken a toll on you. Yet you carry on, trudging through word after word because you want backlinks, to get backlinks, you need content. What if I told you that it’s possible to create outstanding content without any writing? As I’ll show you below, there are tons of linkable assets you can create without ever stringing together more than a paragraph.

What are Linkable Assets?

First, let’s answer a simple question: what exactly are “linkable assets”? Linkable assets are essentially high quality content pieces you can use in your outreach to get links, or to attract links naturally. Think of them as parts of your website that…

How to make sure Google knows about your content

Even if you’re arachnophobic, there’s one kind of spider you want on your website. Search bots. These ‘spiders’ crawl through your pages looking for what to show search engine users and save a cached image of what they find. When someone enters a search query, results are pulled from content the bot has cached. Without search spiders, your site is invisible to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. Wrap your head around this: Google has more than 39 billion webpages cached. That number took a sharp dip starting in early June, 2016 (down from a peak of nearly 52 billion indexed pages in May, 2015), but it’s still huge. That’s one of the reasons Google doesn’t cache EVERYTHING. Another is quality – the search engine policies what it shows. Link farms, spam, and black hat SEO often land sites on blacklists.…

The Basics Of SEO Copywriting: How to write for search engines and get more traffic

Once upon a time, people were the only possible intended audience for a piece of writing. Sure, you could run it by your dog for a bit of creative input, but his opinion was rarely useful, and invariably involved the addition of ‘woofs’ at inappropriate points. Now we write for machines as well as humans. Not as all-powerful overlords (well, maybe a little), but as gatekeepers determining what content is worthy to be seen by their fleshy counterparts. Before you can get your content where it can do some good – in front of your customers' eyes - it must first be judged and assigned a ranking. This ranking shows how relevant the search engine thinks your web page is for the search term that has been entered. And it determines when your web page will be shown,…

Using TF*IDF for keyword research, to assess your Term Weight and improve your SEO

Keyword Density is a term frowned upon, and right it should be! It was used in such a way that the content wouldn’t look natural, as you keep reading the same word over and over again. At the time however, the Google algorithms weren’t as complex as they are today, so you could get away with it and not be penalised as badly. Meaning it once was the most main ranking factor for websites. However, these times have changed considerably as now KD is recognised as a minor factor in the rankings because the overuse of a keyword is better known as keyword stuffing which would you will be penalised for! OnPage.org has invented a new tool for keyword research and to help towards a new method for relevant content creation based around TF*IDF. If you don't know TF*IDF, Google has been…

Case studies and best practices for producing truly outstanding content

With the ongoing rise in content marketing, smarter search engines and increased competition within the earned media space, what does it take to really stand out and gain attention? As we start the New Year, now is as good a time as any to aim for a new set of higher standards for the content we’ll be producing in 2016 and onwards. Recently, Rand Fishkin produced an excellent Whiteboard Friday explaining why the creation of ‘reasonably good, unique content’ must die: Rand’s main point was that the days of producing reasonably good, useful, unique content is no longer an acceptable level of quality for those aiming to compete by ranking highly and generate interest in search. Instead, we must set our sights much higher: Source:…

Simon Swan's interview with Danny Denhard, A digital marketing consultant with 13 years experience in the industry, talking about consulting and giving away some great SEO tips

This interview discusses Danny’s views on how digital marketers should consider what are the key elements in maximising the return from the plethora of digital channels now available to sell a produce or service. Danny shares some fascinating thoughts on how brands need to rethink how they position themselves within the digital market and the importance for brands to build an authority, not to chase the Google algorithm but instead look to craft a voice of trust and meeting the needs of your audience through creating a utility and loyal community.

Q. Can you tell us a about your consultancy? What services you offer and the types of business you work with?

I offer three main product lines; consult, train and advise. I work with the full spectrum…

5 reasons you should continue guest blogging and 10 actions you should take given Matt Cutt’s latest advice affecting content marketers

Alert importance: [rating=5] Recommended link: Matt Cutts: The Decay and Fall of guest blogging for SEO If you work in SEO, the biggest development so far in 2014 is Matt Cutts of Google's clear guidance for marketers to cease guest blogging. But Guest blogging isn’t just an obscure SEO tactic, it’s used by many media sites and brands, so many businesses who practice content marketing will be affected by this. His new post this week starts with this seemingly unequivocal piece of guidance: “Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company”. He…

A step-by-step guide to creating rich snippets for e-commerce sites to help boost your SERPS CTR

Google's Structured Data Mark-up Helper appeared in May 2013 and it can be an effective tool in your structured data arsenal that will help you improve your CTR (clickthrough rate).  The benefits, according to Google are that:  'If you mark up these pages, Google may make the information available as rich snippets on search result pages or in other Google properties. Information such as a product's name, price, and review ratings can help users decide which pages to click on in search results'. In plain English, if we have an e-commerce site, why have a basic snippet appearing on search results (like the one below), when we can have a better one that is going to improve our CTR?

With the implementation…

The advantages of claiming your online identity for SEO and brand authority

As search continues to advance, the concept of authorship and identity will grow in importance. Many opinion leaders believe that over time, websites will begin to be ranked based not just on the keywords they contain and the inbound links they attract but also the people and authors behind the content being produced. Earlier this year, Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt stated: 'Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification'. At the time, some commentators suggested that this statement was proof of ‘AuthorRank’, a situation where Google will give certain pieces of content a rankings boost based on the author of that content. However, whilst there’s no definitive evidence to suggest that AuthorRank is in effect now, authorship mark-up is in place…

Or is SEO just getting some context? 5 ideas for resetting your SEO agenda

I’m not a fan of lightly making big, idle statements and this one has been made before. I say ‘SEO is dead’ now because the industry and culture of SEO, is fast transitioning. SEO Moz, or as they’re now called ‘Moz’, dropping the SEO element of the brand name. Of course SEO is not dead, it's simply now viewed in context, for what it is - one important practice in digital marketing.

When the SEO Juggernaut, ‘SEO Moz’, goes to the lengths of not only re-branding but changing their URL (that can be cataclysmically bad news for an SEO minded out-fit judging by the impact on Econsultancy when they dropped their hyphen), it illustrates just how important it is for them to move away from the pure ‘SEO’ label, a label that seems so dated now. Note…