All posts in blogging

Image: Catching up by M.Danys.

While working on an extended review of the new social news community for SEO, SERPd I had a realization. Thus the review will have to wait till next week. First I have something more important to say. Listen up SEO people: Stop chasing traffic!

On the Web today traffic is a side effect.

Traffic can not be your goal. Also once you have the traffic it’s just a milestone on your way to conversions and ROI. SEO is complex these days. Depending who you are and who you work for SEO can be anything and everything that makes a business more profitable on the Web.

SEO may be web development, SEO may be PR, SEO may be usability. We all know that, I hope at least but SEO is also relationships with other people. You know, all those

Steve Rubel and his ridiculous ‘SEO is dead’ escapade during the Google Instant presentation is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to articles about SEO from outsiders.

Now that SEO has gone mainstream and everbody deals with it many people write about SEO who have barely a clue about it. Others, often web designers who know the basics of SEO from 5 or 10 years ago spread their outdated advice today.

Journalists, bloggers from outside the industry and writers for publications completely unrelated to SEO attempt to “join the conversation”. I have no problem with that.

Make your homework first though and then write. Also make sure to accept feedback. Some bloggers don’t like me pointing out their mistakes and delete my comments instead. Thus I decided to write about it where they can’t.

Grumpy Face by ellie.

I’m blogging all day. Most of the time at work I spend blogging. I write for four flagship blogs. Plus I have a private Tumblr blog as well. Two of the flagship blogs are about SEO, this one here and my own blog. The other two are client blogs covering two different topics. So basically I have to be up to date about at least three subjects, industries or niches. This is not an easy task although one person alone can handle up to 5 flagship blogs at the same if you ask me.

As I enjoy blogging very much I never experience the so called “writers block”. The contrary is the case, I’m often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things I want to write about. I do basic research for 5 to 10 postings and write only one of them after deciding which one to write.

Chess by Alejandro Fernandez

Everybody seems to agree with the “content is king” mantra. At the same time most articles, blog posts in and outside the SEO industry seemed to ignore it. Not anymore: Content SEO and marketing resources are ubiquitous in 2010.

SEO blogs used to deal with other aspects of Web strategy. Content has often been taken for granted and thus on page optimization, web design, usability and link building took center stage all the time.

Good, great or even killer content for flagship blogs isn’t there automatically.

Time flies by. It’s more than two years by now that I write the highly popular “30+” list blog posts to get links and traffic for SEOptimise. I’ve often tried to abandon them, to write tutorials or other types of postings but list posts with around 30 items still rule. They get the most

  • shares on social media
  • links
  • attention
  • traffic

for several reasons.

This year some of the big guys in the SEO blogosphere started doing 30 something lists as well, SEOmoz does them, SEL compiles them. They even surpass my lists in some cases as they spend obviously more time on them than I do. Their success with this technique has just confirmed to me that 30+ lists work. That’s why I will tell you how to write them.

Three of the most trusted SEO and social media experts, Rhea Drysdale, Tamar Weinberg and Lee Odden. Photo by toprankonlinemarketing.

Interviews are often overlooked pieces of distilled wisdom. They aren’t very popular on social media but they definitely should be! In interviews experts often provide the most valuable nuggets of their knowledge in a very concise form. You need to study dozens of other blog posts to learn as much.

Moreover experts often tend to focus on one aspect a time when they write something themselves, even when compiling a list like this. On the other hand interviews focus on several key questions an expert wouldn’t even attempt to cover in one blog post or seminar. These facts combined result in in a very condensed piece of advice.

We all love case studies. Who is we? We in the SEO industry, we in social media and online marketing, we business people. Case studies show on real life examples, real websites, projects and campaigns that something works.

Good case studies are more than proof though. They also show you how to market or optimize a site. They show an example of how it actually works.

Case studies combine both, the insight of a how to articles and the business proof of a finished campaign. They shows the results from experience.

These are some of the reasons why I’ve collected a comprehensive list of 30 SEO, social media & marketing case studies that prove the ROI of it All.

Yes, the ROI in SEO, social media and other kinds of online marketing is still too often fuzzy. We want success stories, numbers and explanations so that we can reenact the steps you need to succeed. So here they are, enjoy:

Overlook Park by dougtone.

There are so many WordPress SEO tutorials out there we don’t need another one. Some of them are very good, I don’t doubt that. They cover most of the blog & WordPress SEO basics like proper URLs e.g. We have also numerous best WordPress SEO plugins lists out there.

Blog SEO is mainly NOT about basics and plugins.

You may use one, two or three of these plugins but not more. The true SEO for blogs is more advanced. On the other hand you don’t need some advanced technical skill-set to master it.

Much of blog SEO is directly related to

  • interlinking
  • keyword choice
  • content prioritization (siloing)
  • community creation

You may cover the SEO basics or use the “best SEO plugins” but still write content nobody will ever find. So what’s the deal? How do you really take care of your blog & WordPress SEO? I’ve seen countless WordPress SEO tutorials but most don’t cover any of the following 30 points most bloggers overlook:

I’ve just published this on Econsultancy, but I thought it would be worth sharing with SEOptimise readers too. This is a presentation from a recent client seminar to show 5 reasons for blogging and 5 tips on how to get started.


Blogging Guide to Business

For the full article please read the Econsultancy post and download our blogging for business whitepaper.

Over recent months I’ve found I’m reading RSS feeds less and less. The main difficulty is that links are now so often shared on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon etc – that RSS can easily be forgotten sometimes. It’s actually quite common that I’ll login to see 1000+ items to read so just end up marking all as read and pretending they were never there, rather than being overloaded with information.

Plus there are so many excellent blogs out there now, meaning that it’s impossible to keep up-to-date on every post from the likes of SEL, SEW, SEJ, SER, SEOmoz, Econsultancy etc. What I need is a system that picks out the best posts which I’m interested in and sends them to me instead!

This is where Google Buzz comes in, and I’ve got to admit, I haven’t got Google Buzz yet, I signed up, integrated Twitter and then left it there – like most people. But this morning I tried cleaning up my RSS subscriptions – to help avoid the 1000+ situation and noticed a list of high-quality blog posts recommended from the people I follow on Google Buzz:

Google Reader

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