SEOByHand - SEO News, Tips, and Ramblings

Best SEO Books and Internet Marketing Books

wesley.mcdermott@gmail.com (Wes McDermott) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 12:47:09 +0000

Which Books Do You Recommend for Learning SEO?

I get asked this question quite a lot from people, and to be honest, there isn't just one book that covers everything you need to know to become skilled at SEO. The search industry is fast paced and very competitive, it doesn't just involve adding keywords to page titles, and stuffing keywords into your content anymore, that died years ago.

As well as the traditional link building and on-page optimisation, to keep on top of the game and to become a well rounded SEO Consultant nowadays you have to be comfortable with a wide range of areas including web analytics, landing page optimisation, content creation, and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and how to work these platforms effectively. In essence you're an Internet Marketing Consultant, not just an SEO.

So, below you'll find my top 11 books on not just SEO, but Internet Marketing in general, perfect for anyone looking to increase their websites' performance on the web.

Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability – Steve Krug's masterpiece on website conversion. Don't Make Me Think is not just a book for designers, it's essential reading for anyone with a website, especially SEO's. As an SEO Consultant my job doesn't just end when a clients' listing gets clicked on in the search engines. As SEO's we have to think about the process after the click, and how we get them to take a desired action, whether that be purchasing a product, signing up for an email list, or participating in the conversation. Don't Make Me Think is exactly what you need for this purpose, it's a short book but it's filled with some really meaty content which you really should be reading!

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity – Avinash Kaushick is pretty much the godfather when it comes to website analytics. All sites need to track their performance on things like sales processes, and keyword performance. In this follow up to Web Analytics and Hour a Day, Avinash goes into detail on how to understand the intent of your visitors. He provides clear actionable tips and techniques throughout – An absolute must for anyone with an eCommerce store or any site that requires an action, whether that be opt-in, sharing content, watching a video or downloading files.

The Art of SEO – Maybe not one for the Advanced SEO's out there as it doesn't touch on anything you don't already know. However, if you're just getting your feet wet in this industry then it's the best book of its kind. Contributors include Online Marketing heavyweights Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie C. Stricchiola.

Information Architecture – 4th on my list is Information Architecture for the World Wide Web aka. The Polar Bear Book. This book is an absolute must for anyone with a website. It explains the basic concepts of information architecture – how to label and structure bits of information so that users can easily navigate and use. Everything from how you lay out your content and how you structure your website navigation will be influenced by what you read in this book.

Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, eBooks, Webinars (and more) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business – Content is king, content is kong, whatever it I this book is king of content creation. If you want to succeed online outside of the paid advertising space - you have to create compelling content, whether that's in the form of blog posts, linkbait articles, videos, on Facebook etc. You have to create content that's going to arouse people's interests. In this book you'll learn everything from the art of storytelling, how to find your voice and create content or ideas shared online as much as possible.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems – Usability testing should be a continuous task for anyone with a site. Usability testing increases your bottom line. But with a price tag of £1000-£3500 for a round of usability tests by a usability expert it doesn't often happen. In this follow up book to Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug lays out practical steps and techniques on how anyone can easily improve their websites usability and the problems to avoid.

ProBlogger: Blogging Your Way to A Six-Figure Income – Although this book is primarily aimed at bloggers, there's several key areas covered that are useful for everyone with a website online. Such things as finding untapped markets, different revenue sources, how to use social media tools to your advantage, what successful content looks like, how to optimise advertising and much more. If you have a corporate blog (or if you don't then you should!) this book is perfect for all!

Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust – A book by renowned internet marketer Chris Brogan (and also Julien Smith) that touches on what is now a frontline marketing tool - social media! To create a successful brand you need to become a Trust Agent. A Trust Agent is someone who has influence online and someone that stands out as an authority in your market. Learn through actionable steps how to use social media to positively impact your business and grow your brand.

The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web – A book in the similar mould as to Trust Agents, The New Community Rules centres around the social web and how it can be used to effectively market your business. As I said it's similar to Trust Agents but it touches on things that Trust Agents fails to, and vice versa. The New Community Rules discusses in great depth such things as conversation marketing and how social media thrives on honesty and transparency. You will learn all about blogging and microblogging and how to use Twitter to create brand awareness, and how to enhance your online reputation all through actionable steps and case studies.

Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords – A comprehensive guide full actionable tips and techniques on how to grow your ROI through increasing click-thru, conversions. You'll learn how to build powerful well converting campaigns from scratch, how to write killer advertising copy, how to improve quality score, how to slash your bid prices, how to develop quality keyword lists and more.

Landing Page Optimisation: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions – Landing pages are the real deal for capturing any type of action from a visitor, whether that is from a search engines or elsewhere. Without a highly tuned converting machine you're leaving potential sales on the table. It's surprising how many webmasters fail to optimise their landing page for conversions. This is where this book comes in.

SEMRush Review - A Keyword and Competitive Research Tool

wesley.mcdermott@gmail.com (Wes McDermott) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:31:31 +0000

What is SEM Rush?

SEMRush is a pretty slick competitive research and keyword research tool combined. Perfect for those people who like to get knee deep in keyword and competition data juiciness.

What can SEMRush do that other SEO tools can't?

TBH I don't quite know where to start with that one, there are so many features and benefits from this tool, it would be better if I just listed all what it can do.

Look up every keyword your competitors are targeting both organically and paid (limited to 10,000 results using the pro account)
Research related keywords
Research the CPC of keywords
Check your rankings and your competitors in both organic search results and paid
Check search volumes of keywords
Find the % of traffic a keyword is bringing to your or your competitors site
Find out the cost % of potential traffic per keyword
The competition level in AdWords per keyword (a good indicator of a good quality search term)
Main competitors of any given keyword in both organic and AdWords results
Main competitors of any given website or web page in both organic and AdWords search results
Returns potential ads buyers - (shows a list of domains that buy CPC advertising with Adwords for the keywords your site is targeting) Also shows the keywords both they and you target as well as their estimated monthly traffic from AdWords and their estimated monthly ad spend.

More great features:

Export to Excel - You can export all data to excel for further analysis. Great for those who need to present data to back up their suggestions to clients, and for those data geeks (like me!) that like playing with graphs.

Country specific databases – I was a SEMRush sceptic when it first arrived on the scene a few years back as it was like pretty much every other keyword research took out there (US Centric), but in the last year they've introduced their UK database which is really helpful for me whose clients mostly target the UK. So thumbs up to that! SEM Rush also caters for USA, Russia, Germany, Spain, and France markets. They also have their Italian, Brazilian, and Australian databases in beta which can be expected to come out of beta fairly soon.

Pricing

The guys at SEMRush have thought about their pricing model long and hard and have come up with what I think is a very fair price point for the data you receive. First off there are three main packages to choose from. They are Pro, Guru, and Enterprise.

SEMRush Pro - The Pro plan allows you to mine up to 10,000 results per report, and up to 3,000 queries per day. That's priced at $69.95 per month, $79.95 for just one month, or $334.95 per 6 months.

SEMRush Guru – The Guru plan allows you to return up to 30,000 results per report and up to 5,000 queries per day. It also comes with priority support. It's the Ideal option for agencies. Price for this is $149.95 a month.

SEMRush Enterprise – The Enterprise plan is aimed at larger sites. It returns up to 100,000 results per report, and allows you to query up to 10,000 reports per day. This also comes with priority support but with the addition of expert consultations.

The SEMRush Pro package is also available on a month by month basis at $79.95, or a 6 month basis at $334.95, saving you $84.75 on the recurring pro monthly package. What I would really like to see here though is an option to pay yearly to as to bring the price down even more. Also a premium section would be a nice addition too, for such things as Q&A, support forum, best practices, tips on other aspects of PPC and SEO. Maybe that's something in the pipeline, we'll have to wait and see.

My Overall View of SEM Rush

Overall my view of SEMRush is that it's the best keyword research and competitive tool of its kind. The data it can give you for both your Adwords and Organic search campaigns is unbelievable. Don't take my word for it though as you can give SEMRush a test drive for free. The results are somewhat limited but you can a better feel of how it works than from me just rambling on about it. Sign up for a free account now.

Paid Links! Why the Hell Not?

wesley.mcdermott@gmail.com (Wes McDermott) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 20:09:11 +0000

Google's team of search engine techies including Matt Cutts, have all made clear Google's stance on paid links over the last couple of years. Buying and selling links to purposefully manipulate the search engines is bad, well... according to them anyways.

Their stance is understandable really, as it destroys Google's ability to use links as an algorithmic calculation. Participating in buying or selling links results in both manual penalties and ranking penalties for those proved to be involved in manipulating Google's calculations.

Understandably, many reputable businesses, sites, and individuals have dropped this method of link building and have been frantically looking for another way ever since. In this post I will outline some of the paid link building techniques that are still perfectly ethical, proving that you can still buy links without being slapped!

1Charitable Contributions - Donate to charities and receive a link in return. It's important to make sure the charities you target do have some geographical or topical relevance, otherwise the link is practically useless to you. The Charity Navigator or the BBB's Accredited Charity Directory are two great resources for finding suitable charities to approach for buying links. Make sure you look through the site to see if they do actually link out to other sites, you may be wasting your time otherwise.

2Sponsor Events - Sponsor an event (either online or off) no matter how big or small, you will receive a link from the events' website and possibly from the attendees websites also. You can either search through your local magazines or newspapers for upcoming events, or you can also check out places like craigslist.org or upcoming.org as well. It is important that you stay within your topic market or your geographical location when choosing an event to sponsor.

3Purchase Content - Look for content within your industry that is of high quality and has already achieved a great deal of link popularity, contact the webmaster and offer to buy the content from them. If they say yes, congratulations, now ask them to 301 permanent redirect all incoming traffic and link popularity to the article on your site.

4Purchase Websites - Buy a website that is on topic leaves and you're free to do with the incoming links what you please. Simply redirect all the links to your main site wherever you feel it would benefit the visitors of the old site. Now this is not an easy method of getting links, there's a lot involved, but a good resource for this is Bruce Clay's post on buying sites for SEO.

These methods have been proven to be very effective, but all link building efforts designed to alleviate rankings come with that inherent risk. These are all techniques that should be undertaken relatively discretely.

If anyone has any more ideas they would like to share other than the ones I have covered here, then please feel free to give your contribution.

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Blog Commenting is not just for SEO

wesley.mcdermott@gmail.com (Wes McDermott) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:36:31 +0000

I'm a massive believer in blog commenting and what it can do for your website rankings (I always have and probably always will be a massive fan), but they don't have to be used just for SEO gains.

Commenting on industry related blogs on a daily basis can have a resounding positive effect on not only SEO and link building, but also with online reputation, brand awareness, expert positioning, and the targeted traffic fellow commenters back to your site.

Even if the blogs have a nofollow in operation, you should still submit! (if they have do-follow, it's a nice little bonus ;-)

Why you shouldn't worry about the nofollow

If you take the time to comment on your favourite industry blogs just twice a day every day, that's....Well, it's a hell of a lot of backlinks over the course of a year :-)

But do these comments all have to be dofollow blogs? No they certainly don't, as Yahoo counts nofollow links and so does Ask. And the backlinks counted in Yahoo can improve the monetary value of your website, and the price in which you can charge to have ads displayed.Text link ads are a company who use Yahoo backlinks as a determining factor in the value they give certain pages for ad placement.

But back links should not be the sole purpose of any blog commenting campaign, the aim of a blogging campaign should be traffic and brand awareness. Getting your word out there to establish yourself as an expert in the field is extremely rewarding. Not only do you establish you and your company, you also provoke an inquisitive reader into visiting your site, whether it be to purchase, or to contribute in the posts on your very own blog.

The Etiquette when Commenting on Blogs

It is important not to think in terms of SEO when posting comments on blogs. Having blatant anchor text within the name field on a comment submission is a no no for me. If you can help it try and include your real name, or your company name in the name filed, as your comment looks less spammy and the link you have is more likely to get followed by the blogs readers.

Linking to your own site in the body of the comment can get seem spammy, and it's a red flag for blog owners and blog spam software alike, and can lead to your comments being deleted from several blogs that use a blog spamming software. Only in extreme cases should you point to your own site in blog comments.

Blog owners like to see their posts stimulate interesting worthwhile comments from bloggers, and if they see that your comment is not adding any relevancy or quality to the blog post itself, it's going to get deleted. So always try read through the posts entirely and look to add a quality comment that adds value to the visitor and the blog owner. This in turn will promote more clickthroughs to your site and provide you with that traffic boost your site so desperately needs.

How to Implement a Successful Blog Commenting Campaign

Blogging can be extremely effective at building back links and building out your brand, that's already been established. But how do you find the best blogs to comment on and how do you know if they are do-follow or not?

Well, the first step to take here is to go to a reputable blog directory and search for authority blogs in your niche. Technorati is the numero uno when it comes to blog directories, and every blog worth there salt in the world is listed here. Start to go through the categories and visit each of the blogs related to your industry, if they are of high quality, bookmark them and revisit on a regular basis.

If you are adamant that you must have do-follow blogs to submit to, then I suggest you take a look at a great piece of software called fast blog finder. It's pretty neat in finding quality authority blogs for you, and it also has a nifty little feature were you can filter searches with do or no-follow blogs showing up. Check it out!

Have anything to share? Then add a comment :-)

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Telesales are Dead! Seo is Very Much Alive

wesley.mcdermott@gmail.com (Wes McDermott) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:28:24 +0000

One very good argument for the introduction of SEO into your companies marketing efforts

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Don't Buy Sticky SEO!!

wesley.mcdermott@gmail.com (Wes McDermott) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:01:45 +0000

Don’t Buy Sticky SEO!!

Well, not until you’ve read this anyway!

I got an email early this morning from David Leonhardt (SEO Specialist and President of Happy Guy Marketing) telling me about a new eBook he’s just published called Sticky SEO. He wanted me to go over it and see what I thought about it so that I can put a review up for you guys.

Needles to say, I was more than happy to do so. I mean, if you’ve read some of his stuff over the past few years, you know that when he speaks about SEO, he speaks with conviction, honesty, and with pinpoint accuracy.

So, lets get down to the nitty gritty shall we?

The areas covered in the eBook include:

History of the search engines – A short chapter on how the search engines have grown and matured over the years and what point they are at now. Great stuff! After all, if you don’t know where you’ve been in the past, how do you know where you going to be in the future?
The Usefulness Algorithm – Here David talks about the ever increasing perception that search engines are heading towards a major change in the way they rank sites. User behavior statistics are set to feature heavily in the way Google operates in future, are you ready for the change?
Quality Web Design – The design of a site is often the determining factor of whether a visitor stays or hits the back button on your site. In this chapter you will learn some revealing tips on how best to optimize your site design.
Engaging Web Content – The importance of engaging content and how you should implement it into your content writing strategy.
Ignore Nobody – Here David goes into detail about the importance of delivering the information which your visitor searched for. And techniques to use so they your visitor gets what they need from your site every time they visit.
Segment Your Market – The importance of delivering niche specific information to certain industry sectors can decrease the bounce rate of your pages considerably.
Cover All Personality Types – This chapter talks about how users navigate sites in different ways, and how you can serve them and decrease the bounce rate of your website.
Be Their Next – David shares his tips on how to prevent users from heading back to the search engines, even after they’ve found what they’re looking for on your site.

The book is just 25 pages long, but the information is juicy and well worth the read. Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention before, it’s FREE!

It’s ideal for both newbie and professional SEO’s, and the information contained is something that all webmasters and SEO’s looking to stay ahead need to know! So what the hell are you waiting for? Get Sticky SEO now!

All the best!

Wes

Click here for a FREE SEO Report, or get in touch for more information.

Are Google handing control over to you?

wesley.mcdermott@gmail.com (Wes McDermott) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:45:40 +0000

Yes they are...well, kinda anyway.

Google has recently announced the introduction of their search wiki, which allows you to alter the positions, delete, comment, and even add new search results. If you don't think a result is worthy of its position, you can move it down! If you like the result you can comment on it, or even vote it up in the rankings too.

Now these changes will only affect the results when signed into your very own Google user account, and they do not affect the rankings that any other person sees. However, it is debatable how Google will implement this ranking tool ( if at all ) in their future algorithmic updates as patterns start to occur. I myself see this as a big step towards something that could change Google's listings forever. If similar patterns occur across the board, then I find it really hard to believe that Google would not implement such results into their algorithm development somehow.

When Google was questioned about this, they sounded skeptical:

Dupont was noncommittal about whether the company planned to build in that feedback loop, either directly as a signal to influence search rankings or indirectly as extra data that could help the company judge the relevance of its search results. But he certainly didn't rule the idea out.

"We don't close any doors. We constantly evaluate signals" that are incorporated into the search results algorithm. "Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they'd like to see their search results."

This is a great tool for Google to use in their fight against spam, and it's only a matter of time until they introduce it into their algorithmic calculations.

In conclusion, this could be the final nail in the coffin for sites that offer little to the community, and with an ever changing and dynamic environment such as the web, handing a certain bit of control over to the public can only be good thing in my opinion.

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Top Ten Powerful Free Press Release Distribution Sites

wesley.mcdermott@gmail.com (Wes McDermott) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:39:38 +0000

The benefits of press releases for SEO are well known. Some of which are:

Backlinks from high traffic authority news sites will increase your performance in the search engines for your chosen keywords.

News sites tend to rank quite well for their press releases, so if you have carried out effective SEO on the pr, you could well achieve numerous first page rankings.

You have the possibility of ranking in both Google and Yahoo news

You get a substantial amount of exposure, with news sites serving thousands of impressions to your press release headlines. They also run RSS feeds too which adds even more exposure for your press releases

Potential to be used by mainstream media

For tips on writing your press release make sure you check out Michel Fortin's article on how to write a persuasive press release.

So, you have carried out search engine optimisation on your press release, where do you submit it to? Well, if you have the advertising budget to be able to submit to paid directories then I recommend you do that first. They cost £80 upwards, but the majority of them have been around for a long time, and they have been able to establish media connections all over the globe and they'll provide you with biggest impact in the search engines.

Some of the best paid press release directories are:

Prweb.com - PR7, Alexa 1,826 Compete Rank 2,708
PRLeap.com – PR5, Alexa 37,288 Compete 106,168
24-7 Press Releases (Recommended!) - PR5, Alexa 12,205 Compete 38,727
Pressat.co.uk - UK Press Release Distribution

Now, for those small to medium sized businesses, the £80+ submission fee may not be ideal. Don’t panic, there’s plenty of free directories were you can submit your press release for distribution.

Here are the top ten free press release distribution sites:

NOTE: Submitting your press release to these distribution sites offers no guarantee that it will be picked up by journalists or major news sites. Ask yourself, is your press release newsworthy? Will a journalist be excited when they catch a glimpse of it? The first step to taking advantage of this very powerful link building technique, is to create a press release that is eye catching, and it is actually deserving of being in the news.

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