SEO Blog from Distilled

SearchLove Boston 2013 – Day One Recap

It’s that time of year again! Flowers are budding, kids are counting down the days to the end of the school year, and SEOs are flocking to Boston for Distilled’s Spring SearchLove conference. Like years past, we had a killer lineup to kick the conference off. For those who weren’t able to attend (this time ) you can follow along with the hashtag #SearchLove. In addition to help surmise the Twitter chatter I’ve put together the main takeaways from each presentation in 140 characters or less!

Neil Patel
Consulting Lessons from the Frontline

Annie Cushing
Take Credit Where Credit’s Due

Bill Slawski
Future Search

Wil Reynolds
How to Get Unstuck!

Kate Morris
Languages and Countries

Pete Meyers
Do-It-Yourself Data-Driven Content

John Doherty
Creating Executive Support for Marketing Initiatives

Eppie Vojt
Scaling Outreach (without looking like an idiot)

Rand Fishkin
Behavioral Psychology and Inbound Marketing

Content Marketing DOs and DON’Ts

While everyone’s definition of content marketing is a little different, the execution side of this marketing channel has much more definitive best practices. Whether you are new to content marketing or just looking for validation that your program is running smoothly, here are some of the most important (and often overlooked) DOs and DON’Ts of content marketing.

How To Start Using The Lean Startup SEO Style

Do you remember the very first day in your office? The first moment of walking into the office as the newbie? That’s exactly what I recall doing not too long ago here at Distilled. As well as being greeted by all the smiley happy faces, there was my desk space complete with laptop, monitor and a Kindle. Loaded to that Kindle, an armoury of recommended reading materials including The Lean Startup.

Working my way through The Lean Startup got me asking, why would Distilled ask me to read this and how does it apply to SEO?

Play it Safe to Consistently Lose in Online Marketing

In consulting larger companies, I’ve recently learned that it’s many times easier to convince decision makers to act when a competitor is already executing a similar strategy. Suggest the same strategy as an untested initiative and it’s nearly impossible to win approval from management. As companies grow they tend to become increasingly risk averse.

Thanks to risk-averse leaders in competing companies, all of your best ideas will inevitably be copied. Some of these clones won’t be pretty (cough Bing cough cough), and others will beat you at your own game. If you launch a successful marketing campaign, find an effective link building method, or design a revolutionary product that people love, you can expect shameless imitation by many of your competitors with varying degrees of success. Continue reading »

Data vs Personas for Content Planning, DistilledLive video discussion

The last DistilledLive video came from our London team and talked you through some positive ways to give feedback to your designers when it comes to producing content. In this edition, we’re moving on from the design of the content as we hear from Kyra Kuik and Alyssa Ennis from our Seattle Outreach team on why you need both big data and personas when you’re creating your content marketing strategy.

So which is better; the data or the personas and which one should you be using? In this video, we talk you through how using both can help you figure out who your audience is as well as what content you should be creating for them.

You can read the full transcript for this video, below.

If you had a ticket to BlueglassX LA you can come to Searchlove Boston for free

Many of you will be aware of the sad demise of Blueglass Interactive. I don’t have inside information and I’m not about to speculate on what happened.

It is now clear, however, that the upcoming BlueglassX conference in LA (scheduled for the 21st and 22nd May) is not happening.

I imagine that some people may be able to get refunds for ticket purchases via their credit card companies, but I also imagine there are others who are going to be left out of pocket. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help out those people.

We have a conference scheduled in Boston at almost the same time as BlueglassX was planned – ours is the 20th and 21st May (Searchlove Boston). If you had bought a ticket to the cancelled BlueglassX, can be in Boston instead of LA and are going to be left out of pocket by the cancellation, I’d like to invite you to Searchlove Boston free of charge.

How to Kick Ass at Copywriting for Your Website

When I declared an English major in college, my mom said it was a great choice, “because people will always need good writers.”

I was pleasantly surprised to find that true upon graduating college, but I was also pretty surprised to find out why people need good writers: because they can’t actually write themselves.

It’s actually a little scary to see how many business professionals can’t write effectively, but what’s even scarier is when those people, who know nothing about copywriting, insist on writing their own website copy.

If you’re involved in building or maintaining a website, you need to know something about copy writing for two reasons:

I realize I’m shooting myself in the foot a bit here, but hiring copywriters is expensive and you’ll save a load of cash if you can do your own writing for your website (although, I wouldn’t recommend the DIY route for large sites).
If you do hire copywriters, you need to have a working knowledge of writing from which to evaluate their work. If a copywriter asks you for direction or input, you need to be able to effectively give feedback.

That said, writing is a hard-earned skill; it takes time and practice, so don’t expect to become a writing whiz easily. But if you’re sitting down to write out some website copy or are asked for input from your copywriters, keep the following in mind.

18 industry experts to descend on Boston in just 3 weeks

There’s just under three weeks left until 18 industry experts will be descending on Boston for the annual SearchLove Boston conference. For two days, SEO’s from across the US and beyond will be joining them to learn the latest key advancements in the industry. Will you be one of them?

If you have already registered to attend, great! We look forward to seeing you there. If not – read on; here’s 5 reasons why you don’t want to miss this year’s Boston conference…

WordPress Category Pages

I’m not a huge fan of most WordPress category pages. They tend to be duplicate content or thin/template content. On top of that, a lot of people use them really badly (such as bloggers who make up new categories every time they write a post). The result of this is typically a lot of really thin pages on your site. If it gets too out of hand, you can end up playing with this guy:

WordPress Category Pages & Panda

Typically, my suggestion is to noindex these pages so you don’t have low quality pages creating problems for you.

LinkLove London 2013 videos are now available

This may well have been the last LinkLove but here at Distilled we were set to make this the best one yet and the quality of speaker sessions [not to mention, line of mid conference refreshments and activities; Scaletrix, anyone?] were certainly testament to that.

Whether you want to earn buy-in with the right kinds of metrics from Rand Fishkin, build training sets with Ian Lurie or simply, want to relive the whole conference experience again; all of the LinkLove 2013 conference video footage is now available over on the store page.