Content Cycles – Make your Business Famous by Reinventing the Wheel [Guest Post]

Posted by simon-penson on December 7, 2011 in the SEO category

Note from John of Distilled – the following is a guest post from Simon Penson. Simon was asked by Distilled to write a guest post for our site, as he is an industry peer and produces phenomenal content. We are happy to have him posting on our blog!

Unique content is a fallacy. There, I said it.

If nothing else such a statement is a great way to simulate healthy debate but before you dismiss it out of hand you may want to consider the underlying truth that even the best articles, infographics and videos are almost always simply reinventions of previously discussed material.

We all like to fool ourselves into thinking that we are covering new ground but the reality is that someone, somewhere has done it before. But is this a problem or does it actually present an opportunity? It depends on your outlook but for the wilier of you out there your mind should now be firmly locked onto the latter.

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The Future of Google Shopping

Posted by Carson Ward on December 6, 2011 in the SEO category

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Google may attempt to launch a fast-shipping option to compete with Amazon Prime. This news corresponds with an improved store-front type home page for Google Shopping. For those who are not familiar with Google Shopping, the service originally launched in 2002 as Froogle, was renamed “Google Product Search,” and appears to be half-way through being rebranded once more as “Google Shopping.”

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JS Bookmarklet for Checking If A Page Is Blocked by Robots.txt

Posted by Tom Critchlow on December 5, 2011 in the SEO category

I’m a big fan of JS bookmarklets for hacking productivity and automating routine tasks that I do over and over again. In this post I want to share with you a new one that I found and have been using a lot…

If you don’t know what a JS bookmarklet is or how to use them I strongly suggest you click here to get the basics.

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Google… Stop Playing; The Jig Is Still Up! [Guest Post]

Posted by Joshua Giardino on December 2, 2011 in the SEO category

Intro

Let me begin by taking a moment to thank John Doherty and the rest of the Distilled Team for giving me a chance to share of this research with you today. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know the members of Distilled through their annual SearchLove conference, which was an amazing experience. Lynsey and Lauren definitely know how to plan an event, and their hospitality was amazing. I experienced this first hand, as I was a very last minute attendee of SearchLove (I emailed Lynsey at 3am the day of and she got back to me in plenty of time to arrive for the first speakers; thanks again Lynsey!).

On that note, if you didn’t attend, not only did you miss a special appearance by EmCee Hammer; you missed Mike King’s awesome presentation “Targeting Humans” which contained a brief section on my recent paper “GoogleBot is Chrome: The Jig is Up… or why a search giant built a browser.”

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Distilled NYC Is Hiring – Refer Us Someone Awesome and Win A Sphero

Posted by Tom Critchlow on December 1, 2011 in the Distilled category

So our New York office has been up and running for almost 6 months now. How time flies when you’re having fun!

Things have been going exceptionally well here in NYC and I’m very proud of the team. But as we look into 2012 and realize that our pipeline is already filling up for January and February naturally I start to think about growth. How quickly should we grow the NYC office? How much growth do we have the cash for? Why does the competitive side of my personality get upset that I run the smallest Distilled office?

We’re a people business here at Distilled, and the people that work here are amazing. Which means that hiring the right people is literally the most important thing I can do. Nothing else even comes close to being that important in my day to day role.

This means that the only time we grow is when growing will make us better, not just bigger.

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A Tachetastic Movember

Posted by tom-neville on November 30, 2011 in the Distilled category

In recent weeks, amidst chatter about economic decline, you are likely to have noticed a sharp increase in Global TPC. This rise in TPC (for the layman; Tache Per Capita) is due to an annual phenomenon called Movember. This annual event sees many men, who would normally take a razor to their faces on a daily basis, make a foray into upper lip heroics in order to raise money for charity.

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Seven things to do at the weekend, to help your SEO

Posted by Rob Ousbey on November 29, 2011 in the SEO, Social Media, Video category

For many people we’re now into the holiday season. As well as lots of turkey, this probably means time away from work and at least a couple of long weekends.

For people who do SEO in-house at a company, or for people who run their own websites/businesses, this can actually be a valuable time to do some work out of the office. You can focus on tasks (big and small) that you just don’t tend to find the time to do when you’re in the office, and you might even find that your creative juices are flowing particularly well after stepping away from the ‘snow-blindness’ that a 9-5 routine can deliver.

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Speaking at Conferences – the Art of Persuasion – Part II

Posted by Hannah on November 24, 2011 in the Events category

This is a two part post. You can read part one here. Watching the sequel before the prequel sucks… Unless we’re talking Star Wars.

Back in September I started telling you how being an awesome speaker was about way more than coming up with an awesome slide deck – it’s about words, music and dance. Last time I talked about ‘words’. Today I’ll be covering ‘music’ and ‘dance’.

I know, right? Here you were thinking you were reading an SEO blog and here I am coming across all musical theatre – don’t panic – here’s what I really mean:

Words = Your slide deck and what you actually say.

Music = How you say whatever you’re saying.

Dance = Not just how you move on stage, but also your gestures, body language and facial expression.

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How To Make Sticky Content

Posted by Mark on November 22, 2011 in the Link Building category

We’ve all heard of sticky content, right?  But what does ‘sticky’ really mean?  And how do we make our blog posts and link-bait sticky?

There are lots of sources out there on how to write good content, but they tend to focus on the structure.  How to write titles, how to use sub-heads, the right length of sentences and paragraphs etc.   And it’s all great stuff, but it doesn’t really tell you what your content should contain!

How do you know your idea’s a winner?  How do you know it will spread?

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How to Create an Awesome Google+ Brand Page

Posted by Julianne Staino on November 17, 2011 in the Google+, Social Media category

It was a summer night, the Distilled NYC crew had just finished up a round of ping-pong and we were sitting down to dinner at a local Thai restaurant when John exclaimed , “Guys, I just got a Google+ invite! “ Mayhem ensued and dinner was lost. That my friends, is how Google+ was born…or, something like that.

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