Resources
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Demystifying the Design Process with Sketch
For non-designers, there is often a level of mysticism around the way we work. In your job, it may well be your responsibility to brief a designer, but as for what happens in between that stage and finally seeing the fruits of their labour – well, this may be rather alien. While it’s not necessarily important to know the ins and outs of this, this post aims to demystify the process and shed light on one of my favourite design programs at the moment, and equip you with good reason to convince any digital or web designer you work with to pick it up if they don’t use it already. Read more
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What We Learned in October 2017: The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute
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This month’s industry includes stories from most of the major tech companies, including Facebook’s News Feed experiments, Google’s ever-growing hardware selection, and Apple and Amazon both falling foul of the European Commission. There’s also the SearchLove London 2017 roundup and the best from the Distilled blog. Read more
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All the Slides from SearchLove London 2017
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As it always tends to do, SearchLove London flew by in a flurry of top-class presentations, intense marketing chat with fellow digital folks, and lots of caffeine. The 2017 edition was our 2nd sellout crowd in a row and it was really special to look across a packed auditorium as each speaker got up on stage to share with you some really cool stuff. Read more
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Facebook News Feed Experiments: Threat or Opportunity?
As Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed at Facebook noted in a post yesterday “There have been a number of reports about a test we’re running in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia.” The test he is referring to is that of moving all content posted by brand pages (not content shared by friends) from the main user News Feed into a separate tab named “Explore”. Read more
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Proposing Better Ways to Think about Internal Linking
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I’ve long thought that there was an opportunity to improve the way we think about internal links, and to make much more effective recommendations. I feel like, as an industry, we have done a decent job of making the case that internal links are important and that the information architecture of big sites, in particular, makes a massive difference to their performance in search. Read more
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The SEO Apprentice’s Toolbox: Gearing Up for Analysis
Being new to SEO is tricky. As a niche market within a niche market there many tools and resources unfamiliar to most new professionals. And with so much to learn it is nearly impossible to start real client work without first dedicating six months exclusively to industry training. Well...that’s how it may seem at first. As a fairly new Analyst at Distilled, I know from experience how difficult it can be to get started. So here’s a list of common SEO analyses and supporting tools that may help you get off on the right foot. Read more
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Blurring the Line Between CDN and CMS
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Cloudflare recently announced that they’re launching a new feature, called “Cloudflare Workers”. It provides the ability for anybody who’s using Cloudflare as a CDN to write arbitrary JavaScript (based on the standard Service Worker API), which runs on Cloudflare’s edge nodes. The announcement is significant because, unlike tag management platforms, the alterations are made server-side, before the page is sent to the user - Google only sees the final, altered code and content. There’s no messy JavaScript in the browser, no cloaking, and no conflicting logic.
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What We Learned in September 2017: The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute
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While the main tech headlines have revolved around new hardware, with all the major players showing off their new products to the press and public, there has been plenty of updates all around the digital marketing and tech landscapes. Google is making changes to appease both publisher and the EU Commission and Instagram is becoming an advertising juggernaut... Read more
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First Click Free is Dead, but is its Replacement Really any Better for Publishers?
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The publishing industry has been claiming victory recently in a long-running disagreement with Google over how subscription content (i.e. content that sits behind a paywall or registration wall) should appear in their search results. However, there’s a lot of confusion around the new policy which Google has announced, and a lack of clarity in how the media, publishers, and Google itself is reporting and discussing the topic. Read more
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8 Reasons You Should Join us at SearchLove London 2017
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We’re closing in on SearchLove London - it’s on 16th and 17th October - in just a few short weeks’ time. We’ve been running a conference in our home city since 2009, and I’m as passionate as I’ve ever been about making our events stand out. You can still get a ticket for under £900 - the classic all-access pass costs £899 +VAT - and get access to the whole conference as well as after-show entertainment on both nights. Here’s why we think our show is special: Read more
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Technical SEO Audit Checklist for Human Beings: September 2017 Update
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Technical audits are one of the activities that define SEO—we’ve all done them. But audits are only as valuable as their impact. Whether you’re a practitioner or an agency partner, your job really begins when the audit is finished. With that in mind, we asked “Can we design an audit that helps make real change happen?” The result is an aware technical audit checklist. It considers the underlying problems we’re tackling (or trying to prevent). It makes technical audits faster, more effective, and more impactful. Read more
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The Distilled Yearly Creative Roundup: 2017 Edition
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It’s been a year since our last creative roundup and I wanted to share what we’ve been working on in the last 12 months. As I started to collate the our creative pieces, it’s become clear that we’ve tried our hand, and indeed had some successes, at new and exciting formats Read more