It’s no mystery that in the SEO industry there is a desire to abandon the “SEO” label due to negative perceptions and skill-limiting connotations. Professionals are trading in the term “SEO” for newer, fresher titles like “inbound marketer,” “earned media marketer,” and even sticking strictly to “content marketer.” While some are abandoning the three letters we’ve come to love so much, and shifting to something that sounds good for the moment, my personal strategy has always been to invent my own way. This tranformation comes as natural progression from what I’ve learned over the past 3 years, as well as what is sought from me in my professional environment. Here I’d like to explain what exactly that is, and what it means to be a Search Experience Architect.
iPad Apps for SEO: Work Has Never Been This Laid Back
Like most, I find myself using the iPad more and more for everyday browsing. Although it is convenient, the utility (as an internet marketing professional) is greatly reduced now that I’m used to the SEO plugins, extensions and tools available on via desktop. It feels like something is missing- sort of like those days when you leave for work and forget to put pants on. What, that never happened to you?
There are a lot of “SEO” apps for the iPad, but very few are usable, and even fewer are practical. As a result, I’ve taken the plunge into investigating all of the available SEO apps on the market. There are many more which are terrible, but reporting those would take up too much time. Instead, check out the best iPad apps I’ve come across for SEO as of April 1, 2013. I’ll follow this up with a review of apps specifically for analytics. If you have any additions to these, please share.
In-Car Search: A New Frontier for Mobile Search
Recently, I saw a commercial for the new Toyota Camry. Now, being a car guy it wasn’t the Camry that caught my attention, but rather a new piece of technology inside it – a console with built-in Bing search.
The SEO in me quickly kicked the car guy to the curb. Could this be a new form of mobile search sneaking up behind us at a red light? All I knew was that I wanted the data.
Reactive Link Building
Link building. Just hearing these words conjures up memories of long nights, long email lists, and even longer wait times hoping to hear back from webmasters. Of course, we are all searching for ways to make this process easier in regard to time, cost, and energy. There are numerous strategies for link building, of which I cannot even touch on in one blog post. One strategy is to recycle old links which have one way or another become broken – appropriately named broken link building. I would like to propose a variation of this strategy called Reactive Link Building.
Resources From An #RVAContentStrategy Panelist
On September 25th, I was invited to be a panelist at a Richmond Content Strategy meetup, due in large part to my post on how to do a quantitative content audit. This post is meant as a thank-you for those in attendance, as well as for those interested in Content Strategy in general. The following are some of my most commonly used tools and resources for Content Strategy and Content Marketing, as well as some recent relevant blog posts. This list will likely change over time, so be sure to check back in the future.
How To (Really) Do A Content Audit, Part 1: The Quantitative Inventory
Overview
With all the buzz about content strategy, it can be dizzying trying to decide where to start. Inspired by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach’s book, Content Strategy For The Web (second edition) this post is meant to describe one method of accomplishing the first step in the planning process; a Quantitative Inventory. As described so eloquently by the authors, this is an initial assessment of a site’s current content. Completely unbiased and objective, this phase of content planning is driven purely by numbers (of course, this version is slightly SEO-centric). Subsequent posts in this series will address the qualitative assessments, part 2 will describe how to do a best practices assessment for SEO, and part 3 will address the strategic assessment.
So, what’s the point of a quantitative assessment?
“If you don’t understand where you are now, you can’t create a plan to get you where you need to be.” – Kristina Halvorson
Enterprise SEO and the Brand-Elite
Of the many divisions among those in the SEO world, one major segmentation I see everyday is enterprise-level vs small business. I’ll refer to the enterprise level as businesses which have been around before the web, and merely create a web presence to support their previously “analog” operations. Small businesses on the web are those that are brand spanking new, and rely on their sites as a primary avenue for customers. In some cases, the small business has also been around before the web, and just resides in somewhat specific niche or are restricted to a given locality. In most cases, a small business’ site is just as old as the business itself. For whatever reason, Google treats these two segments differently.
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