Blogger’s Guide to SEO: Rand Fishkin
Blogger’s Guide to SEO
Read a full version on how to do SEO for your website here or download our SEO Planning Template.
If you don’t know Rand Fishkin he is the wizard behind Moz which is the inbound marketer’s home base for all things search and my personal SEO bible. Seeing Rand at the ProBlogger event in Australia was a huge privilege.
A lot has been said about SEO over the years, and it’s been a powerful tactic for us, so I was keen to hear the latest from the horse’s mouth. So here are my notes and pics from the session, aka the 2014 Blogger’s Guide to SEO according to Rand Fishkin.
Why SEO?
Easy… Because they are 6 billion searches every day.
- 20% clicks are on ads.
- 80% are on organic results…!! So that’s 80 per cent of 6 billion searches!
Active intent
- Search we are in ACTIVE mode → a very active intent.
- Social media is BROWSING mode → inactive intent.
SEO is a big heavy flywheel.
How does it work?
You publish something… then you amplify it via social media… you hopefully earn links (and other indirect signals)… then you grow ‘authority.’
With that authority… next time you post you rank higher… then you earn more search traffic.. and then you earn more shares and more links. You keep on turning the flywheel.
Make sense?
How-to do SEO
1. Brainstorming keywords.
→ what do you wish you ranked for
→ what keywords would bring you your ideal customers?
2. Take your list and research
- Use Google Keyword Planner to look at keyword suggestions [ignore competition tab!!!
- Take the Google auto-suggest to get clues from Google about what
- keywordtool.io (much like uber-suggest) check out SEMrush.com
3. Then use those keywords
Use them in your blog post title (and in the article itself).
Rand’s 3 minute plan
- 1 min: use tools to figure out keywords to target
- Next 60 secs: note some additional terms
- Last 60 secs: employ the keywords in the title of the post
A question every content creator must ask…
“Who will amplify this content and ask why?”
The 1st 24 hours are most valuable
Here’s something I didn’t know: Be aware that most SEO benefit is earned in the 1st 24 hours after launch.
See Rand’s visual guide to optimising content.
1) Make yourself proud. Publish stuff you believe in and are confident promoting.
2) Delight your audience.
3) Make it accessible to Google.
Amplification
Great bloggers consider amplification from the get-go. (I loved this!)
Here’s how it works.
Create content → pre-publication outreach → publish → social media amplification → post publication outreach
RAND TIP:
Update and re-publish an old post (and then 301 redirect to new post).
Link building
The best links are not built, they are earned!!
Look for 3 things:
- Relevant
- Editorial
- Trustworthy
Avoid anything dodgy.. because… just because! And never create SPAM, but if you do, own up and beg for forgiveness. Here’s Rand’s tips (and humorous slide) on spam.
QUOTE of the session
“I hit publish for the first time, and everyone just showed up” said no blogger ever. ~ Rand Fishkin
RAND TIP:
Warning: techie alert. Regarding duplicate content. Rands says it isn’t really a problem as Google will disregard the other pages. To solve the issue of losing back link juice, you want to canonicalise the ‘other’ pages and send them to the primary page. Developers note, here’s the snippet rel=canonical. Yoast has a setting too.
Finally here are Rand’s slides which he kindly shared with us all.
Related articles and wrap-ups from ProBlogger
- Kate Toon’s SEO for bloggers: Rand Fishkin at Problogger
Thank you from your fans down under Rand!
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