Speaking at Link Love Boston, April 2nd, 2012
by Ross Hudgens on February 7, 2012 | posted in Marketing
Distilled hosts the quintessential link building conference every year – Link Love. I was lucky enough to get invited to speak at this year’s Boston iteration, on April 2nd. The speaker list is quite impressive, and one I am honored to be included on. The names include -
- Tom Critchlow, Distilled
- Wil Reynolds, SEER
- Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
- Rhea Drysdale, Outspoken Media
- Adam Audette, RKG
- John Doherty, Distilled
- Justin Briggs, Big Fish Games
Utilizing Second Tier Link Building For Massive ROI
by Ross Hudgens on January 31, 2012 | posted in Marketing,Miscellaneous Strategies
An “advanced” link building tactic frequently discussed is the concept of second tier link building – that is, building links to pages that link to you. These concepts are generally used in spammier instances – such as “link wheels” or other less than favorable examples where links can easily be pushed at authoritative domains – with the hope that the benefit passed back to our site is superior to what will have been gained if the link had been pointed direct. Or, in the case of many websites, this “second tier” phantom link building is used as a coverup to leverage spammy tools for benefit without truly putting sites at risk.
All of these factors combine for an idea, that when put into practice, is mostly done with malicious intent. This does not always have to be the case – actually, the power of second tier link building to drive traffic, conversions and further links can be an extremely strong one.
In your Analytics, you undoubtedly (hopefully) have a strong list of referrers back to your site. Some sites drive more visits than others – from different pages, sources and events. However, for any legitimate business, there’s a good chance that a solid few referrers directly drive conversions – consistently – for your business. These “high profile” referring links are the ones we drool over – the holy grail. They pass SEO value, referring traffic, make us money – hopefully creating a circular chain that makes Bill Gates eventually jealous of our bank accounts. ….
Managing Oneself
by Ross Hudgens on January 9, 2012 | posted in Miscellaneous Strategies
From the Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker describes a methodology for improving oneself – or otherwise, improving by choosing where to best use our efforts at education for the aim of getting better.
Comparing your expectations with your results also indicates what not to do. We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a person – and especially a knowledge worker – should not take on work, jobs, and assignments. One should waste as little effort as possible improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most people – especially most teachers and most organizations – concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead to make a competent person into a star performer.
It is a common thought process in SEO that one should learn to code. Codecademy has taken fire in the space as of late, and the push for this knowledge acquisition in computer science has reached a critical mass. The thought process Drucker describes is cogent for us – the SEOs – to assess in our decision making when learning, or not learning how to code. Is this something we can become great at? Will it make us great SEOs, or simply good SEOs with a mediocre coding ability? This thought process, explained by Drucker, should be the one we undertake when deciding how to proceed. The answer is not as cut and dry as many public voices may lead you to think.
It is my belief that knowing how to code is not a requirement of a great SEO. Constantly getting better, however, is. Coding is just one way of doing that – and there are many other paths on the road.
The Greatest SEO Services Call To Action I’ve Ever Seen
by Ross Hudgens on December 13, 2011 | posted in Marketing
I work in lead generation, so one of the things that frequently catches my eye is the conversion rate optimization (CRO) efficiencies of a page. It’s natural. Getting users to convert while maintaining SEO best practices is something that is a vital part of my job, so when I run into great examples of CRO anywhere on the web, I get pumped. I love seeing great work, cause it inspires me, and it should for you, too.
Today, I found the best call to action on an SEO company website I’ve ever seen. It made me run fill out their form and I don’t even need their services! The company is Australian-based Dejan SEO. In an effort to not take their pageviews, I suggest you mosey on over there and be impressed. The CRO is impeccable. Dejan’s CEO reported a 700% increase in conversion rate over their old version using this new form! That’s an incredible improvement.
That’s not to say that implementing the form instantly means you’ll win millions of leads. Dejan also noted that their competitor, Web Marketing Experts, spotted their CTA and began using it as well. Although Web Marketing Expert’s design is still better than most, it is of my opinion that the overall framing/CRO on-page for Dejan SEO is superior. This is based on more trustworthy/natural “trust signals” in the form of their press clippings, and also the slightly less cluttered design. Of course, I can’t see the stats of either site, but that’s my gut instinct on having run and observed hundreds of A/B tests for sites built out just like this.
Nice work Dejan SEO!
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