Inbound Marketing and Seo
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INBOUND MARKETING AND SEO INBOUND MARKETING AND SEO INSIGHTS FROM THE MOZ BLOG Rand Fishkin and Thomas Høgenhaven This edition first published 2013 © 2013 SEOMoz Registered office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com. The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy- ing, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. 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Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley and Sons, Inc. and/ or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in the book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-118-55155-4 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-55156-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-55157-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-55158-5 (ebk) Set in 10 pt. Minion Pro by Indianapolis Composition Services Printed in the United States by Bind-Rite To the Moz community—You rock! Thank you for helping to build an extraordinary organization. To the remarkable writers and marketers who helped make this book possible—Thank you for your generous contributions. Special thanks to Ashley Tate and Christy Correll—You made this book possible. —Rand and Thomas To the Moz team—My thanks; I feel lucky, thrilled, and humbled to share this journey with you. To Geraldine—I’m sorry for all the nights blogging and writing have kept me away from you; your love and support means the world to me. —Rand To Marie—For making everything look brighter, day after day. —Thomas PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following: Editorial and Production VP Consumer and Technology Publishing Director: Michelle Leete Associate Director–Book Content Management: Martin Tribe Associate Publisher: Chris Webb Executive Commissioning Editor: Craig Smith Associate Commissioning Editor: Ellie Scott Editorial Manager: Jodi Jensen Senior Project Editor: Sara Shlaer Moz Content Editor: Christy Correll Moz Project Manager: Ashley Tate Editorial Assistant: Annie Sullivan Marketing Associate Marketing Director: Louise Breinholt Marketing Manager: Lorna Mein Senior Marketing Executive: Kate Parrett Marketing Assistant: Tash Lee Composition Services Senior Project Coordinator: Kristie Rees Compositor: Erin Zeltner Proofreaders: Melissa Cossell, Wordsmith Editorial Indexer: BIM Indexing & Proofreading Services PROCEEDS All proceeds of this book will be donated to Vittana (www.vittana.org). Vittana’s mission is to graduate a generation beyond poverty through the power of education. Vitanna enables anyone with $25 to lend directly to ambitious students in the developing world. 100 percent of lender money goes directly to the students, and more than 99 percent of students repay their loans upon graduation. CONTENTS Introduction 1 SEO Is Changing 2 From SEO to Inbound Marketing 2 Inbound Marketing 3 Investing in Inbound Marketing for the Long Term 4 Why Read This Book? 4 PART I: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 5 The Birth of SEO 5 Life After Google 6 Cracking Down 6 How Search Engines Make Money 7 Tactics That Never Stop Working 8 The Future of Search 8 Chapter 1: White Hat SEO: It F@$#ing Works 9 Some Points on Kris’ Post 11 Black Hat ≠ SEO 15 Why We Can’t Ignore Black Hat Entirely 17 Why White Hat Is Always Better 18 Chapter 2: Schema.org: Why You’re Behind If You’re Not Using It 23 Myth: Schema.org Markup Doesn’t Get Rich Snippets! 24 Schema.org Is Not a Language 25 Five Underused Schema.org Applications 26 #1 Events 26 #2 Jobs 27 #3 Reputation Management 28 #4 News Sites 29 #5 Ecommerce 29 Wrap-Up 29 Chapter 3: Perfecting Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization 31 Best Practices for Optimizing Pages 33 HTML Head Tags 33 URLs 34 Body Tags 35 Internal Links and Location in Site Architecture 36 Page Architecture 36 Why Don’t We Always Obey These Rules? 37 Best Practices for Ranking #1 37 X CONTENTS Chapter 4: Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World 39 What Is Duplicate Content? 40 Why Do Duplicates Matter? 40 The Supplemental Index 40 The Crawl Budget 41 The Indexation Cap 41 The Penalty Debate 41 The Panda Update 42 Three Kinds of Duplicates 42 True Duplicates 42 Near Duplicates 42 Cross-domain Duplicates 43 Tools for Fixing Duplicates 43 404 (Not Found) 43 301-Redirect 43 Robots.txt 44 Meta Robots 44 Rel=Canonical 45 Google URL Removal 46 Google Parameter Blocking 46 Bing URL Removal 47 Bing Parameter Blocking 47 Rel=Prev and Rel=Next 48 Internal Linking 49 Don’t Do Anything 49 Rel=“alternate” hreflang=“x” 49 Examples of Duplicate Content 49 www versus Non-www 50 Staging Servers 50 Trailing Slashes (“/”) 51 Secure (https) Pages 51 Home page Duplicates 51 Session IDs 52 Affiliate Tracking 52 Duplicate Paths 53 Functional Parameters 53 International Duplicates 54 Search Sorts 54 Search Filters 55 Search Pagination 55 Product Variations 56 Geo-keyword Variations 56 Other “Thin” Content 57 Syndicated Content 57 Scraped Content 57 Cross-ccTLD Duplicates 58 Which URL Is Canonical? 58 CONTENTS XI Tools for Diagnosing Duplicates 59 Google Webmaster Tools 59 Google’s Site: Command 60 Your Own Brain 61 I Hope That Covers It 61 Chapter 5: Freshness Factor: 10 Illustrations on How Fresh Content Can Influence Rankings 63 How Google Scores Fresh Content 64 1. Freshness by Inception Date 65 2. How Much a Document Changes Influences Freshness 66 3. The Rate of Document Change (How Often) Impacts Freshness 66 4. Freshness Influenced by New Page Creation 67 5. Changes to Important Content Matter More 68 6. Rate of New Link Growth Signals Freshness 69 7. Links from Fresh Sites Pass Fresh Value 69 8. Changes in Anchor Text Signals May Devalue Links 70 9. User Behavior Indicates Freshness 71 10. Older Documents Still Win Certain Queries 72 Conclusion 73 Chapter 6: All Links Are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations of Search Engines’ Valuation of Links 75 Principle #1: Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes 77 Principle #2: External Links Are More Influential Than Internal Links 78 Principle #3: Links From Unique Domains Matter More Than Links From Previously Linking Sites 79 Principle #4: Links From Sites Closer to a Trusted Seed Set Pass More Value 80 Principle #5: Links From “Inside” Unique Content Pass More Value Than Those From Header/Footer/Sidebar Navigation Do 81 Principle #6: Keywords in HTML Text Pass More Value Than Those in Alt Attributes of Linked Images 82 Principle #7: Links From More Important, Popular, Trusted Sites Pass More Value 82 Principle #8: Links Contained Within Noscript Tags Pass Low, If Any, Value 83 Principle #9: A Burst of New Links May Enable a Document to Outrank “Stronger” Competition 83 Principle #10: Legitimate Links on Pages That Also Link to Web Spam May Be Devalued 84 Conclusion 85 Chapter 7: The Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded 87 XII CONTENTS PART II: CONTENT 91 History of Content within SEO 91 Types of Content 92 Turning Challenges into Opportunities 93 Video Content 93 High-Quality Content 93 Producing Content on Budget 94 Content at Scale 94 The Future of Content 95 Chapter 8: Beyond Blog Posts: A Guide to Innovative Content Types 97 Q&A Content 98 Presentations 99 Curated Content 100 Magazine and Long-Form Content 102 Imagery and Photojournalism 102 Video 103 Interactive Infographics 105 Product Marketplaces 105 Facebook Notes 106 Why Everyone Needs a Marketing Oracle for Their Content Platform 107 Chapter 9: Scaling White Hat Link Building—Scaling Content 109 Scalable Content 110 Cost 111 Scale 111 Quality 111 What’s This All Have to Do with Link Building? 112 Great Content? 112 Use Only Great Writers 113 Quality Control 113 Automation 113 Filling the Hopper with Good Content 114 Scaling 114 Do We Have All This Stuff? 115 Chapter 10: 10 Super Easy SEO Copywriting Tips for Improved Link Building 117 1. Write for Power Skimmers 118 2. Why Headline Formulas Work 119 3. Get 20% More with Numbers 119 4. Free and Easy Power Words 120 5. A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Clicks 120 6. Use Sub-Headlines or Die Trying 121 7.