Articles Tagged with Blogging

Changing a Blog Post’s Title – a Before vs. After Data Comparison

Published on August 30, 2016September 9, 2016 by Steve

A few years ago, I wrote a monster post. It became so popular that it dwarfed all other pages on my website (even the homepage) – even though I never expected or intended for it to do so. In fact, as I write this, in the past month it received 73% of all hits to my website – so it’s more popular than every other page or post on the blog combined.

As time went on, I had a bit of a dilemma: the content slowly became more and more obsolete. It’s still partly true/helpful even today, but more and more people had been commenting on the post saying that my method no longer worked for them. Obviously I wanted to leave the post up, for both selfless reasons (e.g. as it’s still useful for some people, albeit fewer than before) and selfish reasons (e.g. TRAFFIC), but I felt that the current version of the post was lying to them, so I reluctantly decided to change the title, from an absolute, this-is-how-it-is-now-and-forever style of ‘how to’ headline:

How to Remove Slanderous Google Reviews – A Case Study

…to something suggesting that it was perhaps more time-sensitive and therefore not necessarily helpful any more:

How I Removed A Slanderous Google Review – A Case Study (2013)

It’s very subtle – I basically made it past tense and reiterated the year at the end. However I was genuinely concerned that it would be a massive turn-off to people browsing Google for help on the subject. The vast majority of the traffic that the post gets is via organic search, and I was well aware that the title change would update accordingly in the SERPs… What if someone thought “hey, this is old – I’m not clicking on that…”

In addition to the title change, I added a sort of intro disclaimer section:

So even if someone clicked onto it not reading the title properly, they would (hopefully) see that warning instead.

I made the change on 3rd November 2015 – nearly 10 months ago. I thought it’d be interesting to delve into the Google Analytics data and to see if the change had had any majorly positive or negative effect on my blog’s traffic levels.

The Google Analytics data: a snapshot

I jumped into Google Analytics’ Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages section,* set the traffic to organic search only, and clicked on the post in question. Then I tinkered the date range from 3rd November 2015 (the date of the change) and the last full day of data (which was 29th August 2016 as I type this), and compared it to the previous period (6th January 2015 to 2nd November 2015). Here’s what I saw:

Let’s break it down…

Click to read more!

Using Prisma App to ‘Spice Up’ your Blog’s Images

Published on July 15, 2016 by Steve

A few days ago I caught a tweet by @tombeardshaw showing a painting-style image of his usual avatar head-shot:

https://t.co/7jPJDRspN3 pic.twitter.com/B5qsASdPvN

— Tom Beardshaw (@tombeardshaw) July 8, 2016

I was really impressed, so I asked him who painted it for him, because I was convinced that he’d commissioned someone to do it for him especially.

But I was wrong – it was made via an iPhone app.

Introducing Prisma

Simply put, Prisma is a modern art filter app, overlaying your photos with different artistic styles. In addition to making photos look like paintings (like the example above), you can make them look like sketches, mosaics and even cubist. There’s about two dozen different filters that you can apply.

Here’s what the interface looks like:

Prisma interface - before & after screenshots — Before on the left / After on the right

I’ve slowly become obsessed with it since discovering it, as have many of the people I’ve seen using it. @cardiffisyours is now using Prisma’ed images for its Twitter profile pic and cover pic:

The Guardian recently published an article showing loads of great examples of recent famous photos that have had the Prisma treatment.

The other day, I realised that it had another really good application: photos for blog posts.

Alternative images for your blog posts

I spend a lot of time finding good accompanying images for blog posts, usually hitting up Flickr’s Creative Commons search. I hate stock photos (as I feel that they’re often very generic and ‘forced’-looking), but finding a good, natural, free-to-use image can really take some time. Ironically I often feel that it takes me longer to find a good image for a post than it does to write the damn thing in the first place…!

For a recent post on SEOno – 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Operate a ‘Minimum DA’ Rule When Building Links – I really struggled to find a good image. I tried Flickr’s CC search for keywords around “authority”, “minimum”, etc. but couldn’t find anything appropriate at all. I realised that all I really wanted was a screenshot of Moz’s Open Site Explorer, the tool that displays the metric that was the primary focus of the post. I tried a screenshot at first, but it looked… boring.

Then I had an idea…

Click to read more!

Guest Blogging? Routinely Check Old Posts for Bad Comments

Published on June 9, 2016June 9, 2016 by Steve

If you’re doing SEO, you’re probably doing link building, and if you’re doing link building, you might be doing guest blogging as a tactic. Despite Google saying that it’s done as a tactic a while back, I think it’s still a good, viable strategy – if you’re doing it properly, of course.

When it comes to comments sections, the issue with guest blogging is that you’re relying on someone else to manage and administrate the comments for you. On your own blog, you may choose not to have comments on blog posts at all, but if you do, you’ll probably check them and approve/deny them before they go live – and even so, you’d probably get a notification if a new comment is pending. If it’s a guest blog post then you’re leaving that process in the hands of someone else. Some of them actually notify you as the author (e.g. I get notified of comments against my posts on State of Digital), but not always…

I had a heart attack when a client’s guest post had a negative ‘troll’ comment against it. For six months. Neither me, the client nor the blog owner spotted it until I happened to check something on the post and caught it then.

The nightmare moment

Ironically, I discovered the troll comment because I was contacting another blog about a guest posting opportunity and they wanted to see other examples of the writer’s work, so I went onto the site to dig it out. It was only then that I discovered the offending comment (…and obviously I didn’t share it with the person who wanted to see examples – for obvious reasons, heh).

Click to read more!

SEOno is 5

Published on April 27, 2016 by Steve

This April, SEOno (this very blog) turned 5-years-old.*

Since my very first post on 1st April 2011 – the innovatively titled “My previous posts for other blogs and sites“, which wasn’t an April Fool (despite the date) – I have published 141 posts totalling 144,481 words (whaaat?!), an average of 990 words per post.**

…I need to get out more.

In all seriousness though, I’ve enjoyed running this blog, which I always only ever considered a hobby (I still do), and yet it’s helped me to learn a more about SEO as I work on it, and has even helped me to win clients for Morgan Online Marketing (my SEO freelancing business).

Here’s to another 5 years! 🙂

* Hilariously (to me anyway), I thought my first post was on 30th April 2011, so I was going to post this on Saturday and say “I posted my first post five years ago today!”… only to realise that it was actually 1st April. Oops. So much for that plan. Numpty.

** Kudos to Dashboard Wordcount for that quick little insight.

[Image credit – Andy Eick]

Deconstructing the Worst Article I’ve Ever Seen

Published on March 5, 2016 by Steve

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached peak BuzzFeedification.

By “BuzzFeedification” I refer to the recent onslaught of articles that fit BuzzFeed’s style (i.e. full of GIFs and memes) and/or follow the get-as-many-ad-impressions-as-possible model, which has been adopted by many publishers at the moment – more and more by the day, it seems – in an attempt to get that elusive click.

I came across one article that ticked all the usual boxes…

Unnecessary multi-page image listicle? Check.
Memes? UGH. Check.
Goes on for much longer than it needs to in order to try and accrue more ad impressions? Oh god yes check.

…and is simply one of the most frustrating and pointless articles I’ve ever read. The things publishers will do to get you to click and get you to view ads is becoming laughable.

The article and site in question (which I’ve nofollowed because I sure as sh*t don’t want to give them any SEO love)? “A Woman Makes A Shrine Of Her Used Condom Collection” on Rebel Circus.

Let’s take the time to dissect what’s wrong with this absolute sh*tshow:

They’ve turned a simple one-page story into an unnecessary multi-pager

Below the heading and opening summary, there’s a small paragraph about the ‘collection’ and an image of said collection. Below that, there’s a ‘Next Photo’ link:

Ok, fair enough. So far so good – no harm done.

The inclusion of the ‘Next Photo’ link led me to believe two things:

It’s a multi-page image slideshow article (or whatever the technical term is), but more importantly,
That there’d be more photos of the collection – and more information.

Click onto page 2 and you get this:

…An image of a record collection? Alrighty then.