How to implement Facebook event tracking for ecommerce with Google Tag Manager
Facebook advertising is one of the most effective cost-per-lead advertising mediums available to retailers today. I’ve been using Facebook Lead Ads to grow my top-of-funnel email marketing list and...
View ArticleDeepCrawl – Taking SEO Much Deeper with Your Log Files
If you haven’t heard of DeepCrawl before, firstly – where have you been? And secondly, go check out the many useful features of the original version of the tool, and if you’re still not sold see why...
View ArticleCompetitive, intelligence driven keyword research for online retail
Keyword research is dead, long live competitive intelligence driven keyword research. Classic keyword research hasn’t really moved forward a great deal over the years. Lately, the notion of moving from...
View ArticleNo Exact Match? How to Match Similar Data Tables in Excel with Fuzzy Lookup
What do you do when you have two or more data sets that need merging, but don’t have a single set of data column values that match? VLOOKUP becomes a bit useless, or at least you need to execute some...
View ArticlePlanning for mixed content during HTTPS migrations
Last week, Google announced that in July 2018 it would make another major stride towards the complete normalisation of HTTPS encryption. Version 68 of the Chrome browser will be the first to explicitly...
View ArticleScraping ‘People Also Ask’ boxes for SEO and content research
People Also Ask (PAA) boxes have become an increasingly prevalent SERP feature since their introduction in 2016. In fact, recent data from Mozcast suggests that PAA features on around 30% of the...
View ArticleSite migration – how we make sure a domain migration is successful for SEO
Because getting it wrong can be a terminal blow to a business.. SEO consultants share a nightmare: finding out that their client has decided to change their site’s domain with no notice given or...
View ArticlePrototyping automated product feeds for retailers
I was recently faced with the problem of creating a series of automated product feeds for a retail client. The requirement – deliver a feed in .csv format that contains updated stock and pricing...
View ArticleHow to get new pages or site updates indexed by Google quickly
Fetch as GoogleBot, Indexing API & methods to get your site recrawled by Google Back in 2010, I appeared on a Whiteboard Friday with Rand Fishkin talking about ways to get your site content indexed...
View ArticleAn SEO’s Guide to Using Robots Exclusion Protocol
How to use Robots.txt rules including wildcards, the X-Robots-Tag and noindex indexing directives to keep your content out of Google. Occasionally, we all find an item of content that has been indexed...
View ArticleHow to download your website using WGET for Windows
How to download, install and use WGET in Windows Ever had that terrifying feeling you’ve lost vital assets from your website? Perhaps you need to move to a new web host and there’s some work to do to...
View ArticleXML Sitemaps: How to check your XML sitemaps for errors
Today, I want to share some tips for quickly weeding out errors in sitemap XML files. This post will teach you a few new tricks with the search industry’s favourite crawler, Screamingfrog, a tool that...
View ArticleHow to gather new data for content marketing research using data scraping
What is Scraping? “Scraping” is a way of automating or scaling the process of gathering information from different websites on the Internet. It’s a bit of a staple in the SEO skill set because of an...
View ArticleHow to get Fraggles – Using links to named anchors to improve your search...
What are Fraggles, and how do I get them? A very, very long time ago Google announced their support for a new feature, that they referred to as “jump to:” links. How do named anchors work? The jump to...
View ArticleAnchor text optimisation best practices in link building
Overoptimising your inbound anchor text links can adversely affect your search engine rankings Despite it being 2018, the subject of best practices when it comes to anchor text remains a challenge for...
View ArticleHow to use tables in Microsoft Excel
Most, if not all of my work in Microsoft Excel uses Tables. Using tables isn’t all that different to using cell references, and the outcome is a more agile and robust Excel, with an ability to manage...
View ArticleHow to use VLOOKUP in Excel
Ever needed to compare lists of keywords in different data tables and match corresponding values together? Or needed to find things in a table or a range by row? Lots of my work relies on simple Excel...
View ArticleHow to make a pivot table and chart in Excel
For those of you that have been following my work for the past decade (or more), you’ll know that much of my early work was teaching SEO’s how to use Excel. It seems that despite the long period of...
View ArticleHow to use pagination and infinite scroll on your category page SEO
Should I use standard pagination on my site’s category pages, or implement infinite scroll? When you’re browsing the internet, there are lots of UX conventions that seem so every-day that you barely...
View ArticleHow to tidy up your .htaccess redirects
What’s a .htaccess file? How to tidy up all the redirects in your htaccess file Managing site redirects is an important SEO task and one that can bite you if it’s put off for too long. Especially if...
View Article