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5 Tips For New SEOs

This post was originally published on White.net

Over the past year I have been involved in the interviewing and hiring of a number of experienced SEOs and newcomers to the SEO industry. One of the key things that I ask in those interviews is: how do you keep up to date with the industry, and what are the techniques required to succeed? As you would expect, you get a lot of stock answers from those with experience, but those who are new to the industry don’t really have an understanding of what they need to be doing to succeed.

To help those who are new to SEO, I wanted to provide five tips that I would have loved to have been told when I was starting out.

1. Read, Read, Read and Read!

We work in an industry that is thriving in content, and as a noob to the industry that’s great. Start to read the basics rather than jumping straight in with the advanced. You need to have a good grounding.

Start with:

  • Google Website Optimisation Guide
  • Moz Learn SEO
  • Beginner’s Guide to SEO
  • The Beginner’s Guide for Learning SEO
  • The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet
  • Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-page Optimisation
  • The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO
  • Search Engine Ranking Factors
  • DistilledU – Modular learning programme

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What You Need to Know Before Conducting a Technical Website Audit

This post was originally published on White.net

You have just spent the last week knee-deep in data and technical issues whilst crawling through a website. You have identified a large number of technical issues, and a major blocker that will drastically help improve search engine rankings. You have put together the document, talked the client through it, who thanked you for putting it together and said that it looks great, and can’t wait to see the results of the changes.

A couple of days later, you get the call. Oh don’t you hate it when you get THE call! We can do the implementations no problem, but! Oh no, not the dreaded but. It’s going to take some time, the IT team have said they need to spec out the requirements, work out how to do half of it, and it’s probably going to take six months to implement the basic recommendations. Head, smack!, desk!

How many times have you heard that story? But whose fault is it? Is it the IT team, who didn’t inform you of what is required for each change, or is it yours because you didn’t ask about the process to get website changes made, no matter how simple they may be?

Below I have provided five key questions to ask before you start your technical audit.

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8 Great Tools to use with Google Analytics

This post was originally published on White.net

We hear so much about great SEO tools that we should be using, but we rarely see much written about tools to help you with your Google Analytics data. Over the past year I have been using more and more tools to help with Google Analytics data, from API extraction to data visualisation, and I wanted to share them with you. Below are just 8 tools that I used for Google Analytics on a regular basis that save me a lot of time.

ScreamingFrog

Who has come across GA traffic disappearing and it being down to some GA code being removed? How long has that taken you to find the pages that no longer has the GA code on?

Over the past few years I have been using ScreamingFrog to check websites for any pages that have missing Google Analytics code, and comparing it against those that have. Once I have a list of URLs with missing GA code, I supply this to the internal team to have them look at it and implement. Once implemented, I then re-run the crawl to ensure the missing pages now have the GA code.

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