Gareth Daine

My point about duplicate content isn't with regards to duplicate content across your own site, but syndicated or stolen content (happens all the time). Your sitemap is a good indicator to Google who holds the original content. So rather than someone else's site showing up in the SERPS for content you've produced, the sitemap can help identify the originator. http://searchengineland.com/importance-xml-sitemaps-age-panda-214952

How does that get around the duplicate content issue?

Do what works for you. If direct marketing works for you, then keep at it. The ultimate goal of any business is to sell something. That's a given, but you're missing the point here, I feel. There's going to be very few people interested in reading a long-form article about 'glue' or 'pressure seals', and even fewer people who will share it, I agree, but that is not what I'm saying do. Social engagement is extremely important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it provides 'social proof', which is to say it is an immediate indication to a visitor of the social validity and quality of your content. People are far more inclined to share your content if it already has 'social proof'. It's based on the same psychological principle of why people would rather go into a restaurant that is full of people, compared to one that isn't. It's a trigger. Why is social proof important to rankings? Studies show that content with high social engagement gets linked to far more than content that doesn't. Secondly, social engagement (sharing, commenting, tagging and liking) helps put your content in front of a wider audience, increasing your chances for more successful advertising and remarketing campaigns (custom audiences), as well as opportunities for backlinks. This is especially important for brick and mortar businesses. Thirdly, it increases brand awareness. Despite what Google and Matt Cutts may have said, there appears to be some correlation between social signals and ranking. Furthermore, social profiles and results show in Google's index. Don't forget that Google isn't the be all and end all, though. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are essentially search engines. Facebook alone has over 1 billion users worldwide. This is huge, and with people posting virtually every aspect of their lives on the platform, Facebook probably has the best demographic, purchasing, and behavioral data available for marketers and advertiser to use. It's a similar story with Twitter. Using custom audiences (people who've visited your website) with powerful marketing tools and data as above, is an extremely potent marketing mix. On another note, long-form shareable content gets significantly more backlinks (even more so when combined with outreach) than content that doesn't, and backlinks are still the number one ranking signal. In terms of evidence for social converting to sales, I have no idea what research/evidence you've been looking at, but it's extremely lucrative and successful if done correctly. Especially for businesses that actually sell products. Furthermore, building an opt-in email list via social channels is extremely effective, and 'the money is in the list', as the saying goes. I've seen first hand results for all of the above.

If you use a tool such as Screaming Frog, you can set priority based on URI/page structure level. So, if your website is architected to have the most important content at the highest hierarchical level, with each subsequent level set at a lesser priority, this can be set automatically upon generation.

There are a couple of reasons, but the most important is to help Google (and other search engines) understand content origination, with respect to duplicate content and Panda.

Haha! Sure, but again, it depends on the content you've written about 'cheap socks'. There are many quirky, funny and socially engaging concepts you could come up with regarding 'cheap socks' to get traffic and social engagement. Also, the content doesn't have to be directly related to your main product/service offering, as long as it relates in some way.

Yeah, I know what LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is, and that's exactly what I'm talking about. The relationships between concepts and words, phrases and topics. LSI keywords are keywords that Google deems related to your primary keyword/topic, which gives it more semantic meaning and helps tremendously with ranking and indexing your site. It also helps Google determine how relevant your content is for a given topic. The more semantic context your content has, the more relevant Google will deem it to be on a specific topic, thus increasing your ranking. When you write long-form content, generally you tend to include LSI keywords naturally, but to be doubly sure, sprinkle a few of them within your content. Here's an example. Take the keyword 'cars'. How does Google know from your content that you're talking about Cars the movie, or cars as in the automobile? The answer is LSI. Using the mathematical model you mentioned above (plus some of Google's own secret sauce and machine learning algorithms), Google is able to parse your content looking for relationships between words and phrases. So when it sees keywords like 'director', 'cast list', 'film critics' etc within the content, it can mathematically work out that your content is more than likely about Cars the movie. So, yes, I'm talking about LSI keywords.

It depends on the goal, the content you're promoting, the engagement of the audience, the relevance and how well your page converts. It also depends on what you're using the traffic for, for example, social proof, or to gain backlinks. In most cases, you're not using traffic like this to drive customers to make a purchase. That said, it's one small part of your overall promotion strategy.

Directories are pretty much worthless now as Google removed the majority of them from its index. They can still be useful, though, but don't put too much effort into it. There are far more important tasks to be completed. The key here is 'relevancy'. Is the directory niche specific? I don't mean does it have a category that you can fit into, but is the entire directory based around one specific topic (your topic). If so, and the site passes the 'eyeball test', then grab a link from it. Again, don't spend much effort on this. There are better ways to spend your time.

You can have huge success with Reddit. Granted, it's hit and miss and you have to be careful, but you can use Reddit to drive significant amounts of traffic if you do it right. While any links will be no-follow, you will get referral traffic.

Think you're missing the point.

Hey, There are many, many ways to get (acquire) high-quality backlinks. Here are just a few ideas to get you started. Firstly, think about who you are writing content for. Is it your customers? There's a myth floating around the web in the marketing world that content is king and as long as you write high-quality content, then you'll get backlinks and traffic. Unfortunately, this just isn't true. Most people write content for their audience (customers/potential customers). This is a big mistake. Sure, you should have your money pages set up and tailored for your customers and tweaked for high conversions, but the content that you write and promote on your blog, the stuff that will help you get backlinks should be aimed at those people in your market/niche that have the power to link to you, and more often than not, these people are not your customers. Here are a few tips that will help you get better traction and acquire more links and social shares (social proof): Research the influencers in your industry. The people with the ability to link to your content (website owners/bloggers). Those that have a significant following on social media, who can help to spread the word about your content. Once you have your list, find out what content is being shared and linked to by these people on a regular basis. Pick a topic that you believe will resonate with this new audience. You can use tools like BuzzSumo and Ahrefs to help you find content on this topic that has already been successful and popular. Base your new piece on one of these pieces of content, but make it better, more in-depth and more actionable. Use a proven content framework to develop your piece. Here's an article on a couple https://blog.bufferapp.com/content-marketing-frameworks, but there are loads of them. Some frameworks that kill it every single time are lists, expert round-ups, and case-studies/statistical pieces. Target a specific 'medium-tail' keyword and make sure you have it in your meta title, meta description, h1, one h2, an img alt tag, in the first 100 words, and last 100 words. Sprinkle LSI keywords throughout your content. Don't go crazy, just pop half a dozen in there, throughout the piece. Write long-form content (1900 word plus), this type of content gets shared more, linked to more and correlates more with page-one rankings. Use share triggers in your content. Make the content actionable. Make sure that they can do something with what you have provided. And here's the final, IMPORTANT piece of the puzzle. Promote it like crazy. Most people will tell you that writing great content is enough, it's not. You need to promote the content like your life depended on it, and this is where influencers come in. Perform outreach to these influencers telling them about your article, contact them on Twitter, Facebook etc. Don't be pushy, just let them know about the content, don't ask for a link. A short, personal, email letting them know about the resource is all you need initially. Contact website owners who link to similar resources and let them know about your content. Schedule lots of Tweets and other social media posts to go out over a period of weeks. You can go in-depth on each of the points above, and learn specific techniques related to them, but this should start you on your journey. There are also a ton of 'link-building' techniques out there, such as broken link building, the moving man method, the applesauce technique, specific outreach techniques, resource link building and many, more, but first, start with your content and your influencers. Once you start acquiring high-quality backlinks (despite what's been said above), your rankings will increase and in turn, your organic traffic, as well as your referral traffic will increase. I use all of the above and more on a daily basis, and I've gone from 0 visits to over 2000 plus unique sessions, 1.2k plus social shares and several high-quality backlinks in under 1 week using these techniques on several websites, and it never fails. Sometimes you don't quite get the results you achieved in previous posts, but it never fails and you always get traction. One guy I HIGHLY recommend you follow is Brian Dean at Backlinko http://backlinko.com/.

Hey Folks, Just pre-launched our website to promote our new SaaS application called Content Sleuth. What do you folks think about the design/layout/style? It's a social media and content marketing platform. Appreciate the feedback. Thanks. Gaz

No problem. Yeah, GZIP is awesome, and of course, necessary. With regards to the HTML minification, it's pretty easy and can be done on the fly with PHP, something similar to what I posted above. It all depends what you're working with really. As you can see, 6% to 17% is quite a saving. Setting up APC and Varnish is a good way to reduce load times even further too. Something I'm going to do shortly on the PG site.

Hi Robert, Removing things like comments, white space, carriage returns reduces unnecessary extra bytes of information in the document and when combined with GZIP can reduce the document size even further. GZIP alone is great but combined you can get further savings, anywhere from 6% to 17% of the original GZIPPED file in savings. It's something Page Speed recommends, and it does seem to further reduce file sizes. The same applies to CSS and JS. You minify the document and then apply GZIP to it for further reductions. Bare in mind, while the browser receives the GZIPPED document, it then has to uncompress the resource, which includes uncompressing unnecessary data, i.e. white space, comments, carriage returns. It does improve load times. So essentially, you have the original document at X size. You then minify it which reduces it and then you apply GZIP to that reduced size. You then have a two-fold decrease of file size, while reducing the time it takes to uncompress to the original state. Check out this articles on the subject, http://madskristensen.net/post/effects-of-gzipping-vs-minifying-html-files

Yeah, I use Y-Slow and Chrome dev tools extensively.

Here's an example: Route::filter('minify', function($route, $request, $response) { if (Config::get('minify.html', false) !== false) { if($response instanceof Illuminate\Http\Response) { $filters = array( // remove HTML comments except IE conditions '/<!--(?!\s*(?:\[if [^\]]+]|<!|>))(??!-->).)*-->/s' => '', // remove comments in the form /* */ '/(?<!\S)\/\/\s*[^\r\n]*/' => '', // shorten multiple white spaces '/>\s{2,}</' => '><', // shorten multiple white spaces '/\s{2,}/' => ' ', // collapse new lines '/(\r?\n)/' => '', ); $output = $response->getOriginalContent(); $output = preg_replace(array_keys($filters), array_values($filters), $output); $response->setContent($output); } } });

No mate I mean HTML minification, I'm already using GZIP compression on all of my assets. If you click 'View Page Source' you'll see what I mean. Essentially minifying the HTML output, like you would with CSS and JS, by removing comments, white space, carriage returns etc. I'm not using a HTML minifier, I've written some PHP that does what's required via REGEX when the response is returned to the browser.

Thanks Robert. I've also now written some code to dynamically minify the HTML output too. Just a few more speed optimisations and Pagespeed should indicate a green light. Mainly image optimisation. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpurplegriffon.com%2F&tab=desktop

Cheers dude. I'll fix that up.

Well folks, you're probably getting bored with this now but other than the course search Fuzzy suggested I'm pretty much getting there now and I've made some more adjustments to the nav and fixed up the event and course pages somewhat. Still a bit more to do but we're getting there now. https://purplegriffon.com - Home Page https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation - Course Page https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation - Events Page I've also improved the load time too and it loads in around 1 second now.

Yeah, I agree completely with what you are both saying.

I do agree Fuzzy. Completely.

Thanks again folks. Robert The slider works well at mobile screen sizes but I feel it's not very useful on smaller resolutions. I will be converting the image text to actual text tomorrow also. I've sorted the menu now. Fuzzy I'll try the slider without the shadows but I quite like it. I've updated the page to include info on our main offerings below the slider and I like the idea of a big course filter. So I'll incorporate that tomorrow too. Cheers.

Thanks for the responses guys. I'm slowly improving the layout and design. Let me know your thoughts. I have a few more bits to add to the home page but it's getting there now. https://purplegriffon.com/ (CTRL + R or CMD + R)