Lyndon Antcliff - cognitiveSEO Author

On May 7th the UK will elect MPs, Members of Parliament to form the next UK Government. As this is the most unpredictable UK election in history we thought we would point the cognitiveSEO tool at the subject and see what we could reveal. I think you will agree that there are some very surprising outcomes.   We looked at the websites of the major parties in the UK general election and analyses their backlinks and social signals using the cognitiveSEO tool.   Conservative Party [...]

Tribal content is content targeted at specific tribes or sub-cultures and promoted to them for the purposes of increasing the power of the brand. Which usually means links and social signals.   We know that Google still likes links, and that it does take notice of the data generated on social media, but more importantly, I think it likes the Brand more and more.   When I talk about Google increasingly considering brand as a factor of ranking, I don’t mean they have a knob on [...]

The aim of viral content is to create increased levels of social signals, shares and views, with the intention of driving people to your webpage and causing people to drop links to the web page.   Mostly we are shown viral content of multi million dollar corporations, Adidas for example spend $1.6 billion a year on marketing and are looking to move it all online. We need to concentrate on using the concept of viral content for small business and provide you with actionable information [...]

How can we convince interesting and powerful people who run blogs with authority to link to what the majority of people call boring. It is very difficult to define what boring is as there is always going to be a group of hardened activists who will die for their interest, ok maybe not die but suffer mild inconvenience to defend their interests. Train spotting for example, which in the UK represents the poster boy of what the average person describes as boring. Except did you know there are 100, [...]

After my gathering of Disavow Experts in a previous post, I wanted to go more in depth. I knew who I should talk to, Modestos Siotos, of iCrossing UK and one of cognitiveSEO's long term customers who is specialized in ultra advanced link audits and penalty recoveries. So I got together a few questions to really get stuck into things. Before we go hardcore into Penguin and Disavow and all that good stuff, could you explain what Penguin is. In a nutshell, Penguin is a collection of signals Goo [...]

A magnetic headline is one that attracts, one that draws the reader in, one that stops people surfing past and makes them click. If your content does not have a magnetic headline in this noisy, hyper social, online world, it will not matter how good your content is on your travel blog or travel website. If the headline does not cut it, it will not get viewed. It will not get Tweeted. It will not get links. It will die of loneliness. What Makes a Magnetic Headline? A magnetic [...]

They say that good artists borrow and great artists steal. Whilst I would never advocate ripping off your competition, they can definitely be a source of inspiration and a jump off point for your own ideas.   Plus, it is never a bad thing to see what your competitors are up to. Performing “competitive research”, is something that most sectors do and social media is no different.   If your competitors have tested various ideas, it makes sense to research and analyse the [...]

Having a large and active following on social media should be viewed as an essential asset to your marketing strategy. These tips will give you the ability to employ a very powerful strategy. As social media has only grown in influence and attracted more users over the past few years. If you have a website and an online brand, you need to get people to be exposed to it.   Creating content is only one part of the content marketing plan, promoting the content is the other essential p [...]

Having a comprehensive keyword list is crucial for SEO and will help you rank for keywords that your competition may have missed. Therefore it is very important to use every method available to find those keywords that are useful, but your competition missed.     Unless you have a very narrow niche you will never run out of keyword suggestions, the language people use to describe and label things within a niche is constantly evolving and growing. And other keywords may be fading o [...]

Building links to a website is one of the most crucial aspects of online marketing, because building links means you rank higher in Googles’ search engine, and Google still uses links as its main factor for ranking a website. The problem with link building is that it is more a problem of human persuasion than anything related to a mechanical algorithm. The process of link building causes us to naturally forget that websites don’t actually give the link. It’s people who link to websit [...]