The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

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 [...]

In our recent posts we've tackled topics of content, natural growth and Start-up Strategies and focused less on link building. Well, in this article we'll talk about just that, a way to build new & relevant links to your site, after reading and understanding an in-depth competitive analysis. We'll present the link intersection technique, a way to go even more in-depth with the competitive analysis and link commonalities study. We've always advocated natural link building and this techniqu [...]

Probably you are familiar with the story of the two English salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes, and they wrote telegrams back home. And one of them wrote: "Situation hopeless. Stop. They don't wear shoes." And the other one wrote: "Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet."  There's a similar situation when it comes to The Disavow  Tool also, because there are some people who think that it's an ov [...]

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 [...]

This is a TRUE & SUCCESSFUL story from Jonathan Verrall - Senior SEO Manager at Jellyfish and one of our long time customers. “ Negative SEO attacks can come in many shapes. Given the latest Google Updates, black hats had to up their game, resorting to all kind of elaborated SEO attacks. In this context, keeping an eye on your backlinks is mandatory, as well as maintaining a healthy link profile. Below, there is a great, in-depth story about a recovery from a negative SEO attack fro [...]

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 [...]

I'm sure most of you are familiar with Buffer, the tweet scheduling app that evolved into a social media scheduling app. Now the tool is viewed as a necessity, not only for startups, but for every business which aspires to do great content marketing and build a tribe for itself. With a yearly income of nearly $4 million, Buffer managed to become one of the best platforms to schedule, analyze and create social media strategies on all social media websites including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus [...]

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 [...]