Friday Update & Recommended Reading #3

Another Friday and another quick round up + some recommended reading for the weekend!

Highlights

I missed the roundup last Friday, so a quick resume of the last 2 weeks!

Traffic

Traffic has been reasonably consistent, with the biggest source still social media.

I did have an interesting spike on Wednesday of this week when I got 162 referrals from ’email’ under google analytics acquisition page.

Most of the email traffic came from Eastern Europe and Tynt (more on that in a minute) tells me that some of my content was copied into an email, so I’m guessing someone liked what I had to say and sent it out to their mailing list. So, thanks whoever you are!

I continued to receive additional traffic right through yesterday.

On Tuesday of this week I registered for the Warrior Internet Marketing forum and started getting involved answering questions on SEO/affiliate marketing there. So far I’ve made 23 posts, been thanked 7 times and received 58 referrals from my signature link – not bad!

Content

I have published 6 new posts since my last update, with the highlights being my first competition (win a free SEO consultation and content strategy) and today’s post, which is the first inย an experiment in white hat SEO.

The SEO experiment is going to be a lot of graft, but I am confident will show how well white hat SEO can work when implemented correctly.

Recommended Reading

Here’s a few articles from around the web that have taken my fancy over the past fortnight.

Nice Tool For Picking Up Some Links

First up, I mentioned Tynt above. I initially heard about it in this article on Matthew Woodward’s blog. The gist of it is that it will drop a link in every time someone copy and paste content from your site, which happens more often than you might think.

I installed it a week or so ago and have already picked up a couple of links and social media referrals ๐Ÿ™‚

White Hat Link Building In A Difficult Niche

Next up is an excellent post on moz.com by Sam Miranda in which he shows how it is still possible to conduct a white hat SEO campaign in what is traditionally a very difficult niche to do so – gambling.

The article is here and is a fantastic example of how, with a bit of thought and hard work you can build links and rank a website without having to resort to spammy tactics. A must read for all the naysayers!

And Finally…

I was directed from webproworld to a wonderful article from a couple of years back by Jill Whalen titled ‘Silly Stupid SEO‘. It’s a great piece about the bad advice that continues to circulate about SEO and ranking a website.

As I hadn’t come across Jill before online and really enjoyed what she had to say I was sad to hear that last week she said goodbye to SEO. Well worth reading her farewell post after reading the first article.

And that’s it for this week’s update… it’s Friday night, so I’ll see you in the pub! Cheers ๐Ÿ™‚

About the Author

I'm a web developer, programmer, blogger and SEO expert from Glasgow, Scotland, with over 15 years experience in the industry. When I'm not writing about marketing and SEO you'll find me strumming the guitar in my band or listening to Revolver on repeat. Follow me on twitter, connect with me on google+ and add us on facebook to keep up with all the latest trends in SEO and online marketing.

Rahul - November 9, 2013

Hello David McSweeney,

Seems like you’ve done so many things this friday, and i’m still stuck on my tech blog. I love your updates and stats of your blog which is really motivational.

thanks

    David McSweeney - November 9, 2013

    Thanks Raul, glad you’re finding my posts helpful

Brandon Bear - November 9, 2013

Good stuff – I always love roundup posts… it’s sort of like the “bestof” subs on reddit… all of the best content sorted out from the hundreds of other posts.

Thanks mate!

Sohail - November 14, 2013

Hello,

Since I’m new here, i really love your idea of rounding the updates in a single post. The post describes the complete stats of your blog and its traffic.

Impressive stuff.

thanks

Shaun Hoobler - December 5, 2013

I love seeing link-ups. Thanks for sharing these links. i’ll make sure to visit them. Sounds like informative sites.

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