Weekly Picks

Weekly Reading Picks| Volume 41

Leave a comment

Bob’s Weekly Reading Picks

2019.10.20 volume 41

Content

1.The affiliate marketers blueprint to futureproof your business
2.21 Ways to Promote Your Blog
3.Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify
4.Intro to SEO Competitive Analysis
5.An Introduction to Python for Technical SEO
6.Why You Should Integrate Search Marketing into Your Organization’s Culture
7.Who Owns Your Favorite News Media Outlet

1.The affiliate marketers blueprint to futureproof your business

Focus on consumer privacy first

Privacy and data will continue to be two major battlegrounds.

  • The first consideration should be what data do you capture and can you justify doing so?
  • Additionally, the smaller the amount of personally identifiable information you capture the better.

Regulations

  • GDPR
  • New York SHIELD Security Act
  • Nevada Consumer Privacy Bill
  • California Consumer Privacy Act

Implement adaptive tracking solutions

Apple, Chrome and Mozilla move from supporting third-party tracking to reliance on first-party cookies.

Solutions:

  • Server-to-Server tracking,
  • API tracking
  •  first-party cookies 

Diversify partnerships

One of the key developments over the past 18 months has been the emergence of a number of non-traditional affiliate businesses, software companies, banks and brands looking to explore the CPA model and build additional revenue streams.

2.21 Ways to Promote Your Blog

Bloggers who report "strong results" based on type of promotion

3.Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify

Graph Of Shopify Usage Statistics

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

  • Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture
  • Remove duplicate paginated URLs
  • Create blog content for keywords with informational intent
  • Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data
  • Determine how to handle product variant pages
  • Compress images using crush.pics
  • Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

  • Canonical URL path: /products/
  • Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page.

Robots.txt file
A very important note is that in Shopify stores, you cannot adjust the robots.txt file. This is stated in their official help documentation. While you can add the “noindex” to pages through the theme.liquid, this is not as helpful if you want to prevent Google from crawling your content all together.

4.Intro to SEO Competitive Analysis

what keywords to target,
what content to create,
how to optimize that content, and
where to get links.

  • Identify your top competitors
  • Perform a keyword gap analysis
  • Perform a link gap analysis (domain, page level)
  • Perform a top content analysis

SEO Competitive Analysis Template

5.An Introduction to Python for Technical SEO

Python Libraries
The main power of Python is in its libraries, which enable a number of add-ons including:

  • Data extraction.
  • Analysis and preparation.
  • Scientific computing.
  • Natural language processing.
  • Machine learning.

Some useful libraries for tasks involving data analysis and automation include:

  • TensorFlow: An open-source machine learning library.
  • NumPy: Useful for scientific computing.
  • SciPy: Used for scientific and technical computing.
  • SciKit Lear: Machine learning for data mining and analysis.
  • Pandas: Used for data manipulation and analysis.
  • SpaCy: A great natural language processing library.
  • Requests: A library for making HTTP requests.

This list of tasks you can automate with Python is growing continuously:

  • Identifying user intent.
  • Mapping URLs ahead of a migration.
  • Internal link analysis.
  • Performing keyword research.
  • Optimizing images.
  • Scraping websites.

Some real-world machine learning examples include:

  • Google’s RankBrain algorithm.
  • Baidu’s Deep Voice program.
  • Twitter’s curated timelines.
  • Netflix and Spotify recommendations.
  • Salesforce’s Einstein feature.

6.Why You Should Integrate Search Marketing into Your Organization’s Culture

Acceptance
With the maturity of the industry, there is more common knowledge of what SEO and paid search metrics, strategies, and tactics are. However, there are still people from the outside that don’t get it or want to question it as a valid marketing channel and challenge the search team’s process and competency.

Support
SEOs need UX, IT, content, social media, PR, and other areas of support.

Speed
SEO is a long-term process, but requires short-term iterative updates. Paid search is real-time marketing and often needs new and updated assets and resources in specific timeframes to shape success.

The speed of execution is critical for the success of a search team especially in areas where they rely on other resources for support.

Collaboration
To get the most out of the search team, it’s important to:

  • Know what the top-level goals are.
  • Know the performance in other channels.
  • Know the content and strategies being conducted in other parts of the marketing plan.
  • Be given a chance to collaborate.

The Company or Agency

  • Audience Research （keyword research）
  • Competitor Research
  • Website Improvements (CRO, UX…)
  • Testing Opportunities (updated messaging, offers, calls-to-action, or sales tactics)
  • Cultural Alignment (Having shared goals and KPIs is important)

7.Who Owns Your Favorite News Media Outlet

Who Owns Your Favorite News Media Outlet?

Below is a look at the top 20 owners of America’s newspapers:

Parent Companies Total Papers Example brands
New Media Investment Group 451 Patriot Ledger, The Columbus Dispatch, The Providence Journal
Gannett 216 USA Today, Detroit Free Press, Arizona Republic
Digital First Media 158 Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post
Adams Publishing Group 144 The Charlotte Sun, Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
CNHI 114 Niagara Gazette, The Huntsville Item, The Lebanon Reporter
Lee Enterprises 100 Arizona Daily Sun, St. Louis Post Dispatch
Ogden Newspapers 81 The Maui News, The Toledo Chronicle, Salem News
Tribune Publishing 77 Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun
Berkshire Hathaway Media 75 Buffalo News, Winston-Salem Journal, Omaha World-Herald
Shaw Media 71 Suburban Life Magazine, Putnam County Record
Boone Newspapers 66 The Austin Daily Herald, The Charlotte Gazette
Hearst Corp. 66 San Francisco Chronicle, Seattlepi.com, Houston Chronicle
Paxton Media Group 58 Daily Corinthian, Connersville News-Examiner
Landmark Media Enterprises 55 Citrus County Chronicle, The News-Enterprise
Community Media Group 51 Lafayette Leader, The Wellsboro Gazette
AIM Media 50 Odessa American, El Nuevo Heraldo
McClatchy 49 Idaho Statesman, Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee
Advance Publications 46 The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, The Oregonian, NJ.com
Rust Communications 44 Cherokee Chronicle Times, Southeast Missourian
News Media Corp. 43 Cheyenne Minuteman, Brookings Register, Newport News Times

 

Leave a Reply